Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another

If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry

> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.

That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.

The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.

(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).

You have wind right?

Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.

What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built

> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.

Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.

Radium Hot Springs (BC), you mean? +Dildo (NF) +Dawson Creek (BC) +Regina (SK) +Snafu (YK) +Stoner (BC) +Climax (SK) +Radville (SK) +Emo (ON) +Crotch Lake (ON) +Sober Island (NS)

Asbestos was renamed due to the negative connotations.

Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.

An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.

It is a political choice. Pro-nuclear propaganda in Australia is all about the long time frames, and the fossil fuels needed until they start coming online. Climate targets get to be pushed back, scrapping 2030 targets in favor of 2050 targets. It keeps coal, gas and oil money flowing for another generation. And the problem of actually building and paying for the nuclear power plants is also next generations problem, as they are expected to all be over cost and delayed, and not a priority once all the new gas plants are online. Everybody knows all this, but nuclear still gets traction because when you put lipstick on it and take all the most optimistic estimates from the salesmen, it looks like a pro-environmental policy. One that the right and far right can get behind, because it is not what the greens are saying needs to happen and anything those communists want must be bad.

I don't know if it is similar in Canada. Solar is less viable, relying more on wind. And they have more experience building and running nuclear power plants.

Probably it depends on what part of the world you are and on what is your goal, what you want to optimize for.

In many countries there are usual systematic weather events where all renewable production goes to basically nothing for few days or even 2 weeks. You can not solve that by improving renewable sources, there isn't enough raw energy they could capture.

Storage for that long is currently impossible and even if it would be, it would be prohibitively expensive. So what you can do, build gas or coal plants. Building those, having people on call all the time, and the opportunity cost is probably many times more expensive than the building cost of renewables themselves.

And you still need to buy and store fossil fuels, you are still dependent on geopolitical issues, and you still produce a lot of CO2.

If your goal is environment protection or reducing climate change, then nuclear is probably better. If your goal is to reduce energy cost then probably renewables + short term battery storage + gas backup is the winner if you use an appropriate electricity pricing model.

Nuclear seems to be the old, known, stable thing, while renewables are the new and shiny thing that solves everything cheaply (and that sounds like it has huge catch). When you are building such critical infrastructure as the electrical grid, then staying safe and choosing the known, but expensive solution might seems to be the right choice for many people.

I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.

And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/

You think they shouldn’t negotiate with native tribes?

>Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.

It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.

You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.

> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.

If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.

> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.

Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.

It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:

1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];

2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];

3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.

Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?

But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.

[1]: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...

[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...

> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.

Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.

> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack

Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.

But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s

It if "becomes urgent" (it already is), spending a decade and a half building a reactor won't exactly be helpful, will it?

>What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2?

What?! It has been urgent for years.

Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.

The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.

I wouldn’t say you cannot but I also wouldn’t say it is proven that you can.

> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs

I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.

I think the assumption is that anything that you can build now, you can build more of later. Unless you think there is some reason you can't?

The same China that started construction on at least 10 reactors last year?