| ▲ | sleepyguy 8 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | thisislife2 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| How viable is Solar in Canada given its weather? (I am ignorant about it and only know that it's really cold and cloudy most of the time). |
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| ▲ | Marsymars an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Depends what you mean by viable. Solar is easily economically viable, but integration at grid scale is tricky when your peak summer generation is 10x your winter generation. | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Alberta is one of the best locales for solar on the continent -- it's sunny most of the year -- and had an exploding renewables sector. Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector. | |
| ▲ | _whiteCaps_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Cold is fine - solar panels perform better the lower the temperature. That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar. | |
| ▲ | sleepyguy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro. | | |
| ▲ | MegaDeKay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Its not so much the days but the hours. Days start getting pretty short in winter. The sun also doesn't get as high in the sky so the efficiency of a fixed panel drops further. | |
| ▲ | acchow 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Calgary is quite sunny at 2400 hrs/year. But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950). |
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| ▲ | singpolyma3 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Since it is a make work project, costing more and tried longer is an advantage |
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| ▲ | preisschild 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected. Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-... |
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| ▲ | sleepyguy 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded. The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ontarios-costly-... Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars). | | |
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