alt Hacker NewsCanada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
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The USA should start a civilian nuclear corps. Expand training at the many nuclear power training center and teach double the students at the nuclear power school there; hands on training they split up to naval reactor training they currently have and land training at wherever they build the first land reactor. Pay the same as a us navy plant operator gets paid. Bootstrap the whole thing off of the nuclear navy like they did with the space force a while ago did with the Air Force’s space command, but do a fork into two orgs, not a rename. Pick a single plant design for equipment and build them all over the country; naval reactors are expensive so train this corps on the land design.
Boom, there you have it, a nuclear remains in the USA. They won’t do it though.
Good job Canada
I’m not Canadian so news to me that Canada has built nuclear plants around the world.
As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
Perhaps relevant.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.
Can't wait for this to get bogged down in legislation and never get done
The idea is great, the timeline is super unrealistic. We'll see those reactors in 2070 the earliest, more likely in 2080.
This is great. Hopefully they can make enough to supply the US energy. Because we seem to be incapable of building new reactors.
Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.
Hopefully, Canada will not get bullied by US for selling it cheaply.
From what I've seen out of Canada, this is likely overly optimistic and probably will not be possible in that time frame.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
That’s great news ! Have they also solved the nuclear waste problem?
Honest question; here in the USA we have not.
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
But what do they do with the waste? And how much fresh water is that going to use?
We are trying.
new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
would be good
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal.
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
Isn't it interesting? Now that power generation is seen as the deciding factor between who wins/loses AI, nuclear is back on the table again.
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Makes alot of sense. Canada has:
- one of the largest uranium reserves
- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.