- 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.
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
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.
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
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... !
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.
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.
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
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
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.
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.
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'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 do understand that don't you?
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 to be unsafe.
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
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
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...>
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 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.)
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/
Spain in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.
> 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.
Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
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".
Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.
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.
What, if anything, would convince you?
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.
What?! It has been urgent for years.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
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...
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."
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.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
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 won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
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.
If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.
[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
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.
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?
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
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.
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.
Boom, there you have it, a nuclear remains in the USA. They won’t do it though.
Good job Canada
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.
Good for Canada btw.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2026/0...
The Canadian Shield [0] is uniquely well-suited for this: it's remote, sparsely populated, and geologically stable.
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.
The only hard part is ensuring your waste doesn't enter the water system, but that's just bog standard mining engineering.
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.
Honest question; here in the USA we have not.
- 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 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.
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'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?
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
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.
Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector.
That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.
But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950).
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-...
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).
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%?
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.
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...
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)
> 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.
What other kind of subsidy is there?
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
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.