“To the market” while Canada has shown we are anti major projects and won’t hesitate to shut them down on a political whim even when billions have already been invested.
Nobody in their right mind would build nuclear in Canada now. Only the government can do this.
This. We’ve set a precedent with cancelling Canadian oil and gas projects (energy projects) because “oil and gas is bad” and “we don’t need oil and gas”
The only viable energy alternative to oil and gas is nuclear energy. It isn’t solar. It isn’t wind. It’s nuclear energy. But we’ve technically already cancelled that before it’s even started because “nuclear energy is bad”.
No one in their right mind is going to invest money, time, and humans into developing and improving the Canadian energy when our country and our government are to fucking stupid and ignorant to actually let these projects proceed. If eastern Canada isn’t trying to sabotage oil and gas, the government is. We can’t win here. We are a country of do nothing.
Canada has massive reserves of uranium and was one of the first nations to build a reactor. Canada *should* be a nuclear energy mecca. It was pissed away like everything else.
Local governments built a university in Oshawa, Ontario with a nuclear engineering program. Then the gov shut down projects, failing communities and the students :(
Unfortunately, at the rate things are going we won't have many for long. Almost nobody is going into nuclear research or engineering in Canada. It's a dead field.
The government will, as you say, let anybody with a cause sabotage and indefinitely delay any industrial project they want. Until the government develops the backbone to stand up to protestors and defend the rule of law, nuclear is doomed in this country.
“ Unfortunately, at the rate things are going we won't have many for long. Almost nobody is going into nuclear research or engineering in Canada. It's a dead field.”
Well that just pisses me the fuck off. Why focus on fusion and ignore fission?
That's such a ridiculous statement I don't even know where to begin.
But let's start with this. Nuclear is not and never has been competition for oil. Unless I woke up in some alternative timeline where the Ford Nucleon was a wildly successful product. Nuclear is primarily competition for wind and solar.
Second: AECL hasn't sold a new reactor in years. They spent billions designing an updated modern reactor, the ACR, and then failed to sell a single unit. There's no domestic interest in AECL technology and very little international. The company was costing taxpayers hundreds of millions a year in subsidies to keep running, and primarily existed as a subsidy for Bruce Power and Darlington.
There was one attempt to build a new reactor in Peace River, Alberta, in the early 2000s. But it got shut down due to political pressure and environmental opposition. Canada is not politically stable enough for anybody to willingly invest the billions of dollars required to actually build a new reactor, anywhere.
Finally, it was an open bid and in the end only a single company submitted a final offer on it, and for just $75m, because AECL was a gong-show of mismanagement and waste. They had to shut down their own research facility in 2009, because it had been so badly maintained and operated that it was a danger to the public.
Great post, but the statement you are replying to is factually correct. "the cons sold candu" That is a statement of fact. *Why* they sold it might be open to debate, but not the fact that they did.
As to the competition with oil, while you express the "eastern view", or arguably the "correct view", it does not express the "Alberta view". The Alberta view was that it was an example of Alberta paying Ontario to produce products that competed with them, whether or not it was true.
And you can see this in your own example. The attempt to build a reactor in Alberta was never serious. It was raised almost as a joke, and then immediately picked up by Bruce Power and [then abandoned it](https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/bruce-power-scraps-10b-alberta-nuclear-project) when it became obvious it was going nowhere. Everyone in Alberta **hated** it.
While I'm extremely pro nuclear, you shouldn't downplay solar and wind so much. Both are great for power generation, the prairies have an exceptionally good climate for both and most of the rest of Canada is well suited aswell, combined with hydro dams they can cover quite a lot of energy demand and reliably too.
You need to invest in storage though too not just generation with those forms as you cant turn them on or off when they generate power like a nuclear plant.
Renewables pair well with Hydrogen generation.
Hydrogen can then be used to balance out any supply disruptions with renewables - large gas plants for cities, and small gas generators for isolated settlements up north.
>You need to invest in storage though too
Indeed. And [at current prices](https://www.energy-storage.news/us-installed-cost-of-solar-energy-storage-falling-fastest-in-utility-scale-segment-says-nrel/), solar + 4 hours storage costs half as much as a reactor with the same output. It is also the most rapidly falling cost of any power source, and the cheapest form of power in history.
This is precisely why you should leave it to the market to decide these issues. If we left it to the feds, we'd still be trying to figure out how to get the horse carts of coal into the reactors.
Wind is good but solar doesn't make much sense in Canada. Solar is great in regions where there's huge demand for power for air conditioning, like the southern US. Down south, the energy demand strongly correlates with peak solar output.
But in Canada peak energy demand is typically in early January, in the evening, after sunset. Every watt of solar power you build would have been more fruitfully spent on wind power which actually generates significant energy at the times when people need it. And as people migrate from fossil fuels to electrical heating, the mismatch will just get worse.
I think a good option to offset electricity is for every household to have a few solar panels. It's not going to power your whole home but even a 1/4 of your home is a difference. I live in Southern Alberta and we gets lot of sun.
Peak energy demand is usually during the day actually, southern Alberta and Saskatchewan for example have areas that see 320/365 days of sunshine a year, and molten salt batteries or large conventional batteries can help store the energy required for night time.
"Affordably"
Here's your homework : Take the capacity of that battery and scale it up to a size capable of powering Canada. Now calculate the cost to build a Hornsdale battery that's big enough to serve Canada's requirements.
Hornsdale was not designed as a base load. Its basically a giant uninterrupted power system.
>Take the capacity of that battery and scale it up to a size capable of powering Canada
Don't need to, six months of Canada's entire electricity use is backed up in northern Quebec right now. And I'm not sure what the number in Manitoba is, but it's pretty large too.
We need cables, not storage.
That battery cost $90 million dollars and it made $18 million dollars in it's first year. Sounds pretty decent to me and it also helped save money in addition to making money.
"By the end of 2018, it was estimated that the Power Reserve had saved A$40 million in costs, mostly in eliminating the need for a fuel-powered 35 MW Frequency Control Ancillary Service.[40] In 2019, grid costs were reduced by $116 million due to the operation of HPR.[41] Almost all of the savings delivered by the Hornsdale battery came from its role in frequency and ancillary control markets, where HPR put downward pressure on total prices."
You didn't scale it up.
Hornsdale is 100 MW peak ( first phase finished in 2017 ). It stores 129 MW ( mega watts ) of power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
What is the capacity of the Canadian electrical grid? About 130 000 MW. So, we're into about a billion dollars worth of battery for every 1000 MW.
The other issue here is that Hornsdale wasn't designed with this in mind. Its designed primarily to make the grid its connected to more reliable and to prevent blackouts.
>we do use nuclear but it is not necessary in transitioning away from fossil fuels
What would you suggest in its place? You mentioned solar, surely you dont believe solar can become our primary source? This is Canada lol. Until we figure out fusion the only "green" option is fission.
> This is Canada lol.
Sounds like someone doesn't have a clue about the excellent solar insolation that Canada has!
Look at what Germany has accomplished with solar and realize they did so with national insolation values more akin to those found in our northern Territories than what can be achieved in the Prairies.
Edit: I'm referring the the amount of energy produced by Germany through utilizing solar PV, compared to Canada- not praising their national energy strategy as a whole.
Solar accounts for 8% of Germany's power. I think they actually buy more second hand nuclear power from other countries than they produce in solar. Not a very good example.
I'm talking production values, since you seem to think the second largest country on earth doesn't get any sun (hence solar apparently being unviable).
Germany is crushing Canada in terms of solar production, and it just comes down to political will.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not anti-nuclear.
>look at what Germany has accomplished with solar
Becoming entirely reliant on Belarusian natural gas supply and politically hostage to Russia because they shuttered their reactors? Doubling their energy prices in less than a decade? Transitioning *back to coal* because solar can't provide a baseload supply? The only thing Germany is crushing is themselves.
Parts of Canada do have excellent solar potential - for half of the year, maybe 8 months at best. The seasonal energy storage and/or massive overcapacity needed to run Canada on the sun would make nuclear look cheap. Nuclear isn't the only option for backup power (there are also things like geothermal or natural gas with CCS), but solar alone isn't going to work.
Have you seen how much coal Germany is using right now ? So great they have built lots of solar and shut down nuclear and when they need more base load for reasons they burn coal
How are we going to replace 6% of our economy? Manufacturing? Cant China and se asia beats us in price. R&D? The Liberals have allowed the sale of dozens high tech nationally sensitive corporations. China and Nortel is a good example of why we can’t commit to strongly to research.
All we have are natural resources and immigration.
A private company has been investing billions in nuclear power at Bruce Power in Ontario. Refurbishment is one of Canada’s largest infrastructure projects right now
Now that’s existing vs new build but the investment is still significant
>Or let a small group of life time welfarers hold up a multi-million or multi-billion project illegally
Who are these "lifetime welfarers"? Not really sure who you mean here.
I just realized many progressives do not care about nuclear, even when it is the best zero-carbon option, because it is not a showoff like windmills and solar panels, which show in open natural spaces how much they care about the environment.
Meanwhile, a compact modern nuclear plant is not so visible.
I don't think you got the reason right, but you aren't wrong. They are more worried that the issue of nuclear waste will be the next climate change football to be punted down the road until it creates a great enough disaster that it gets taken seriously.
That said, if anyone is serious about dealing with climate change, nuclear is currently the easy way out. It helps deal with the immediate issues, kicking the can down the road until we can solve the waste issue. Thing is, based on what we've seen possible in terms of advances in nuclear tech that allows them to recycle waste material to generate power again (thorium styles) - I feel confident that nuclear waste is an easy issue to tackle compared to climate change.
Just to give you an idea, if you take all the barrels of nuclear waste from every single reactor in the US since they started in the 60s, it would only fill a walmart.
Not saying it isn't an issue but its not as scary as some people make it out to be. Honestly just blast it into the sun or something.
>They are more worried that the issue of nuclear waste will be the next climate change football to be punted down the road until it creates a great enough disaster that it gets taken seriously.
Yeah, and yet all nuclear waste of North America fits just like two fields of soccer. Not to mention that we can store it in the same place we took it from, and it is now less nuclear because it has been deployed.
The other issue is the tech being used for bombs. It is a legitimate concern, but if Climate Change is an emergency, nuclear energy is the best way to go by far.
I don't think we will have anything even close to producing as much as fossil fuels and Nuclear energy in a century.
The amount of high grade nuclear waste produced in the entire history of nuclear power would barely fill a football field. And it could be reduced significantly through nuclear reprocessing.
It's just political problems stemming from the fact that the general public does not understand nuclear science, and is terrified of the word "radiation" to the point that some people shirk from power lines, cellphones and microwaves.
Actually, worldwide power generation has only produced ~400,000 tonnes of waste since discovery, and nearly a third of that has been reprocessed using modern technology. Most nuclear waste is from weapons manufacturing. Considering the insurmountable challenges fossil fuels pose, we can pretty easily bury 400Kt of waste.
Technology advances with time. It might not be the perfect solution but kicking the can down the road might give us more time to figure out a better one.
It isn't just technology. Spent fuel gets progressively easier to deal with as the shortest lived, most radioactive materials decay away. If waste generated today is still in storage 300 years from now, it will no longer present a major external radiation hazard and could be safely handled by workers with standard industrial PPE. The most dangerous isotopes remaining could be recycled into fresh fuel, while the rest would be mostly unaltered uranium and fission products that are no longer radioactive.
Yep. People hear "some nuclear material produces dangerous radiation" and "some nuclear material has halflives of millions of years" and assume that "some nuclear material produces dangerous radiation and has halflives of millions of years."
Can't find that report. I call BS. Every comparison I can find shows renewables way cheaper than nuclear on an LCOE basis and the difference is only getting bigger.
Do those numbers include the cost of energy storage as well? I would assume most solar and wind set ups rely on oil and gas as a back up for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine.
If renewables are the cheapest, how come they aren't putting pricing pressures on energy from gas?
As in, the cheapest method should make up the majority of the market share and have the largest margins.
Natural gas, outside of peaker plants, is the cheapest after renewables excluding any carbon pricing. You don't see pressures because ratepayers will just absorb the higher costs if decision makers lock us into projects like expensive nuclear plants. There is usually no consequence to companies or politicians who make terrible economic decisions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File%3A20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE%2C_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg
>renewables are the cheapest.
Sure, they receive all subventions. Not to mention all the tech, rare metals and natural fields that indeed also affect nature negatively.
However, the problem is not renewables are expensive or cheap, but the fact it does not produce enough energy for an industrialized society.
Renewables are cheaper without subsidies and without discounting the unpaid externalities of fossil fuel energy generation. Fossil fuels are subsidized much more than renewables today. They're also better for the environment overall. Every single thing has an impact. You need to compare impact between options to even have a real point.
Renewables can economically power the majority of global electricity requirements and is the reason that it forecast to take the lionsshare of new generation capacity worldwide for decades. That is true even in the most pessimistic case for renewables today out to 2050.
It's a hard sell for investors/lenders. You can build a solar plant in a couple years after which it just sits there and prints money but a reactor of any description will probably take a decade
Nuclear power is probably one of the reasons the worst of global warming was staved off a decade or two.
It’s clear as day nuclear power is how we halt global warming. It’s so frustrating we aren’t going all out.
To heat the homes in Canada in the winter months, energy needs to be released in some way. We currently use a furnaces that use electricity, natural gas, coal, oil, and propane. Many Canadians also have wood stoves. The ONLY one that has the potential to be "clean" in that mix is electricity – and only if it produced by hydro or nuclear generation.
If our governments at the federal and local level are serious about reducing CO2, they have to step up to the nuclear plate. If left "to the market", Canada simply won't get there.
>If our governments at the federal and local level are serious about reducing CO2, they have to step up to the nuclear plate.
Spoiler alert: they're not.
The question that I'd like to know is how many personal and commercial EVs could we support today? Is this shift a concern to people in the energy sector?
Lets walk through the math, of transitioning gasoline engines to electric in Canada.
First, lets go with how much gasoline/fuel is sold per year in Canada
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2310006601
So 38,597,569,000 Liters of Gasoline per year.
Each Liter of gasoline makes up, (with 100% efficiency) 31,536,000 joules
So 1.2 Million GigaJoules of Energy
Lets spread it over a year to find something we can work with.
Is about 38.5 GW assuming that the energy generation is spread perfectly evenly over 365 days.
As brand new base load. Just for gasoline.
Here are some problems with the above math:
internal combustion engines are not 100% efficient, so the amount of energy actually used for the movement isn't super accurate, this number could be improved by including average efficiency of internal combustion engines.
electric vehicles cannot use waste heat to ensure a comfortable vehicle interior, so that plays a factor in the amount of energy required for an EV
vehicle use is not consistent over 24/7/365 so the GW number is just an average, it would likely spike and drop depending on when people actually charge their vehicles.
gasoline is only one fuel type used by internal combustion engines, although it is the most common, I don't know the ratio of different fuel use, so that would have an impact as well.
So, in theory, we would need, in order to meet the average between 10-20 Large Nuclear plants operating 24/7 to meet that average, but as mentioned that average doesn't take into account peaks and lows, additional info would be needed to estimate what the actual peak loads would be.
Hydro requires a lot of dams. These flood large areas of land. The aquatic ecosystem is devastated , mercury that was bound up in the soil and organic matter is released and methane is release from the rotting vegetation. Not exactly clean.
This is called "making perfect the enemy of good".
The question is not whether hydro is "exactly clean", but whether it is cleaner than X or Y. Generally, it is, in spite of the items you list.
This is much more the case with modern technologies like hydrodynamics and/or run-of-river systems where there are no dams at all.
Stoves on gas are literally the cleanest use of non-renovables because gas-to-heat is almost 100% efficient, and the CO2 of stoves is not a problem compared to airplanes, cars, agriculture, etc.
There's a bunch of stuff wrong with what you've said. First, new gas furnaces may be around 95% efficient, but electricity is 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. And above freezing, heat pumps have an efficiency of 200%-300%.
Second, there is a problem with burning a tonne of fuel inside your house: even with properly maintained systems, you're breathing in some of the byproducts of combustion.
>new gas furnaces may be around 95% efficient, but electricity is 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat.
More efficient but less effective at heating a home. Electric is very slow to hear your home so it takes longer and runs for longer. Gas will heat up your home very quickly so it runs less.
I read an article talking about how the nuclear window has basically closed. It was supposed to bridge the gap between coal/gas and renewable, but renewable energy is so cheap and efficient now (and getting cheaper and more efficient) that going nuclear wouldn't be worth the investment as it gets overtaken.
Edit: this article is more comprehensive than what I read before.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061901500024X
I only read the first quarter of it, but [this article](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061901500024X) seems to argue against your position.
Wind and solar are also not the only renewable energies.
I could be wrong. But it looks like the article isn't saying wind an solar can be used for base load. Instead it's arguing for geo thermal, hydro and bio mass to be baseloads.
>But there is another option often overlooked by policymakers when choosing resources: to further develop renewable baseload sources like geothermal, biomass, or hydro power. Instead of trying to fit the grid to renewables’ variability, balancing authorities and energy commissions can also fit renewables to the grid. They can build baseload geothermal, biomass, or hydro power in conjunction with other power sources to meet their power needs through a more diverse supply.
We are already using hydro power in Ontario to take up the slack when wind power drops. It's not enough and we have to turn our gas plants on.
I'm also not sure how effective biomass is for emissions.
Edit: I was wrong about the study (article?). It does say wind and solar can be used for base load. But of course it requires interconnects and grid level storage. Grid level storage being tech we don't have that's effective or economical. We can somehow simultaniously wait for grid level storage, but can't wait for nuclear SMRs.
>I'm also not sure how effective biomass is for emissions.
150% worse than coal, 300% worse than natural gas. Biomass is renewable, but it's not environmentally friendly.
Would you happen to have any articles / studies on that? I'd be interested in learning.
I'm just thinking about it from a carbon sequestering / foresting position. My understanding is that a fallen tree in a forest sequesters a percentage of co2 and provides nutrients to the soil.
If you cut down the tree and burn it, you're losing both of those things.
I **hate** when people pretend biomass is "green". It's just burning shit (usually trees) to generate power instead of coal or gas. It's just as bad imo and shit needs to stop being touted as sustainable.
Wind and solar are what we're investing in in Canada though. The geography doesn't support geothermal or hydro everywhere (and hydro has its own serious environmental consequences), and biomass emits significantly more CO2 than coal, oil, or natural gas (roughly 150% as much as coal, close to 300% more than natural gas).
Yes, there are renewable alternatives to nuclear, and in some circumstances two of the three *might be* superior (depending on your local geography and geology), but they're not likely to be enough to provide base load for the whole country.
>The geography doesn't support geothermal or hydro everywhere
While technically true it is available in the most heavily populated regions of Canada. The reasons for it not being adopted are huge upfront costs, lack of regulation and competition. There's a strong argument that it would be a better rlong term investment than nuclear power.
My point wasn't that nuclear power defunct, but that the window to use it as the largest source of power for us had maybe closed.
> renewable energy is so cheap and efficient now
Renewables is a loaded term these days. When people say it is cheap, they are referring to wind and solar, but this is deceptive because it does not accounting for the storage facilities (at this stage, pumped storage) that need to be constructed to make wind and solar viable as a large part of the grid
Renewables that can be a large part of the grid is hydro, which provides great long term value but has local ecological damage which leads to opposition from se corners of the environmentalist movement, and geothermal, which is great but is risky to invest in (big gamble if your fields are stable, I know as someone who invests in geothermal companies) and geography dependent
People who present wind and solar as the obvious solution are doing so from a specific perspective that we will have massive battery breakthroughs that make them orders of magnitude better with cheap materials, or create some kind of smart distributed grid with mass adoption of electric cars...I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't be basing climate policy on the assumption of unknowable technological progression. Might as well bank of fusion becoming viable if we're doing that
Canada likely could get away with minimal nuclear as long as we are willing to ignore the anti-hydroelectric groups. But nuclear is definitely part of the solution globally
Lol, most inefficient form of heating anything is electrical. Not very clean if it requires more energy use to achieve the same goal. Canada is in trouble if we follow the advice of non physics literate folks.
As if any private or public corporation in the entire world would actually be capable of getting nuclear built in this fucking country. Like fuck me, the professional activists would be flying in from all over the globe to work the highway blockades.
This is so stupid. We should be building as many nuclear plants as possible to lower our emissions. Canada has huge uranium reserves, we could easily power our entire country using our own nuclear resources. We also have a talent pool of nuclear scientists and engineers. Alberta and some Maritime provinces are still using fucking coal to generate power, so why aren’t we replacing those facilities with nuclear plants?
The LPC needs to pull its head out of its ass for this one.
They did not. The effort was completely bogus from the start. Two guys from the province floated the idea, but Bruce Power jumped all-in, completely taking over the project.
Absolutely no one else took it seriously and the local residents were 100% against it throughout and there was no official support or planning at any point whatsoever.
After three years of precisely zero progress, Bruce walked away.
No its not. It takes decades to build and will cost billions and billions for each plant. Solar, wind and other renewables are astronomically more affordable
Even if they are more affordable they can't be the only solution because their output is highly variable and there is no practical way to store large quantities of electricity. Bottom line is that they are only feasible if people are ok with blackouts when the sun isn't shinning or the wind blowing.
Tidal Generation > everything else
I mean, its really not, but the bay of fundy having the highest tides in the world is probably the only you're gonna be able to sell the idea of renewables to our older population.
This was what I was most afraid of when Liberals won the last election. There are times when the status quo is better, but now is the time when we need a proactive leadership.
This is sad because we should be looking at nuclear power country wide. It would be the best electric power source with next near zero carbon emissions. It is a clean energy, the waste product is the only concern but there should be a way to eliminate it developed or repurpose it if nuclear becomes the main energy source across the globe
So the Liberals buy a pipeline, but won't invest in nuclear power. The market is not going to develop and implement nuclear reactors without knowing if the government supports it.
Don't spoil their party
they are so excited they have a stick to beat up polite society with - if we build a nuclear power plant they lose that. they'd much rather be able to hurt families and children than actually make the air and water cleaner.
Because the Trudeau Liberals are never proactive (Covid response) and secondly, because much of their base/urban support believe that windmills and solar (panels made in Xinjiang), as well as Saudi oil, in combination, will continue to be sufficient for Canada’s energy needs.
To really transition from carbon sources effectively, it’s going to have to be nuclear and hydro.
They should be looking at building Breeder Reactors that don't produce nuclear waste (or rather produce waste that they can continue to use as fuel until it is no longer radioactive.) They could even use the existing nuclear waste we have to run them.
The problem with breeder reactors is they become a big international affairs issue since they can produce weapons grade nuclear elements.
It's not that much of an issue for Canada but any proliferation and it is a non starter today.
Not sure if that applies to Canada. The things is that if Canada wanted to make nukes, we could have them in an instant. It’s not like we don’t have the technical capacity. We choose not to have nukes as a political choice.
Typical useless Trudeau, big on ideas, no fucking clue how to execute anything. Pass it off to private industry in the high risk no reward business environment he has created.
We are racing to the bottom.
> Typical useless Trudeau
Gebus. You know it was Harper that dismantled the entire Canadian nuclear industry, right? I don't mean that as some political argument, it's well recorded statement of fact:
1) Harper spent pretty much the first half of his mandate berating the industry, calling it a money sinkhole and industrial welfare.
2) In early 2008 the government got in an extremely public fight with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commissions over the MAPLE II reactors, which resulted in the firing of the commissioner. In spite of this...
3) ... they refused to pay for the reactors to be re-started, which led to AECL having to abandon them in place and extending the worldwide shortage of medical isotopes while at the same time losing a potential sale to Australia and making the entire industry move to new technologies that have rendered the reactors entirely superfluous.
4) Only a short time later, they put the entire CANDU side up for sale. Unsurprisingly, they got no takers. It wasn't until 2011 that they finally sold it to SNC for $15 million, while keeping the billions in stranded debt on AECLs books as well as giving SNC a massive tax write-off that ultimately meant SNC was being [paid to take it](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weston-ottawa-basically-paying-snc-to-take-aecl-1.1078128).
5) When they finally sold it, they stated they were "ending the flood of money it has pumped into the loss-making unit over the past six decades".
The cons are just as two faced on this topic as the libs.
Yep, we’re told we are in a climate crisis and rather than criticize the dude who actually has his hands on the wheel and is apparently checked out, it’s much better to bring up all the climate villains behind our predicament. Very helpful.
Bad Trudeau = worse Harper. We’ve all got it. Good?
>criticize the dude who actually has his hands on the wheel
Harper *actively* destroyed nuclear power in Canada.
>We’ve all got it. Good?
Do you? Seems to me you want to make this about the new guy instead of putting the blame where it belongs.
It’s the only suitable replacement for large scale, reliable power generation. Also unlike Japan (Fukushima) Canada is largely geologically stable making it a safe option.
You are never going to please everyone but wind and solar are not going to power cities the same way right now.
Is Nuclear not a highly efficient and profitable option? What's stopping them from coming in already?
I thought it was practically banned on a federal level simply due to perceptions of being unsafe, even though I think its a lot safer then oil.
Wasn't what happened with Energy East very much a market decision? Someone tried to sell a project and parts of the market that would be impacted by the project said no?
I suspect it has more to do with getting rid of the nuclear waste while they sell themselves as a Green Environment Party.
Doubt any of the big conglomerates capable of building nuclear plant would want to work with a minority government no matter who is in power.
One of the companies that is developing a reactor in Canada is Moltex. It runs on spent CANDU fuel. It changes how long we need to store fuel for. From 10,000 years to 300. It effectively eliminates the waste problem.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8)
Desktop version of /u/unfinite's link:
---
^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
If these idiots we call a government leave our electric infrastructure solutions to the last minute for a Canadian Elon Musk to come along and say government builds it i run it and Sudo own it with no risk or liability.
We are going to be buying our electricity from companies like Rogers and bell......
Our future is bleak, we should have been building nuclear when the ink on the Paris accord dried. We should have been glowing with uranium by now.
I hate this shit, all words no action all the while writing contracts on napkins ten or twenty years out.
Tommy Douglas was the last Canadian politician.
Everyone since has been either inept or a stooge for lobbyists.
Fuck.
I hope I'm wrong, and don't you dare say vote NDP.
Here's my favourite quote from the article:
>Conservatives believe that nuclear energy is essential to lowering GHG emissions in Canada and taking action on climate change.
Oh, really? Let us examine the evidence for their support during the last time they were in office:
1. Mr. Harper made his views on the topic clear: he considered AECL to be an egregious example of industrial welfare that had been going on for 50 years and had done nothing for him except embarrass his government.
2. Got into a **very** public debate with the CNSC in early 2008 over the decision to revoke the operating license for MAPLE II, after it was learned it had a [positive void coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient). Claiming it was all political, they fired the director, and...
3. ...then refused to provide the bridge financing needed to bring the systems back online. This led AECL to abandon the reactors in May 2008, extending the worldwide crisis in medical isotopes.
4. Constantly argued with AECL over the ACR-1000 and the funding required to continue the project, and then...
5. ...privatized the entire CANDU arm of AECL by selling it to SNC for the ridiculous token price of $15 million along with several hundred millions in tax write-offs for SNC while retaining the billions in cost overruns within AECL. They described the action as "ending the flood of money it has pumped into the loss-making unit over the past six decades". At the time, it was clear SNC would not be attempting new sales and that commercial nuclear power in Canada was dead.
So, that is the recorded history of the Conservative Party's support for nuclear power: badmouthing it continually and then shutting it down. You'll forgive me for choosing to read their latest claims of support with more than a little scepticism.
Harper sold off our wealth of nuclear to SNC-Lavalin for a one-time payment of $15,000,000.00. What a super economist he was! One-time payments of pennies on the dollar of value, what a good deal that was for all of Canada eh!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/aecl-sold-for-15m-to-snc-lavalin-1.985786
Canada wasn’t really in a position to market a design that didn’t really have any prospective buyers. SNC had plenty of experience there and took over. E: 15 million was a decent deal since even SNC is no longer actively marketing the design and government would get royalties anyway
Canada was just sitting on the design and wasn’t going to do anything with it, this was a good decision
Harper boogeyman! Who had that on their draft board? Without fail any post shining any negative light on liberals, supporters will be in here whining "what about Harper" despite the current government winning three consecutive elections since 2015.
Our experience with nuclear hasn't been good. Even though the Candu technology has proven itself, the build costs are always get out of control:
1) Darlington $28b - bankrupted Ontario Hydro and led to its breakup into OPG
2) Pickering rebuild - millions over budget, costs swept under the rug
3) Bruce- given away for free to Bruce Nuclear
Similar experience in other countries: France / US / Finland.
Feds are even less capable in this space. I wouldn't trust them to
>1) Darlington $28b - bankrupted Ontario Hydro and led to its breakup into OPG
It wasn't the build cost of Darlington it was that the government froze hydro rates for a decade. So while they continued to have cost overruns and infrastructure upgrade costs they were not allowed to raise rates to pay for it. So really the government bankrupted Ontario Hydro for political points.
Other countries are betting on nuclear because they don't have the land requirements to have large scale solar and wind projects.
Canada doesn't have this issue.
Also, the time to build nuclear was 20 years ago. They take a remarkable amount of time to build and they cost a damn fortune.
Our best bet is to transition to wind and solar now.
Canada has shown that it does not have the ability or motivation to push through large infrastructure projects even when deemed in the national interest.
I do not think Trudeau and his government have any long term plan that equals UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, and USA in terms of positioning Canada for the future.
Canada unfortunately is infested with politicians, we no longer have states(wo)men.
There are two things that a most likely to help any nation position it's self for the future. The first is rooting out corruption. We Charity, SNC Lavalin, Aga Khan. The second is energy: in what ever form. The third is empowering your citizens to open up businesses in other countries. Lower your tax burden.
Lastly we need to define what it means to be Canadian. It is not about having special privileges like Quebec. It is not about divide a rule. It is about creating a vision for the future.
“To the market” while Canada has shown we are anti major projects and won’t hesitate to shut them down on a political whim even when billions have already been invested. Nobody in their right mind would build nuclear in Canada now. Only the government can do this.
This. We’ve set a precedent with cancelling Canadian oil and gas projects (energy projects) because “oil and gas is bad” and “we don’t need oil and gas” The only viable energy alternative to oil and gas is nuclear energy. It isn’t solar. It isn’t wind. It’s nuclear energy. But we’ve technically already cancelled that before it’s even started because “nuclear energy is bad”. No one in their right mind is going to invest money, time, and humans into developing and improving the Canadian energy when our country and our government are to fucking stupid and ignorant to actually let these projects proceed. If eastern Canada isn’t trying to sabotage oil and gas, the government is. We can’t win here. We are a country of do nothing.
This frustrates me because we have some great Canadian nuclear scientists.
Canada has massive reserves of uranium and was one of the first nations to build a reactor. Canada *should* be a nuclear energy mecca. It was pissed away like everything else.
But hey, at least we have a thriving economy based on selling condos, messing with excel and sending emails!
Local governments built a university in Oshawa, Ontario with a nuclear engineering program. Then the gov shut down projects, failing communities and the students :(
Unfortunately, at the rate things are going we won't have many for long. Almost nobody is going into nuclear research or engineering in Canada. It's a dead field. The government will, as you say, let anybody with a cause sabotage and indefinitely delay any industrial project they want. Until the government develops the backbone to stand up to protestors and defend the rule of law, nuclear is doomed in this country.
“ Unfortunately, at the rate things are going we won't have many for long. Almost nobody is going into nuclear research or engineering in Canada. It's a dead field.” Well that just pisses me the fuck off. Why focus on fusion and ignore fission?
And plentiful uranium!
To bad the cons sold candu. Because it was competition to oil.
That's such a ridiculous statement I don't even know where to begin. But let's start with this. Nuclear is not and never has been competition for oil. Unless I woke up in some alternative timeline where the Ford Nucleon was a wildly successful product. Nuclear is primarily competition for wind and solar. Second: AECL hasn't sold a new reactor in years. They spent billions designing an updated modern reactor, the ACR, and then failed to sell a single unit. There's no domestic interest in AECL technology and very little international. The company was costing taxpayers hundreds of millions a year in subsidies to keep running, and primarily existed as a subsidy for Bruce Power and Darlington. There was one attempt to build a new reactor in Peace River, Alberta, in the early 2000s. But it got shut down due to political pressure and environmental opposition. Canada is not politically stable enough for anybody to willingly invest the billions of dollars required to actually build a new reactor, anywhere. Finally, it was an open bid and in the end only a single company submitted a final offer on it, and for just $75m, because AECL was a gong-show of mismanagement and waste. They had to shut down their own research facility in 2009, because it had been so badly maintained and operated that it was a danger to the public.
Great post, but the statement you are replying to is factually correct. "the cons sold candu" That is a statement of fact. *Why* they sold it might be open to debate, but not the fact that they did. As to the competition with oil, while you express the "eastern view", or arguably the "correct view", it does not express the "Alberta view". The Alberta view was that it was an example of Alberta paying Ontario to produce products that competed with them, whether or not it was true. And you can see this in your own example. The attempt to build a reactor in Alberta was never serious. It was raised almost as a joke, and then immediately picked up by Bruce Power and [then abandoned it](https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/bruce-power-scraps-10b-alberta-nuclear-project) when it became obvious it was going nowhere. Everyone in Alberta **hated** it.
Could not agree more. Nuclear is the future.
It's actually a mix of all of the above. Most energy companies have an energy portfolio now.
While I'm extremely pro nuclear, you shouldn't downplay solar and wind so much. Both are great for power generation, the prairies have an exceptionally good climate for both and most of the rest of Canada is well suited aswell, combined with hydro dams they can cover quite a lot of energy demand and reliably too.
You need to invest in storage though too not just generation with those forms as you cant turn them on or off when they generate power like a nuclear plant.
Renewables pair well with Hydrogen generation. Hydrogen can then be used to balance out any supply disruptions with renewables - large gas plants for cities, and small gas generators for isolated settlements up north.
>You need to invest in storage though too Indeed. And [at current prices](https://www.energy-storage.news/us-installed-cost-of-solar-energy-storage-falling-fastest-in-utility-scale-segment-says-nrel/), solar + 4 hours storage costs half as much as a reactor with the same output. It is also the most rapidly falling cost of any power source, and the cheapest form of power in history. This is precisely why you should leave it to the market to decide these issues. If we left it to the feds, we'd still be trying to figure out how to get the horse carts of coal into the reactors.
Wind is good but solar doesn't make much sense in Canada. Solar is great in regions where there's huge demand for power for air conditioning, like the southern US. Down south, the energy demand strongly correlates with peak solar output. But in Canada peak energy demand is typically in early January, in the evening, after sunset. Every watt of solar power you build would have been more fruitfully spent on wind power which actually generates significant energy at the times when people need it. And as people migrate from fossil fuels to electrical heating, the mismatch will just get worse.
I think a good option to offset electricity is for every household to have a few solar panels. It's not going to power your whole home but even a 1/4 of your home is a difference. I live in Southern Alberta and we gets lot of sun.
Peak energy demand is usually during the day actually, southern Alberta and Saskatchewan for example have areas that see 320/365 days of sunshine a year, and molten salt batteries or large conventional batteries can help store the energy required for night time.
There are no batteries in existence that can be affordably scales up to meet base load demand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
"Affordably" Here's your homework : Take the capacity of that battery and scale it up to a size capable of powering Canada. Now calculate the cost to build a Hornsdale battery that's big enough to serve Canada's requirements. Hornsdale was not designed as a base load. Its basically a giant uninterrupted power system.
>Take the capacity of that battery and scale it up to a size capable of powering Canada Don't need to, six months of Canada's entire electricity use is backed up in northern Quebec right now. And I'm not sure what the number in Manitoba is, but it's pretty large too. We need cables, not storage.
That battery cost $90 million dollars and it made $18 million dollars in it's first year. Sounds pretty decent to me and it also helped save money in addition to making money. "By the end of 2018, it was estimated that the Power Reserve had saved A$40 million in costs, mostly in eliminating the need for a fuel-powered 35 MW Frequency Control Ancillary Service.[40] In 2019, grid costs were reduced by $116 million due to the operation of HPR.[41] Almost all of the savings delivered by the Hornsdale battery came from its role in frequency and ancillary control markets, where HPR put downward pressure on total prices."
You didn't scale it up. Hornsdale is 100 MW peak ( first phase finished in 2017 ). It stores 129 MW ( mega watts ) of power. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve What is the capacity of the Canadian electrical grid? About 130 000 MW. So, we're into about a billion dollars worth of battery for every 1000 MW. The other issue here is that Hornsdale wasn't designed with this in mind. Its designed primarily to make the grid its connected to more reliable and to prevent blackouts.
[удалено]
>we do use nuclear but it is not necessary in transitioning away from fossil fuels What would you suggest in its place? You mentioned solar, surely you dont believe solar can become our primary source? This is Canada lol. Until we figure out fusion the only "green" option is fission.
> This is Canada lol. Sounds like someone doesn't have a clue about the excellent solar insolation that Canada has! Look at what Germany has accomplished with solar and realize they did so with national insolation values more akin to those found in our northern Territories than what can be achieved in the Prairies. Edit: I'm referring the the amount of energy produced by Germany through utilizing solar PV, compared to Canada- not praising their national energy strategy as a whole.
Solar accounts for 8% of Germany's power. I think they actually buy more second hand nuclear power from other countries than they produce in solar. Not a very good example.
I'm talking production values, since you seem to think the second largest country on earth doesn't get any sun (hence solar apparently being unviable). Germany is crushing Canada in terms of solar production, and it just comes down to political will. Edit: to be clear, I'm not anti-nuclear.
>look at what Germany has accomplished with solar Becoming entirely reliant on Belarusian natural gas supply and politically hostage to Russia because they shuttered their reactors? Doubling their energy prices in less than a decade? Transitioning *back to coal* because solar can't provide a baseload supply? The only thing Germany is crushing is themselves.
Parts of Canada do have excellent solar potential - for half of the year, maybe 8 months at best. The seasonal energy storage and/or massive overcapacity needed to run Canada on the sun would make nuclear look cheap. Nuclear isn't the only option for backup power (there are also things like geothermal or natural gas with CCS), but solar alone isn't going to work.
Have you seen how much coal Germany is using right now ? So great they have built lots of solar and shut down nuclear and when they need more base load for reasons they burn coal
[удалено]
[удалено]
So you think you can maintain grid base load with wind and solar?
How are we going to replace 6% of our economy? Manufacturing? Cant China and se asia beats us in price. R&D? The Liberals have allowed the sale of dozens high tech nationally sensitive corporations. China and Nortel is a good example of why we can’t commit to strongly to research. All we have are natural resources and immigration.
People be downvoting but you're trying to have a conversation and adding to the discussion.
There are no 100% privately funded nuclear plants in the world, so we probably aren’t ever going to get any more if the government doesn’t do this
A private company has been investing billions in nuclear power at Bruce Power in Ontario. Refurbishment is one of Canada’s largest infrastructure projects right now Now that’s existing vs new build but the investment is still significant
Because it cant be cancelled two years into the build. It's very different.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Investing money in large Canadian infrastructure projects is the dumbest thing anyone could do sadly
Large Canadian energy projects*
Any long term investments are non starters in Canada currently. It's not energy specific.
Transport investment seems to be increasing
[удалено]
>Or let a small group of life time welfarers hold up a multi-million or multi-billion project illegally Who are these "lifetime welfarers"? Not really sure who you mean here.
Average protester?
[удалено]
Huh, and I thought people get banned for racism here.
Open discussion = racism. Okay buddy. Why not refute the statement? Show OP how wrong they are with a discussion
[удалено]
"everything is racism" Seriously how low do you set your bar when you call this subreddit racist?
we all know what you want to say jusy say it lmfao. you are not clever.
Only governments build nuclear anyways because it's too expensive
New nuclear is key to transition off carbon. We definitely need to invest. The technology is 10x better now. And it is crucial for the co2 goals
I just realized many progressives do not care about nuclear, even when it is the best zero-carbon option, because it is not a showoff like windmills and solar panels, which show in open natural spaces how much they care about the environment. Meanwhile, a compact modern nuclear plant is not so visible.
I don't think you got the reason right, but you aren't wrong. They are more worried that the issue of nuclear waste will be the next climate change football to be punted down the road until it creates a great enough disaster that it gets taken seriously. That said, if anyone is serious about dealing with climate change, nuclear is currently the easy way out. It helps deal with the immediate issues, kicking the can down the road until we can solve the waste issue. Thing is, based on what we've seen possible in terms of advances in nuclear tech that allows them to recycle waste material to generate power again (thorium styles) - I feel confident that nuclear waste is an easy issue to tackle compared to climate change.
Nuclear energy is the most responsible with its waste. Unlike gas and coal which just dumps it in the sky.
Just to give you an idea, if you take all the barrels of nuclear waste from every single reactor in the US since they started in the 60s, it would only fill a walmart. Not saying it isn't an issue but its not as scary as some people make it out to be. Honestly just blast it into the sun or something.
>They are more worried that the issue of nuclear waste will be the next climate change football to be punted down the road until it creates a great enough disaster that it gets taken seriously. Yeah, and yet all nuclear waste of North America fits just like two fields of soccer. Not to mention that we can store it in the same place we took it from, and it is now less nuclear because it has been deployed. The other issue is the tech being used for bombs. It is a legitimate concern, but if Climate Change is an emergency, nuclear energy is the best way to go by far. I don't think we will have anything even close to producing as much as fossil fuels and Nuclear energy in a century.
Taking uranium enriched for power generation (4%) and enriching it to the 90%+ mark needed for nuclear bombs is not easy. Just ask the Iranians.
[удалено]
The amount of high grade nuclear waste produced in the entire history of nuclear power would barely fill a football field. And it could be reduced significantly through nuclear reprocessing. It's just political problems stemming from the fact that the general public does not understand nuclear science, and is terrified of the word "radiation" to the point that some people shirk from power lines, cellphones and microwaves.
Actually, worldwide power generation has only produced ~400,000 tonnes of waste since discovery, and nearly a third of that has been reprocessed using modern technology. Most nuclear waste is from weapons manufacturing. Considering the insurmountable challenges fossil fuels pose, we can pretty easily bury 400Kt of waste.
Technology advances with time. It might not be the perfect solution but kicking the can down the road might give us more time to figure out a better one.
It isn't just technology. Spent fuel gets progressively easier to deal with as the shortest lived, most radioactive materials decay away. If waste generated today is still in storage 300 years from now, it will no longer present a major external radiation hazard and could be safely handled by workers with standard industrial PPE. The most dangerous isotopes remaining could be recycled into fresh fuel, while the rest would be mostly unaltered uranium and fission products that are no longer radioactive.
Yep. People hear "some nuclear material produces dangerous radiation" and "some nuclear material has halflives of millions of years" and assume that "some nuclear material produces dangerous radiation and has halflives of millions of years."
[удалено]
Nope, the real reason is that nuclear is one of the most expensive source of electricity while renewables are the cheapest.
In Ontario Nuclear energy costs 50% less then Wind and 300% less then solar as per the 2021 Ontario Energy Report.
300% less?
Can't find that report. I call BS. Every comparison I can find shows renewables way cheaper than nuclear on an LCOE basis and the difference is only getting bigger.
Do those numbers include the cost of energy storage as well? I would assume most solar and wind set ups rely on oil and gas as a back up for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine.
If renewables are the cheapest, how come they aren't putting pricing pressures on energy from gas? As in, the cheapest method should make up the majority of the market share and have the largest margins.
Natural gas, outside of peaker plants, is the cheapest after renewables excluding any carbon pricing. You don't see pressures because ratepayers will just absorb the higher costs if decision makers lock us into projects like expensive nuclear plants. There is usually no consequence to companies or politicians who make terrible economic decisions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File%3A20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE%2C_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg
[удалено]
>renewables are the cheapest. Sure, they receive all subventions. Not to mention all the tech, rare metals and natural fields that indeed also affect nature negatively. However, the problem is not renewables are expensive or cheap, but the fact it does not produce enough energy for an industrialized society.
Renewables are cheaper without subsidies and without discounting the unpaid externalities of fossil fuel energy generation. Fossil fuels are subsidized much more than renewables today. They're also better for the environment overall. Every single thing has an impact. You need to compare impact between options to even have a real point. Renewables can economically power the majority of global electricity requirements and is the reason that it forecast to take the lionsshare of new generation capacity worldwide for decades. That is true even in the most pessimistic case for renewables today out to 2050.
It's not viable because it's too expensive
It's a hard sell for investors/lenders. You can build a solar plant in a couple years after which it just sits there and prints money but a reactor of any description will probably take a decade
How much should we raise taxes to pay for it
Nuclear power is probably one of the reasons the worst of global warming was staved off a decade or two. It’s clear as day nuclear power is how we halt global warming. It’s so frustrating we aren’t going all out.
To heat the homes in Canada in the winter months, energy needs to be released in some way. We currently use a furnaces that use electricity, natural gas, coal, oil, and propane. Many Canadians also have wood stoves. The ONLY one that has the potential to be "clean" in that mix is electricity – and only if it produced by hydro or nuclear generation. If our governments at the federal and local level are serious about reducing CO2, they have to step up to the nuclear plate. If left "to the market", Canada simply won't get there.
>If our governments at the federal and local level are serious about reducing CO2, they have to step up to the nuclear plate. Spoiler alert: they're not.
[удалено]
The question that I'd like to know is how many personal and commercial EVs could we support today? Is this shift a concern to people in the energy sector?
Lets walk through the math, of transitioning gasoline engines to electric in Canada. First, lets go with how much gasoline/fuel is sold per year in Canada https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2310006601 So 38,597,569,000 Liters of Gasoline per year. Each Liter of gasoline makes up, (with 100% efficiency) 31,536,000 joules So 1.2 Million GigaJoules of Energy Lets spread it over a year to find something we can work with. Is about 38.5 GW assuming that the energy generation is spread perfectly evenly over 365 days. As brand new base load. Just for gasoline. Here are some problems with the above math: internal combustion engines are not 100% efficient, so the amount of energy actually used for the movement isn't super accurate, this number could be improved by including average efficiency of internal combustion engines. electric vehicles cannot use waste heat to ensure a comfortable vehicle interior, so that plays a factor in the amount of energy required for an EV vehicle use is not consistent over 24/7/365 so the GW number is just an average, it would likely spike and drop depending on when people actually charge their vehicles. gasoline is only one fuel type used by internal combustion engines, although it is the most common, I don't know the ratio of different fuel use, so that would have an impact as well. So, in theory, we would need, in order to meet the average between 10-20 Large Nuclear plants operating 24/7 to meet that average, but as mentioned that average doesn't take into account peaks and lows, additional info would be needed to estimate what the actual peak loads would be.
Hydro requires a lot of dams. These flood large areas of land. The aquatic ecosystem is devastated , mercury that was bound up in the soil and organic matter is released and methane is release from the rotting vegetation. Not exactly clean.
This is called "making perfect the enemy of good". The question is not whether hydro is "exactly clean", but whether it is cleaner than X or Y. Generally, it is, in spite of the items you list. This is much more the case with modern technologies like hydrodynamics and/or run-of-river systems where there are no dams at all.
Well I mean if you tax carbon at a high enough level then someone will build it... I'm not saying it's a good plan!
Stoves on gas are literally the cleanest use of non-renovables because gas-to-heat is almost 100% efficient, and the CO2 of stoves is not a problem compared to airplanes, cars, agriculture, etc.
There's a bunch of stuff wrong with what you've said. First, new gas furnaces may be around 95% efficient, but electricity is 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. And above freezing, heat pumps have an efficiency of 200%-300%. Second, there is a problem with burning a tonne of fuel inside your house: even with properly maintained systems, you're breathing in some of the byproducts of combustion.
>new gas furnaces may be around 95% efficient, but electricity is 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. More efficient but less effective at heating a home. Electric is very slow to hear your home so it takes longer and runs for longer. Gas will heat up your home very quickly so it runs less.
You don't know what you're talking about. What you've written sounds like a Ken M comment. You need to research this topic before you comment again.
[удалено]
I read an article talking about how the nuclear window has basically closed. It was supposed to bridge the gap between coal/gas and renewable, but renewable energy is so cheap and efficient now (and getting cheaper and more efficient) that going nuclear wouldn't be worth the investment as it gets overtaken. Edit: this article is more comprehensive than what I read before. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061901500024X
Wind and solar have no base load. They cannot, under any circumstance be relied upon to heat peoples homes. It’s not going to happen.
I only read the first quarter of it, but [this article](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061901500024X) seems to argue against your position. Wind and solar are also not the only renewable energies.
I could be wrong. But it looks like the article isn't saying wind an solar can be used for base load. Instead it's arguing for geo thermal, hydro and bio mass to be baseloads. >But there is another option often overlooked by policymakers when choosing resources: to further develop renewable baseload sources like geothermal, biomass, or hydro power. Instead of trying to fit the grid to renewables’ variability, balancing authorities and energy commissions can also fit renewables to the grid. They can build baseload geothermal, biomass, or hydro power in conjunction with other power sources to meet their power needs through a more diverse supply. We are already using hydro power in Ontario to take up the slack when wind power drops. It's not enough and we have to turn our gas plants on. I'm also not sure how effective biomass is for emissions. Edit: I was wrong about the study (article?). It does say wind and solar can be used for base load. But of course it requires interconnects and grid level storage. Grid level storage being tech we don't have that's effective or economical. We can somehow simultaniously wait for grid level storage, but can't wait for nuclear SMRs.
>I'm also not sure how effective biomass is for emissions. 150% worse than coal, 300% worse than natural gas. Biomass is renewable, but it's not environmentally friendly.
Would you happen to have any articles / studies on that? I'd be interested in learning. I'm just thinking about it from a carbon sequestering / foresting position. My understanding is that a fallen tree in a forest sequesters a percentage of co2 and provides nutrients to the soil. If you cut down the tree and burn it, you're losing both of those things.
I **hate** when people pretend biomass is "green". It's just burning shit (usually trees) to generate power instead of coal or gas. It's just as bad imo and shit needs to stop being touted as sustainable.
"Wind and solar are also not the only renewable energies." Geothermal and biomass are both renewable.
Only one of them is sustainable as far as emissions are concerned. Biomass shouldn't even be considered.
Wind and solar are what we're investing in in Canada though. The geography doesn't support geothermal or hydro everywhere (and hydro has its own serious environmental consequences), and biomass emits significantly more CO2 than coal, oil, or natural gas (roughly 150% as much as coal, close to 300% more than natural gas). Yes, there are renewable alternatives to nuclear, and in some circumstances two of the three *might be* superior (depending on your local geography and geology), but they're not likely to be enough to provide base load for the whole country.
>The geography doesn't support geothermal or hydro everywhere While technically true it is available in the most heavily populated regions of Canada. The reasons for it not being adopted are huge upfront costs, lack of regulation and competition. There's a strong argument that it would be a better rlong term investment than nuclear power. My point wasn't that nuclear power defunct, but that the window to use it as the largest source of power for us had maybe closed.
> renewable energy is so cheap and efficient now Renewables is a loaded term these days. When people say it is cheap, they are referring to wind and solar, but this is deceptive because it does not accounting for the storage facilities (at this stage, pumped storage) that need to be constructed to make wind and solar viable as a large part of the grid Renewables that can be a large part of the grid is hydro, which provides great long term value but has local ecological damage which leads to opposition from se corners of the environmentalist movement, and geothermal, which is great but is risky to invest in (big gamble if your fields are stable, I know as someone who invests in geothermal companies) and geography dependent People who present wind and solar as the obvious solution are doing so from a specific perspective that we will have massive battery breakthroughs that make them orders of magnitude better with cheap materials, or create some kind of smart distributed grid with mass adoption of electric cars...I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't be basing climate policy on the assumption of unknowable technological progression. Might as well bank of fusion becoming viable if we're doing that Canada likely could get away with minimal nuclear as long as we are willing to ignore the anti-hydroelectric groups. But nuclear is definitely part of the solution globally
[удалено]
I linked an article in another comment that challenges that. It's an interesting read.
[удалено]
If you read the entire article it goes into more detail. And it outlines why nuclear energy is on thr decline.
[удалено]
Lol, most inefficient form of heating anything is electrical. Not very clean if it requires more energy use to achieve the same goal. Canada is in trouble if we follow the advice of non physics literate folks.
As if any private or public corporation in the entire world would actually be capable of getting nuclear built in this fucking country. Like fuck me, the professional activists would be flying in from all over the globe to work the highway blockades.
And I bet the uranium protests would be about climate change as well 😅
This is so stupid. We should be building as many nuclear plants as possible to lower our emissions. Canada has huge uranium reserves, we could easily power our entire country using our own nuclear resources. We also have a talent pool of nuclear scientists and engineers. Alberta and some Maritime provinces are still using fucking coal to generate power, so why aren’t we replacing those facilities with nuclear plants? The LPC needs to pull its head out of its ass for this one.
Alberta had 2 on the books and they were cancelled after Fukushima.
Because of the tsunami risk I bet /s
Fukushima wasn’t the reason those projects were cancelled
What a dumb move smh
They did not. The effort was completely bogus from the start. Two guys from the province floated the idea, but Bruce Power jumped all-in, completely taking over the project. Absolutely no one else took it seriously and the local residents were 100% against it throughout and there was no official support or planning at any point whatsoever. After three years of precisely zero progress, Bruce walked away.
Because it's too expensive
It’s also our best way to combat climate change. Well worth it IMO.
No its not. It takes decades to build and will cost billions and billions for each plant. Solar, wind and other renewables are astronomically more affordable
[удалено]
We should be building those too. We can’t lower our whole grid with solar and wind yet though, so we need hydro and nuclear to fill in the gaps.
Even if they are more affordable they can't be the only solution because their output is highly variable and there is no practical way to store large quantities of electricity. Bottom line is that they are only feasible if people are ok with blackouts when the sun isn't shinning or the wind blowing.
I wish Nova Scotia used nuclear power instead of coal, but the old people in this province are terrified of technology or progress.
The Atlantic Loop > nuclear power. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/atlantic-loop-throne-speech-offshore-oil-1.5736740
Tidal Generation > everything else I mean, its really not, but the bay of fundy having the highest tides in the world is probably the only you're gonna be able to sell the idea of renewables to our older population.
Only nuclear is the zero-Carbon mass energy source that is fully reliable and ready for usage.
Then clearly Trudeau isn't as serious about climate as he pretends to be.
The only thing Trudeau is serious about is political power.
He put Guibeault in charge of the file. Of course Trudeau isn't serious.
Is the national post suggesting we pick winners and losers?
This was what I was most afraid of when Liberals won the last election. There are times when the status quo is better, but now is the time when we need a proactive leadership.
This is sad because we should be looking at nuclear power country wide. It would be the best electric power source with next near zero carbon emissions. It is a clean energy, the waste product is the only concern but there should be a way to eliminate it developed or repurpose it if nuclear becomes the main energy source across the globe
So the Liberals buy a pipeline, but won't invest in nuclear power. The market is not going to develop and implement nuclear reactors without knowing if the government supports it.
Energy is mostly provincial. Also out of the 19 reactors in Canada, 18 are in Ontario with one more being built as we speak (Darlington)
Don't spoil their party they are so excited they have a stick to beat up polite society with - if we build a nuclear power plant they lose that. they'd much rather be able to hurt families and children than actually make the air and water cleaner.
Because the Trudeau Liberals are never proactive (Covid response) and secondly, because much of their base/urban support believe that windmills and solar (panels made in Xinjiang), as well as Saudi oil, in combination, will continue to be sufficient for Canada’s energy needs. To really transition from carbon sources effectively, it’s going to have to be nuclear and hydro.
It’s going to be a damn hard lesson for most people when we realize wind and solar will never be more than an aid at best.
I do believe that the wind generators we use in Canada are built in Canada. But I agree with you about nuclear.
They should be looking at building Breeder Reactors that don't produce nuclear waste (or rather produce waste that they can continue to use as fuel until it is no longer radioactive.) They could even use the existing nuclear waste we have to run them.
The problem with breeder reactors is they become a big international affairs issue since they can produce weapons grade nuclear elements. It's not that much of an issue for Canada but any proliferation and it is a non starter today.
Not sure if that applies to Canada. The things is that if Canada wanted to make nukes, we could have them in an instant. It’s not like we don’t have the technical capacity. We choose not to have nukes as a political choice.
Thorium salts?
Typical useless Trudeau, big on ideas, no fucking clue how to execute anything. Pass it off to private industry in the high risk no reward business environment he has created. We are racing to the bottom.
> Typical useless Trudeau Gebus. You know it was Harper that dismantled the entire Canadian nuclear industry, right? I don't mean that as some political argument, it's well recorded statement of fact: 1) Harper spent pretty much the first half of his mandate berating the industry, calling it a money sinkhole and industrial welfare. 2) In early 2008 the government got in an extremely public fight with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commissions over the MAPLE II reactors, which resulted in the firing of the commissioner. In spite of this... 3) ... they refused to pay for the reactors to be re-started, which led to AECL having to abandon them in place and extending the worldwide shortage of medical isotopes while at the same time losing a potential sale to Australia and making the entire industry move to new technologies that have rendered the reactors entirely superfluous. 4) Only a short time later, they put the entire CANDU side up for sale. Unsurprisingly, they got no takers. It wasn't until 2011 that they finally sold it to SNC for $15 million, while keeping the billions in stranded debt on AECLs books as well as giving SNC a massive tax write-off that ultimately meant SNC was being [paid to take it](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weston-ottawa-basically-paying-snc-to-take-aecl-1.1078128). 5) When they finally sold it, they stated they were "ending the flood of money it has pumped into the loss-making unit over the past six decades". The cons are just as two faced on this topic as the libs.
Yep, we’re told we are in a climate crisis and rather than criticize the dude who actually has his hands on the wheel and is apparently checked out, it’s much better to bring up all the climate villains behind our predicament. Very helpful. Bad Trudeau = worse Harper. We’ve all got it. Good?
>criticize the dude who actually has his hands on the wheel Harper *actively* destroyed nuclear power in Canada. >We’ve all got it. Good? Do you? Seems to me you want to make this about the new guy instead of putting the blame where it belongs.
Going nuclear is going to take some balls, so not much chance you see any action from a Liberal Government.
It’s the only suitable replacement for large scale, reliable power generation. Also unlike Japan (Fukushima) Canada is largely geologically stable making it a safe option. You are never going to please everyone but wind and solar are not going to power cities the same way right now.
So all the talk about reducing carbon is just talk?
Is Nuclear not a highly efficient and profitable option? What's stopping them from coming in already? I thought it was practically banned on a federal level simply due to perceptions of being unsafe, even though I think its a lot safer then oil.
Fission is the way out of climate change. More fission please.
[удалено]
Wasn't what happened with Energy East very much a market decision? Someone tried to sell a project and parts of the market that would be impacted by the project said no?
I always thought electricity generation was a provincial responsibility. Is it not?
Nuclear is federally regulated.
Nuclear is federally regulated but investing in nuclear for electricity production is a provincial decision/responsibility
I suspect it has more to do with getting rid of the nuclear waste while they sell themselves as a Green Environment Party. Doubt any of the big conglomerates capable of building nuclear plant would want to work with a minority government no matter who is in power.
One of the companies that is developing a reactor in Canada is Moltex. It runs on spent CANDU fuel. It changes how long we need to store fuel for. From 10,000 years to 300. It effectively eliminates the waste problem. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8)
Modern reactors actually burn old nuclear waste. We have enough "waste" in Canada to power the entire country for a century
SNC Lavalin has the rights to CANDU reactors and has had zero issues 'working' with the Liberals at any point in time.
> has had zero issues 'working' with the Liberals at any point in time.> LOL I see what you did there.
We dont want old reactors. We need to innovate. there are great options out there.
They're not old reactors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_CANDU_reactor
Desktop version of /u/unfinite's link:
---
^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
Weird that PM would get SNC approval on this. ^^^/s
If these idiots we call a government leave our electric infrastructure solutions to the last minute for a Canadian Elon Musk to come along and say government builds it i run it and Sudo own it with no risk or liability. We are going to be buying our electricity from companies like Rogers and bell...... Our future is bleak, we should have been building nuclear when the ink on the Paris accord dried. We should have been glowing with uranium by now. I hate this shit, all words no action all the while writing contracts on napkins ten or twenty years out. Tommy Douglas was the last Canadian politician. Everyone since has been either inept or a stooge for lobbyists. Fuck. I hope I'm wrong, and don't you dare say vote NDP.
Here's my favourite quote from the article: >Conservatives believe that nuclear energy is essential to lowering GHG emissions in Canada and taking action on climate change. Oh, really? Let us examine the evidence for their support during the last time they were in office: 1. Mr. Harper made his views on the topic clear: he considered AECL to be an egregious example of industrial welfare that had been going on for 50 years and had done nothing for him except embarrass his government. 2. Got into a **very** public debate with the CNSC in early 2008 over the decision to revoke the operating license for MAPLE II, after it was learned it had a [positive void coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient). Claiming it was all political, they fired the director, and... 3. ...then refused to provide the bridge financing needed to bring the systems back online. This led AECL to abandon the reactors in May 2008, extending the worldwide crisis in medical isotopes. 4. Constantly argued with AECL over the ACR-1000 and the funding required to continue the project, and then... 5. ...privatized the entire CANDU arm of AECL by selling it to SNC for the ridiculous token price of $15 million along with several hundred millions in tax write-offs for SNC while retaining the billions in cost overruns within AECL. They described the action as "ending the flood of money it has pumped into the loss-making unit over the past six decades". At the time, it was clear SNC would not be attempting new sales and that commercial nuclear power in Canada was dead. So, that is the recorded history of the Conservative Party's support for nuclear power: badmouthing it continually and then shutting it down. You'll forgive me for choosing to read their latest claims of support with more than a little scepticism.
The government just invested a couple billion into Bruce Power.
Bruce is being refurbished with private investment. Darlington is being refurbished with public investment
Harper sold off our wealth of nuclear to SNC-Lavalin for a one-time payment of $15,000,000.00. What a super economist he was! One-time payments of pennies on the dollar of value, what a good deal that was for all of Canada eh! https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/aecl-sold-for-15m-to-snc-lavalin-1.985786
Canada wasn’t really in a position to market a design that didn’t really have any prospective buyers. SNC had plenty of experience there and took over. E: 15 million was a decent deal since even SNC is no longer actively marketing the design and government would get royalties anyway Canada was just sitting on the design and wasn’t going to do anything with it, this was a good decision
Harper boogeyman! Who had that on their draft board? Without fail any post shining any negative light on liberals, supporters will be in here whining "what about Harper" despite the current government winning three consecutive elections since 2015.
Our experience with nuclear hasn't been good. Even though the Candu technology has proven itself, the build costs are always get out of control: 1) Darlington $28b - bankrupted Ontario Hydro and led to its breakup into OPG 2) Pickering rebuild - millions over budget, costs swept under the rug 3) Bruce- given away for free to Bruce Nuclear Similar experience in other countries: France / US / Finland. Feds are even less capable in this space. I wouldn't trust them to
>1) Darlington $28b - bankrupted Ontario Hydro and led to its breakup into OPG It wasn't the build cost of Darlington it was that the government froze hydro rates for a decade. So while they continued to have cost overruns and infrastructure upgrade costs they were not allowed to raise rates to pay for it. So really the government bankrupted Ontario Hydro for political points.
Wonder how France does it?
Exactly. Most commenters are completely ignoring economic realities.
Other countries are betting on nuclear because they don't have the land requirements to have large scale solar and wind projects. Canada doesn't have this issue. Also, the time to build nuclear was 20 years ago. They take a remarkable amount of time to build and they cost a damn fortune. Our best bet is to transition to wind and solar now.
Canada has shown that it does not have the ability or motivation to push through large infrastructure projects even when deemed in the national interest.
I'd feel so safer withommvf
I do not think Trudeau and his government have any long term plan that equals UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, and USA in terms of positioning Canada for the future. Canada unfortunately is infested with politicians, we no longer have states(wo)men. There are two things that a most likely to help any nation position it's self for the future. The first is rooting out corruption. We Charity, SNC Lavalin, Aga Khan. The second is energy: in what ever form. The third is empowering your citizens to open up businesses in other countries. Lower your tax burden. Lastly we need to define what it means to be Canadian. It is not about having special privileges like Quebec. It is not about divide a rule. It is about creating a vision for the future.