- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another
If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry
Could be a good way to kickstart a canadian nuclear industry that would expand into the US, exploiting the a big thing the US is bad at, coordinating infrastructure projects with multiple government groups, not making infrastructure builds incredibly overpriced and take an incredible amount of time and not being hyper litigious.
They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran.
What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it looks like they are really doing it. See https://www.autonocion.com/us/canada-tonne-grid-nuclear-reac... !
> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]
> I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...
It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.
The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).
There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.
You appear to be reiterating an irrational position. I provided links to overviews of the topic; I strongly suggest at least skimming them. The quantity of unavoidable high level waste would appear to be sufficiently small that geological disposal is a cost effective solution.
The high level waste in question is not magically safe. Rather the various reprocessing and disposal methods have been extensively engineered and deliberated. At this point there is no cause to believe deep geological disposal in crystalline bedrock to be unsafe.
I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.
The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage
Why dont you suggest what "safe" looks like, and we can discuss your understanding of safety. Its clear to me that the issue is your standards and not actual waste disposal.
Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.
Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
Alberta ships through BC now and I think they’ve gone from half to full capacity. That profit might not survive Hormuz opening and unfortunately much of it leaves Canada.
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.
And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.
Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.
The problem with Chernobyl was that (1) it didn't have a containment dome, and (2) it was designed so as the temperature increased, the reaction sped up. It was fundamentally unstable.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
> The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.
> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.
Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.
It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:
1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];
2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];
3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.
Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?
But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.
> If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.
Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?
>Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.
You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.
> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].
The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.
Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.
Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).
> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.
> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.
Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.
We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.
Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack
Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.
But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s
What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.
The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.
I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).
Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.
I asked Claude:
"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."
One of my pet peeves is that people keep quoting numbers about solar costs oblivious to location, time of year, etc. No wonder some people are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "neener neener neener".
Battery storage for diurnal variation in favorable locations looks feasible, battery storage for annual variation looks absurd. Maybe you can overbuild solar by a 3x factor in some places, I've gotten cost numbers from 'a little less than what an AP1000 is claimed to cost' to 2x more with back of the envelope calculations that probably aren't worth anything. Then there's Dunkelflaute.
It would help if you could find a good use for the excess energy but the capital cost of anything you don't use all the time is multiplied.
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs
I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.
China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.
OK, so when does the first one come online? "The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035."
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
Always thought it was weird that the Commonwealth Realm nations had never pooled resources to have standardised reactor designs and expertise. Canada and Australia have loads of uranium - seems like an obvious strategic move. Instead, the UK turns to China, lol.
>As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
You could be right about the Korean plants. I only relied on google to give me the top 5 nuclear plants active in the world. The Korean plants you mention were not on the list.
Wikpedia has more info, plus WNN and other industry publications usually are more up-to date.
Kori[1] has 7 operational units today and 1 commissioning and 1 under construction
Hansul[2] has 8 operational units and another 2 more under construction.
All 4 new units are APR-1400 reactors ~1400 MW capacity. Kori should retains its top position, Saeul-3 in Kori Phase II has already reached criticality in April.
Tianwan in China will come close but its 7/8 units are slightly behind in construction than Saeul-3/4 in South Korea, plus the plant is also bit smaller at 6600MW now . The Russian VVER-1200 design China are using is also slightly smaller than Korean APR-1400.
It's obvious to me there will be a renaisance, but the question is which design will win.
There are so many companies building small modular reactors right and various different designs with different fuels and cooling mediums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence.
I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.
"If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides,"
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if safety concerns are met. Also from the article:
> Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
The problem of course is that safety has costs and people cut corners, leading to events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
The USA should start a civilian nuclear corps. Expand training at the many nuclear power training center and teach double the students at the nuclear power school there; hands on training they split up to naval reactor training they currently have and land training at wherever they build the first land reactor. Pay the same as a us navy plant operator gets paid. Bootstrap the whole thing off of the nuclear navy like they did with the space force a while ago did with the Air Force’s space command, but do a fork into two orgs, not a rename. Pick a single plant design for equipment and build them all over the country; naval reactors are expensive so train this corps on the land design.
Boom, there you have it, a nuclear remains in the USA. They won’t do it though.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.
Tounge in Cheek: Expect this headline to be down voted once the German HN readers wake up. The (Washington-backed) green populists really did a cultural number on us. Germany will rather go full Mao and starve its people before it accepts that its stance on nuclear was a bad idea.
Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
The regulation of it is an entirely different thing from the budgeting and promotion of it. Promotion of nuclear power has become a very vocal Ford government thing in the last few months.
Leaving aside that Canada is huge, waste is really just not that much of a problem. It would be easy to safely store all the waste that will ever be produced at a dedicated storage site, if you could drum up the political will for such a site to exist. But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site. Not that much waste is produced; stick it in a cask and leave it alone.
> But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site.
I agree with the rest but on site storage of high level waste is a terrible idea. Even after vitrification that's material that will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than agrarian human civilization has existed. Ideally it should enter a disposal chain that keeps as little of it at ground level for a short a time as possible in order to hedge against the long tail possibility of a large scale disaster stranding it on the surface.
I think the finnish plan to bury it on site 500 meters down in bedrock is a decent one.
This is why I always scoff at people talking about the scarcity of landfill space. We have damn near unlimited space here. It might not look like it if you never leave a major city, but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
The only hard part is ensuring your waste doesn't enter the water system, but that's just bog standard mining engineering.
> but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
Problem is you'll get some tribe coming out of the woodworks claiming whatever inaccessible area hundreds of miles from civilization is some sacred ground that can't be touched.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
I think most (all?) nuclear plants use once-thru cooling. There is a water intake upstream (or in an ocean/lake) of the plant, the water passes through the cooling loop interfacing with a heat exchanger that has hot heavy water from the core on the other side. Some of the water is evaporated in hyperboloid cooling towers, and the rest is discharged downstream (or back in the ocean/lake)
That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radiative emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.
I love nuclear reactors and CANDU are quite cool. But I don't think that today we have any reasons to build CANDU reactors, except possibly that Canada can demonstrate they can build them for cheaper than others can build light water reactors. The ability to build is something that has little to do with the technical merits of a nuclear reactor design. But all things being equal, a PWR or a BWR should cost less per GW than a CANDU reactor and have other advantages too:
- main problem with CANDU: proliferation. India was able to build nuclear weapons after using a Canadian built heavy water reactor (basically a CANDU reactor) [1]. There is no guarantee that another country will not try something similar in the future, the design has no built in proliferation resistance. An operator can remove irradiated fuel at any time, and if the IAEA discovers they engage in plutonium manufacturing and they get on a black list, they can manufacture their own fuel quite easily, because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium. With light water reactors, you need enriched fuel, so if you are flagged as a proliferator no fuel manufacturer will be allowed to sell you fuel, and it's going to be much harder for you to manufacture your own fuel, since you can't enrich. If you can enrich uranium, you might as well try to build a uranium bomb (like Iran is trying to do). Also, with light water reactors, you refuel only at discrete times, generally about 18 months apart, so it is much more difficult to extract lightly irradiated fuel without being caught by the IAEA.
Now some less important problems:
- because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium, it produces much more nuclear waste per GWh compared to light water reactors. Nuclear waste is not the boogeyman nuclear anti-advocates make it to be, but still, if you generate 5-10 times more nuclear waste than the mainstream alternatives, it is less than ideal.
- there is one positive reactivity feedback loop in a CANDU design. Because of that CANDU designs are not licenseable in the US. The Canadian nuclear regulator is comfortable that the design is stable [2], but if you can choose between a design with one positive feedback loop and one without any positive feedback loop, why would you choose the first?
new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.
We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).
I was being a little flippant there - but I think we've gone way too far in the "nuclear is risky" direction, largely because of Chernobyl, which was a) a very specific disaster caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck and b) not that deadly. In the US about as many people die every year due to coal pollution as have yet (or will ever) die because of Chernobyl. About the same number die in Europe every year because of a lack of AC. Those are just invisible risks that we accept already and we need to start seeing them.
I'm all down with spamming nuclear plants but will that, in the end, give free electricity to the consumer? Lower the rates? ..or just continue to be an economic weapon against the masses?
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
Its not so much the days but the hours. Days start getting pretty short in winter. The sun also doesn't get as high in the sky so the efficiency of a fixed panel drops further.
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
The Alberta government absolutely banned new solar and wind development, first a short-lived moratorium and then with regulations meant to "protect the natural beauty", restrictions mind you that absolutely do not apply to the pump jacks any company can place on your land and which you do not have the right to refuse. Or to the vast stretches of Mordor-like tailing ponds.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
Then perhaps they should start collecting money for their orphan well problem rather than letting it worse with the clear goal of making the rest of the country pay for it.
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Makes alot of sense. Canada has:
- one of the largest uranium reserves
- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another
If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry
Could be a good way to kickstart a canadian nuclear industry that would expand into the US, exploiting the a big thing the US is bad at, coordinating infrastructure projects with multiple government groups, not making infrastructure builds incredibly overpriced and take an incredible amount of time and not being hyper litigious.
They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran.
What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it looks like they are really doing it. See https://www.autonocion.com/us/canada-tonne-grid-nuclear-reac... !
> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
For one thing, nuclear power plants produce much less waste than most people imagine.
Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it.
In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
Most waste isn't spent fuel, it's contaminated other things. You aren't reprocessing any of that.
I thought contaminated clothing are low level waste. They are quite safe after 30-ish years, but rated to store for 100 years
I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]
> I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...
It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.
The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).
There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
You're repeating the problem - You're saying that there is less waste to deal with which magically means it's safe.
You do understand that don't you?
You appear to be reiterating an irrational position. I provided links to overviews of the topic; I strongly suggest at least skimming them. The quantity of unavoidable high level waste would appear to be sufficiently small that geological disposal is a cost effective solution.
The high level waste in question is not magically safe. Rather the various reprocessing and disposal methods have been extensively engineered and deliberated. At this point there is no cause to believe deep geological disposal in crystalline bedrock to be unsafe.
I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.
It's not.
The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage
Why dont you suggest what "safe" looks like, and we can discuss your understanding of safety. Its clear to me that the issue is your standards and not actual waste disposal.
Nuclear waste isn’t an issue.
Nuclear also works well with grid batteries to smooth demand curves, which Ontario is targeting 2700MW of scale by 2030.
More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.
Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.
Probably the assumption is that renewables replace a different base load like coal or gas powered plants.
Yeah, it's utter crap.
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
Always wanted to go to ... Uranium City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_City
While you're at it, add Radium Springs and Asbestos to your itinerary!
Radium Hot Springs (BC), you mean? +Dildo (NF) +Dawson Creek (BC) +Regina (SK) +Snafu (YK) +Stoner (BC) +Climax (SK) +Radville (SK) +Emo (ON) +Crotch Lake (ON) +Sober Island (NS)
Asbestos was renamed due to the negative connotations.
15 years, to be clear.
Will Alberta go along?
Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.
Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
Alberta ships through BC now and I think they’ve gone from half to full capacity. That profit might not survive Hormuz opening and unfortunately much of it leaves Canada.
>Alberta ships through BC now
Yes, in minuscule amounts.
As of 2025, 90% of Canadian crude and 100% of natural gas goes to the US. <https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...>
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.
And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/
France has higher prices than several EU countries.
Spain in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.
And the French cannot seem to replicate the putatively low price they paid for their first nuclear rollout.
All forms of generation have downsides.
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
You think they shouldn’t negotiate with native tribes?
If they're not building reactors on the land allocated to native tribes, why should they?
Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
> Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history
Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.
Isn't that a little hyperbolic? Sure cancer rates will be elevated wherever the fallout blows but it's not going to end anything.
In terms of severity, Chernobyl was a long way from the worst case.
If the core had melted down to a body of water, the steam flash could have vaporized it & ejected it high into the atmosphere.
That's city-ending, if not quite "continent rendered uninhabitable".
Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.
Not convinced. The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.
The problem with Chernobyl was that (1) it didn't have a containment dome, and (2) it was designed so as the temperature increased, the reaction sped up. It was fundamentally unstable.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
>Not convinced.
What, if anything, would convince you?
> The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.
> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.
Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.
It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:
1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];
2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];
3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.
Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?
But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.
[1]: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
> If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.
Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?
Ah yes, the ridiculous strawman engineering of saying batteries would be used for seasonal storage.
>Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.
You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.
> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].
The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.
Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.
Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).
> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.
> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.
Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.
We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.
Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack
Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.
But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s
>Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now.
Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.
What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.
>What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2?
What?! It has been urgent for years.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
I wouldn’t say you cannot but I also wouldn’t say it is proven that you can.
My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.
The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.
I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.
I asked Claude:
"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."
One of my pet peeves is that people keep quoting numbers about solar costs oblivious to location, time of year, etc. No wonder some people are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "neener neener neener".
Battery storage for diurnal variation in favorable locations looks feasible, battery storage for annual variation looks absurd. Maybe you can overbuild solar by a 3x factor in some places, I've gotten cost numbers from 'a little less than what an AP1000 is claimed to cost' to 2x more with back of the envelope calculations that probably aren't worth anything. Then there's Dunkelflaute.
It would help if you could find a good use for the excess energy but the capital cost of anything you don't use all the time is multiplied.
We can't generate power out of thin air and the coal/natural gas powerplants got shut down what do you propose?
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs
I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.
Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now
Canada won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?
I think the assumption is that anything that you can build now, you can build more of later. Unless you think there is some reason you can't?
China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.
The same China that started construction on at least 10 reactors last year?
OK, so when does the first one come online? "The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035."
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
Always thought it was weird that the Commonwealth Realm nations had never pooled resources to have standardised reactor designs and expertise. Canada and Australia have loads of uranium - seems like an obvious strategic move. Instead, the UK turns to China, lol.
I’m not Canadian so news to me that Canada has built nuclear plants around the world.
As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
>As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
So France and Canada both build nuclear plants. Must be something in the french language that makes folks just want to do the cool stuff.
If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.
This analysis is missing that Quebec doesn't have any nuclear plants. (Although NB has one, which counts for half?)
AtkinsRéalis (fka SNC-Lavalin) does build nuclear reactors and is headquartered in Montreal[0].
[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...
They bought CANDU reactor designs from the government
Quebec's geography is so favorable for hydropower that they don't need nuclear, or any other source of electricity.
Quebec has one they shut it down, hydro Quebec is a hydro power company not a nuclear power company
Well there goes that theory.
The French are undoubtedly a good choice considering nuclear produces the majority of their electricity and EDF already operates in the UK.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor. More capacity is needed in most parts of the world. Lager reactors are needed.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
> Larger reactors are needed.
Genuine question: Why? Why not many smaller reactors? Small modular reactors seem pretty neat.
Is there an efficiency loss/total cost difference with smaller reactors?
Like most industrial sites, large reactors are much more economical than small ones. This is why nobody has built SMRs since the 1950s.
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
You could be right about the Korean plants. I only relied on google to give me the top 5 nuclear plants active in the world. The Korean plants you mention were not on the list.
Wikpedia has more info, plus WNN and other industry publications usually are more up-to date.
Kori[1] has 7 operational units today and 1 commissioning and 1 under construction
Hansul[2] has 8 operational units and another 2 more under construction.
All 4 new units are APR-1400 reactors ~1400 MW capacity. Kori should retains its top position, Saeul-3 in Kori Phase II has already reached criticality in April.
Tianwan in China will come close but its 7/8 units are slightly behind in construction than Saeul-3/4 in South Korea, plus the plant is also bit smaller at 6600MW now . The Russian VVER-1200 design China are using is also slightly smaller than Korean APR-1400.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanul_Nuclear_Power_Plant
It's obvious to me there will be a renaisance, but the question is which design will win. There are so many companies building small modular reactors right and various different designs with different fuels and cooling mediums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence.
I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.
From the article:
"If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides,"
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if safety concerns are met. Also from the article:
> Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
The problem of course is that safety has costs and people cut corners, leading to events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
The USA should start a civilian nuclear corps. Expand training at the many nuclear power training center and teach double the students at the nuclear power school there; hands on training they split up to naval reactor training they currently have and land training at wherever they build the first land reactor. Pay the same as a us navy plant operator gets paid. Bootstrap the whole thing off of the nuclear navy like they did with the space force a while ago did with the Air Force’s space command, but do a fork into two orgs, not a rename. Pick a single plant design for equipment and build them all over the country; naval reactors are expensive so train this corps on the land design.
Boom, there you have it, a nuclear remains in the USA. They won’t do it though.
Good job Canada
Perhaps relevant.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.
A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.
Doesn’t help with the burning part. Or the stranded infrastructure once the demand goes away.
Demand will not go away. There'll be toxic waste to clean up for decades after.
I wonder if anyone will tell them that's an oxymoron.
Can't wait for this to get bogged down in legislation and never get done
That might take a while. We need to bog down the HSR first.
This is great. Hopefully they can make enough to supply the US energy. Because we seem to be incapable of building new reactors.
Microreactor initiatives in the US are at least promising.
The idea is great, the timeline is super unrealistic. We'll see those reactors in 2070 the earliest, more likely in 2080.
Tounge in Cheek: Expect this headline to be down voted once the German HN readers wake up. The (Washington-backed) green populists really did a cultural number on us. Germany will rather go full Mao and starve its people before it accepts that its stance on nuclear was a bad idea.
Good for Canada btw.
Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.
Hopefully, Canada will not get bullied by US for selling it cheaply.
Who else can Canada sell excess power to?
No one else I guess. But they could use it themselves, building whatever plants/factories/server farms needed to use it.
Hydrolysis.
From what I've seen out of Canada, this is likely overly optimistic and probably will not be possible in that time frame.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
Society grows great when old men build nuclear plants whose power they will never get to enjoy.
Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.
You pay for it.
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.
Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.
The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.
It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)
One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
Darlington nuclear refurbishment finished ahead of schedule and under budget
https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2026/0...
Nuclear industry in Canada is federally-regulated, not provincial.
The regulation of it is an entirely different thing from the budgeting and promotion of it. Promotion of nuclear power has become a very vocal Ford government thing in the last few months.
But what do they do with the waste? And how much fresh water is that going to use?
> But what do they do with the waste?
The Canadian Shield [0] is uniquely well-suited for this: it's remote, sparsely populated, and geologically stable.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
Leaving aside that Canada is huge, waste is really just not that much of a problem. It would be easy to safely store all the waste that will ever be produced at a dedicated storage site, if you could drum up the political will for such a site to exist. But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site. Not that much waste is produced; stick it in a cask and leave it alone.
> But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site.
I agree with the rest but on site storage of high level waste is a terrible idea. Even after vitrification that's material that will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than agrarian human civilization has existed. Ideally it should enter a disposal chain that keeps as little of it at ground level for a short a time as possible in order to hedge against the long tail possibility of a large scale disaster stranding it on the surface.
I think the finnish plan to bury it on site 500 meters down in bedrock is a decent one.
This is why I always scoff at people talking about the scarcity of landfill space. We have damn near unlimited space here. It might not look like it if you never leave a major city, but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
The only hard part is ensuring your waste doesn't enter the water system, but that's just bog standard mining engineering.
> but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
Problem is you'll get some tribe coming out of the woodworks claiming whatever inaccessible area hundreds of miles from civilization is some sacred ground that can't be touched.
If there's something Canada has in excess it's water and storage space.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
The sun uses much more water on earth than people do.
I think most (all?) nuclear plants use once-thru cooling. There is a water intake upstream (or in an ocean/lake) of the plant, the water passes through the cooling loop interfacing with a heat exchanger that has hot heavy water from the core on the other side. Some of the water is evaporated in hyperboloid cooling towers, and the rest is discharged downstream (or back in the ocean/lake)
That’s great news ! Have they also solved the nuclear waste problem?
Honest question; here in the USA we have not.
It's not really a problem. The alternative is to grind it up into fine dust, spray it into the air, and call it "clean coal".
That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radiative emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.
Something for future generations to figure out with their AI chatbots.
CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world
I love nuclear reactors and CANDU are quite cool. But I don't think that today we have any reasons to build CANDU reactors, except possibly that Canada can demonstrate they can build them for cheaper than others can build light water reactors. The ability to build is something that has little to do with the technical merits of a nuclear reactor design. But all things being equal, a PWR or a BWR should cost less per GW than a CANDU reactor and have other advantages too:
- main problem with CANDU: proliferation. India was able to build nuclear weapons after using a Canadian built heavy water reactor (basically a CANDU reactor) [1]. There is no guarantee that another country will not try something similar in the future, the design has no built in proliferation resistance. An operator can remove irradiated fuel at any time, and if the IAEA discovers they engage in plutonium manufacturing and they get on a black list, they can manufacture their own fuel quite easily, because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium. With light water reactors, you need enriched fuel, so if you are flagged as a proliferator no fuel manufacturer will be allowed to sell you fuel, and it's going to be much harder for you to manufacture your own fuel, since you can't enrich. If you can enrich uranium, you might as well try to build a uranium bomb (like Iran is trying to do). Also, with light water reactors, you refuel only at discrete times, generally about 18 months apart, so it is much more difficult to extract lightly irradiated fuel without being caught by the IAEA.
Now some less important problems:
- because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium, it produces much more nuclear waste per GWh compared to light water reactors. Nuclear waste is not the boogeyman nuclear anti-advocates make it to be, but still, if you generate 5-10 times more nuclear waste than the mainstream alternatives, it is less than ideal.
- there is one positive reactivity feedback loop in a CANDU design. Because of that CANDU designs are not licenseable in the US. The Canadian nuclear regulator is comfortable that the design is stable [2], but if you can choose between a design with one positive feedback loop and one without any positive feedback loop, why would you choose the first?
- heavy water is a worse moderator than light water (by a large factor). It [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
[2] https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/safety-an...
We are trying.
new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
Micro reactors have micro markets. The diseconomies of scale kill it for general grid power.
would be good
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.
We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).
I was being a little flippant there - but I think we've gone way too far in the "nuclear is risky" direction, largely because of Chernobyl, which was a) a very specific disaster caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck and b) not that deadly. In the US about as many people die every year due to coal pollution as have yet (or will ever) die because of Chernobyl. About the same number die in Europe every year because of a lack of AC. Those are just invisible risks that we accept already and we need to start seeing them.
Don't forget Fukushima!
I'm all down with spamming nuclear plants but will that, in the end, give free electricity to the consumer? Lower the rates? ..or just continue to be an economic weapon against the masses?
Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal.
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
How viable is Solar in Canada given its weather? (I am ignorant about it and only know that it's really cold and cloudy most of the time).
Alberta is one of the best locales for solar on the continent -- it's sunny most of the year -- and had an exploding renewables sector.
Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector.
Cold is fine - solar panels perform better the lower the temperature.
That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
Its not so much the days but the hours. Days start getting pretty short in winter. The sun also doesn't get as high in the sky so the efficiency of a fixed panel drops further.
Calgary is quite sunny at 2400 hrs/year.
But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950).
Since it is a make work project, costing more and tried longer is an advantage
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-...
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ontarios-costly-...
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Isn't it interesting? Now that power generation is seen as the deciding factor between who wins/loses AI, nuclear is back on the table again.
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Doesn't nuclear make sense to increase baseline capacity where hydro isn't available?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
A village near me in southern Alberta just built a huge wind farm.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
[0] - https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-renewable-energy-investment-co...
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
(Energy trader here)
The Alberta government absolutely banned new solar and wind development, first a short-lived moratorium and then with regulations meant to "protect the natural beauty", restrictions mind you that absolutely do not apply to the pump jacks any company can place on your land and which you do not have the right to refuse. Or to the vast stretches of Mordor-like tailing ponds.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
Then perhaps they should start collecting money for their orphan well problem rather than letting it worse with the clear goal of making the rest of the country pay for it.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
What other kind of subsidy is there?
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Oh but you can.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Wind farms though. Terrible things. Eye sore.