Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors

https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewan-ontario-to-roll-out-mini-nuclear-reactors-5568249

by voisin • 4 years ago

422 400 4 years ago

It looks like there may be a typo with the estimated year of deployment in Ontario: the estimate is likely for 2028, not 2018.

The article was published on July 11, 2022, but opens with: "Saskatchewan and Ontario have each chosen GE-Hitachi as the supplier of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2018." Then, the article concludes with: "GEH and Ontario plan to construct up to four 300 MWe small module reactors, with the first coming online by 2028."

A separate source by The Canadian Press [0] also reflects an estimate of 2028 for Ontario: "The governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a nuclear plan that they say will transition them toward cleaner energy. The provinces’ energy ministers agreed today to a joint plan for small modular reactors, with the first 300-megawatt plant to be built in Darlington, Ont., by 2028."

[0] https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/renewables/onta...

QuadrupleA• 4 years ago

Article goes on to mention a "300W-solar power farm" (could power a desktop PC for $300M) and that the SMR could power "240,0000 homes".

osuairt3• 4 years ago

There is a push by conservative Canadian politicians in Ontario and Saskatchewan to use Uranium.

Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the province, and has actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.

I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after Doug Ford leaves.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

A low-power desktop PC, since my not-massively-impressive gaming PC (i5-10600KF and RTX 3060) draws 330 W from the wall at peak.

unsigner• 4 years ago

I have noticed that bad things' energy output is measured in watts, and good things' energy output is measured in "homes powered". It's probably taught in journalism school nowadays, it's pervasive.

snewman• 4 years ago

Nice. Yeah, the numbers in press articles are basically always wrong; it's just a question of whether you can notice the error.

https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers

mistrial9• 4 years ago

notice the "western investor" source ..

jollybean• 4 years ago

What I don't understand is why they are still not done at scale, i.e. build 10 of these in the same spot and get the economic advantage and especially keep the security and risk things isolated.

recycledmatt• 4 years ago

Article says they are building 4 at the same site - there are economies of scale in generation / transmission and in security, but more important building smaller plants may keep the cost overruns lower.

nl18• 4 years ago

MIT looked at this:

they consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

xorcist3• 4 years ago

The boring answer is that they're much less fuel efficient than what their size would suggest. As in, almost an order of magnitude. There are both science and engineering challenges to solve before they get competitive with established designs. That's why they haven't taken over.

senectus1• 4 years ago

so approx 5k per house... i wonder how long they last for?

tinco2• 4 years ago

Hadn't looked at it that way yet, that actually sounds really attractive. If they can be maintained and operated at under 1k per house per year then that's competitive with what I pay now.

I wonder why it's so cheap when calculated this way it seems competitive with solar panels when I expected it to be a factor ten more expensive (of course solar panels wouldn't really work that far north).

labster• 4 years ago

A lot of what you pay now is for maintenance of the lines and transformers.

DavidKarlas• 4 years ago

If you calculate 300MW/240k homes, it comes out at 1.25kW per home which is not enough for peak demand...

xupybd4• 4 years ago

Yeah the pay back time is long but the cost of operation is so much lower than traditional fuels. It will pay off if it remains running for long enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY&ab_channel=Illin...

nl18• 4 years ago

which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2028.

Note the "could be".

Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy please die?

It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:

Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages.

It's not safe:

US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip] In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman. [snip] Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I became so convinced that, years after departing office, I’ve now made alternative energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs — in lives and dollars — are just too high. [3]

It's always slow to deploy[4]:

Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost 15 years.

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

[2] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-underestimate-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...

[4] https://www.dw.com/en/finlands-much-delayed-nuclear-plant-la...

towaway154633• 4 years ago

Anti-nuke sentiment is the reason we are facing global warming right now. Just stop it.

more_corn• 4 years ago

No. Centuries long burning of fossil fuels is why we’re facing climate change.

nl18• 4 years ago

This is untrue.

1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming right now.

2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!

thrown_226• 4 years ago

When the last chapter of industrial civilization is written some time in the 2100s the number of people the Greens killed in the name of protecting the environment will make every war, genocide and mass murdering dictator look like amateur hour.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is unfortunate we have made Earth into hell though.

throwaway8943454• 4 years ago

These things can all be true and yet it is still a good idea to include some nuclear in our energy portfolio for diversification. In particular, my understanding is that economic storage of renewable energy has not yet been solved, so it might be nice to get some nuclear going in case that endeavor doesn’t pan out as optimistically as hoped.

nl18• 4 years ago

Elsewhere on this thread someone posted a great 2019 research article that says:

If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.

Battery storage is already well under $150/kWh!

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

The cost of storage must be factored into the cost of renewables, else it's not really a fair comparison. How much does it cost to build out 10 hours of storage @ 50% of day time generation wattage?

nl18• 4 years ago

Renewables, with storage included are cost competitive with coal now.

Utility scale wind = $26-$50/MWh + wholesale 100MWh storage ($55-$97) = $81-$147

Coal = $65-$152/MWh

Nuclear: $131-$204/MWh

These don't include pump-hydro which is a widely used and very cheap storage mechanism.

It's much cheaper and better to overbuild renewables and put a few cheap gas peaker plants around as backup.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

orthecreedence5• 4 years ago

We're talking about the far north. I think it's reasonable to require a lot more storage than 10 hours (and account for overcast weather, which is common in winter).

defrost• 4 years ago

> Each of the 300 MWe SMRs cost between $1 billion to $1.5 billion and can provide enough electricity to power approximately 240,0000 homes.

. . . with bonus '0' and misplaced comma at no extra cost I trust?

woleium• 4 years ago

Will they provide the tritium required to bridge the gap to fusion? Canada provides almost all the world supply, but it's from stockpiles iirc. Once fusion is up and working, it can generate its own tritium, but ITERs tritium generation experiment has been massively scaled back, so we need more from nuclear reactors.

see https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... for more info.

BbzzbB• 4 years ago

Once fusion is up and working

That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does.

samatman3• 4 years ago

The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been nonlinear.

Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.

adrianN4• 4 years ago

Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away. We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by projects that, for example, use better superconductors.

That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.

perihelions• 4 years ago

Canada's *deuterium-moderated* reactors are responsible for the world's tritium supply. This isn't that; this is the wrong type of fission reactor.

- "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium."

- "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."

noisy_boy• 4 years ago

I find the volume interesting.

"Whats your annual yield?"

"100 grams...."

I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are super expensive.

vlovich123• 4 years ago

The entire premise the founders of nuclear energy wanted was a cycle of fission byproducts into other useful things. Nuclear waste wasn’t. The war on nuclear proliferation scuttled that.

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

There will be no commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power. It would cost >10x fission, which is already not competitive, and gets less so every day.

Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg.

It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.

jesstaa2• 4 years ago

So it's estimated to cost 4x the cost of wind or solar today and it's not being deployed for at least 10yrs. Sounds like a bargain.

throwaway8943454• 4 years ago

Can you share your math? How much storage are you factoring in for renewables?

mikefallen2• 4 years ago

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9. Tldr $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent.

Also the land requirements for huge solar / wind installations is another downside. Nuclear at scale is a clear winner especially in seismically stable regions of NA.

jesstaa2• 4 years ago

The numbers from the article are:

* $300 million for equivalent solar

* $200-400 million for equivalent onshore wind (they don't mention offshore wind which is more cost effective over it's lifetime)

* $1.5 billion for the SMR

Assuming solar and wind stay the same price for the next decade (which they definitely won't) that's a 4-5x construction price difference. The article didn't mention lifetime, decommissioning or running costs, which is likely a significant difference too.

mikefallen2• 4 years ago

Except wind and solar cannot be used to sustain base load energy demands. Until battery technology improves drastically the issue with solar and wind is the variability of output. One of the greatest challenges of operating a power grid is matching the supply of electricity with demand. Thats why they build gas and coal plants to meet peak energy demand periods. Nuclear energy supplemented by win and solar is by far the cleanest way to meet our energy needs currently.

nl18• 4 years ago

This is mostly untrue.

Coal plants in particular are dramatically unsuited for the rapid changes in output to respond to changing demands for power.

Gas plants on the other hand are. And gas plants are cheap!

Overbuilding renewables with combinations of solar, geothermal (where available) and wind gives pretty good availability on it's own and with gas plants as a backup it gives you plenty of grid stability.

Edit: A link you posted elsewhere (thanks!) points out how well this works:

If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.

Battery storage is already well below this $150/kWh price.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

Alternately, if wind and solar can be made absurdly cheap, there are are less-energy-efficient but lower-cost per unit output forms of storage that can help. Pneumatic storage is promising for this for example. So like instead of one wind turbine and one battery, you build two wind turbines and one pneumatic energy storage vessel and get the same amount out.

Schroedingersat6• 4 years ago

Oh no. You only get one unit of wind, one unit of solar, one unit of methane by electrolysis, and one unit of combined cycle gas plant for the same price rather than the usual of double all that.

However can we figure out how to get the same result with twice the energy and the ability to store it indefinitely at 40% efficiency. Especially given that the costs of all these technologies are going down at two digit percent per year.

viraptor• 4 years ago

The caveat is mentioned in the link, right after the price comparison. "provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily" considering the price of land recently... that may need a better estimate than just the cost of the tech.

SECProto2• 4 years ago

it's not being deployed for at least 10yrs

2028 is 6 years from now.

xorcist3• 4 years ago

I have a most excellent bridge to sell if you are interested?

pj_mukh2• 4 years ago

My dad worked on these for the (even further north) northern provinces.

I forget which company, but I know one of these were sold as being tested to be safe under a direct missile hit in case of an attack! Super cool.

Edit: Territories, not provinces. All three of them.

smnrchrds• 4 years ago

northern provinces

You mean territories?

throwawaytemp27• 4 years ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. As a Canadian I’ve never heard the expression northern provinces, because that’s nonsense they basically all start at the border.

pj_mukh2• 4 years ago

Yea my bad. Territories. But maybe not for long! [1]

[1] https://www.nunavutnews.com/news/quassa-says-next-step-for-n...

joshlemer4• 4 years ago

Why doesn’t Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario just import most of its electricity from Manitoba?

epgui4• 4 years ago

It's not at all obvious why you think this question is so obvious that it doesn't require a bit more context.

Why would it?

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

Manitoba has spectacularly cheap and plentiful hydroelectric power.

brutusborn10• 4 years ago

I imagine because it is cheaper to produce locally, or Manitoba does not have spare capacity. Why do you think they should import from Manitoba?

rob74• 4 years ago

If it's cheaper to build these nuclear reactors as compared to "importing" hydro power from another Canadian province (these comments make it sound like it's another country) remains to be seen. Maybe it even looks that way from current estimates, but from past experience most estimates on the cost of building nuclear power plants are a bit optimistic...

joshlemer4• 4 years ago

Manitoba exports huge amounts of electricity to Ontario, SK, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and with the new Keeyask dam coming online it'll have capacity for 400,000 new homes. There's also still 1000s of MW of untapped potential in Manitoba, if investments would be made in dams and transmission.

UberFly• 4 years ago

Probably to diversify and be somewhat self-sufficient.

multiplegeorges9• 4 years ago

Canada is a surprisingly unconnected federation of almost independent provinces. We don't have a great east-west interconnection between the provinces.

I mean, we have trade barriers between provinces. It's insane.

xrendan• 4 years ago

A big reason that Ontario can't / doesn't is that the demand centers in Southern Ontario are ridiculously far from the generation centers in Manitoba. Toronto is 1800 km straight from the new Keeyask Dam. This is over unpopulated muskeg that is expensive to build on in the first place and difficult to access for maintenance.

joshlemer4• 4 years ago

Yeah, Southern Ontario is for the time being not possible but perhaps Northern Ontario.

throwaway81523• 4 years ago

They looked at the price tags of these reactors vs solar and wind, and chose the lowest number, fine. But I've never heard of a nuclear project coming in at under multiple times its original estimate, and taking a decade or more longer than expected. Has any new nuclear power come online anywhere since Fukushima?

vondro2• 4 years ago

Olkiluoto EPR reactor in Finland was connected to the grid in March this year. There are 2 more EPRs in construction, in France and UK.

So yes, there were new power plants coming online, but after budget overruns and missed timelines.

Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.

dividedbyzero• 4 years ago

Olkiluoto isn't fully online yet, that's expected to happen in December after it didn't pass trials and required repairs. It would then be 13 years late and cost about four times what was planned. The other two are looking like they're going in a similar direction.

Schroedingersat6• 4 years ago

Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.

In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.

All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.

And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.

percevalve3• 4 years ago

For the EPR, you also had the Chinese Units, Taishan, that were started after but got connected to the grid before. https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

Other significant projects to check is the building by KEPCO and ENEC, I think BARAKAH-1 was the first unit connected: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

There are a lot of teams working on this issue, like Oklo: https://oklo.com

wewxjfq2• 4 years ago

Right, unlike wind and solar, the predicted cost of a nuclear SMR is not based on real-world data, you have to take the word of the vendor who is selling it to you.

hannob• 4 years ago

Was also the first thing that I noted. They're comparing fictional nuclear prices with real renewable prices.

One more thing though that makes this calculation even more ridiculous: They're comparing today's wind+solar prices with a tech that's supposed to be available in the 2030s. Like, they're assuming wind+solar won't progress in the next 10 years. That's... a very unrealistic thing to assume.

helloooooooo2• 4 years ago

You also have to consider distribution infrastructure. Currently, the Ontario grid is built to hand distribution from majority nuclear sources. When replacing nuclear reactors with wind and solar, it changes the centralized nature of the grid’s power source. The government then needs to invest big bucks into re-orienting the grid towards distributed distribution. Given that would mean going from one extreme to another, it’s no question why the government would feather replace nuclear with nuclear

IMTDb• 4 years ago

Bear in mind that those known renewable prices are always including the little asterisk "* prices only computed when sun is shining and wind is blowing".

Renewable prices are computed as : "I put $XXX and got this much electricity during the year, so price per watt is $YYY -> renewable is cheap"

That calculation is not reflective of the reality of the needs. People - and anyone in charge of maintaining a power grid - think like so :

"I need YYY watts of electricity now, how much $XXX do I need to put down to get it ?"

That amount is massively higher in price per watt with renewable, because renewable can sometime works at >90% of their potential, and provide cheap and abundant electricity or they can decide to work at < 1% and be completely useless. And I have never seen anyone advocating for renewable that is willing to say "Please do cut my home line to save electricity when it's dark and windless - even in November - if batteries are low. I think it's better than building reliable backup supply".

Nuclear is the preferred choice here because you are going to get electricity in those situation at the push of a button. Maybe prices will be higher than the price per watt of renewable, but it will provide electricity when no amount of wind farms and solar panels are going to do the job. Meaning when prices of renewable are approaching infinity. In that case, expensive nuclear is still cheaper than failing renewable. Batteries can help renewable, but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing. There are other options than nuclear - like the usual coal, gas and oil, but they have their own problems - like CO2 emission. Other options include geothermal and hydro but they have ecological aspects as well, and tend to be more expensive than nuclear.

hnaccount_rng• 4 years ago

The _really_ interesting point is: They still come up short (or close enough that it doesn't make a difference). And that's the most optimistic thing proponents are willing to come up with.

percevalve3• 4 years ago

There are actually quite a lot of them, the AIEA maintains the PRIS database: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/ You will see a lot of them being connected to the grid since.

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

Plus you could get those renewable systems online tomorrow (or get them much much cheaper in 2030), vs nuclear where you pay today and then just hope it doesn't massively overrun time and budget...

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

And, pay out for NG for the ten years what it would have cost for the renewables to start generating immediately.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

and chose the lowest number, fine.

This is not fine, for multiple reasons:

1. Nuclear is probably not the lowest number. See Lazard's analysis of levelized energy costs: https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o... on the whole / on the average, Nuclear in 20221 is $167 / MWh while solar is $36 and wind is $38. Now, granted, maybe these mini-reactors are cheaper than the average, and maybe solar and wind are effectively more expensive etc. - but I doubt it's that much of a difference; and the figures quoted are not "levelized costs", so they may be neglecting various factors, such as maintenance of older reactors or waste storage (which needs to happen for hunderds or thousands of years).

2. The reason you yourself gave - "over schedule, over budget" : Even if you want to choose what's cheapest, it can't be what's cheapest as proposed, but what's cheapest as projected to cost.

3. Price is not everything. On the one hand, there's the question of availability of the renewables (e.g. you might need some storage as well); and on the other, there are the grave safety concerns from nuclear reactors.

4. Price is not everything. II : Greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear is not "emission-free", since you need to count emissions due to Uranium-mining and processing, not just the electricity generating reaction. IIANM, there are significant emissions to take into account as well relative to solar, wind, geothermal etc.

Tsarbomb• 4 years ago

You can be skeptical all you want but given that most of Ontario's power already comes from Nuclear, and Ontario operates the largest nuclear facility in the world by both reactors and output, you are yelling into the wind.

TheDudeMan• 4 years ago

These are still too big. They will take too long and have huge cost overruns.

piokoch• 4 years ago

Mini nuclear reactors make a lot of sense especially in the areas with a lot of electricity-hungry industry, Polish copper producer KGHM is planning to build such reactors for their own needs (they use 1 GW a year) [1].

It will make their operations cheaper, saving on transfer losses alone on their scale is significant gain.

[1] https://media.kghm.com/en/news-and-press-releases/kghm-plans...

rippeltippel• 4 years ago

A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land.

I assume 300W is actually 300MW. If that's correct, solar panels are still much more convenient, also considering that power plant will require many acres of land for the building, pipes, etc. Solar panels have zero waste too. What am I missing?

rdsubhas• 4 years ago

Winter.

Edit: I wonder why you had to copy/paste only part part of the line. They literally address this in the next word:

...provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily

slimebot802• 4 years ago

Ah yes. There is no sun in winter.

gibolt3• 4 years ago

Solar actually thrives in the winter. Panels' enemy is heat, and snow is happy to soak that up and quickly melt, sliding itself off.

Even during overcast or rainy days, you'd be surprised how much sun energy still comes through.

ErikVandeWater2• 4 years ago

In 20-30 years you'll have 1.5 million solar panels to dispose of. It's not zero waste at all.

We're also talking Canada, which isn't the best for consistent sunlight.

jillesvangurp2• 4 years ago

Recycling for solar panels is already being worked on. Recovering things like silver is pretty interesting. The main challenge is waiting for obsolete panels. Just not a huge business yet.

Nuclear plants also need decommissioning of course. Seems to be expensive due to all the radioactive material.

Canada has plenty of sun. Most of the populated parts are at the same latitude as central Europe. They have hydro and wind too. And not a very large population.

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

Dead solar panels are a precious resource: tons and tons of already super-high purity silicon.

They are being warehoused against the time that they may be sold.

inasio• 4 years ago

Ontario and Saskatchewan extend pretty far north (Saskatchewan all the way to the arctic circle), very little sunlight in the winter.

oceanplexian2• 4 years ago

Even if Saskatchewan was in the middle of the desert the solar panels had perfect efficiency, it would still produce half the power of a similarly rated base load nuclear plant. And Canada isn’t a desert and some places don’t receive sunlight for weeks at a time.

orthecreedence5• 4 years ago

solar panels are still much more convenient

Until night hits. Then it turns out you need a ton more solar panels to overproduce in the day to store energy in your expensive energy storage system. Which is inconvenient.

gibolt3• 4 years ago

Except it turns out we don't use much energy at night...

Solar aligns very well with daily energy demands, and storage helps smooth it out. In the end we will have a massive energy surplus and finding ways to use that extra energy will be big business.

ricardobayes• 4 years ago

Maybe we'll go full circle and just go to sleep when dusk falls like our medieval ancestors.

Krssst• 4 years ago

Capacity factor: actual yearly energy produced is 10-25% of capacity for solar, 89% for nuclear.

Storage cost.

wewxjfq2• 4 years ago

Just some days ago Australia's National Science Agency published a report where they found that renewables with integration costs remain the cheapest option. Naturally that submission didn't do well on HN because it isn't nuclear energy fluff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32053537

charles_f• 4 years ago

As a comparison with other non-emission options, BC Hydro’s 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16 billion.

I get that this is coming from a website whose name contains "investor". As combustible based options go, I think nuclear is the least worse, and a site-C equivalent in Sask is probably not even an option.

I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win

veltas• 4 years ago

If a wind turbine catches fire it emits pollutants too. I think we're defining on the (usually reasonable) assumption all goes well and there isn't catastrophic failure.

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

It does not render the surrounding region uninhabitable.

DrBazza4• 4 years ago

How much noxious chemical waste, and by volume, is produced in the manufacture of the many thousands of solar panels and wind turbines though for the same power?

xorcist3• 4 years ago

You act like there aren't people who do things called "lifecycle analysis" professionally.

There are very uncontroversial answers to your questions, even if you personally don't like them.

ezzaf3• 4 years ago

Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created building a nuclear, or any other, power station.

What's your point?

muds• 4 years ago

I don't see how nuclear is any more dangerous than any other renewable sources of electricity. The law of conversation of energy dictates that the residual waste energy has to go somewhere for any process. Any and all energy production mechanism are going to cause some disturbance in the natural order of things. It just turns out that the emissions due to "renewable" sources isn't something that does widespread ecological or societal damage. A hydroelectricity plant's "emissions" are in the form of riverbed erosion however, we can optimize around that by putting it in places which minimizes ecological and societal damage. For nuclear, we minimize this damage by placing the waste matter in large indestructible concrete bins.

mellavora• 4 years ago

Maybe because of the potential toxicity of the waste product, and the lifetime of this toxicity?

storing it safely is a bit more complex than "large indestructible concrete bins"

nb. I'm not anti-nuke, just pro good risk analysis

evgen• 4 years ago

IMHO the lie is to pretend that hydro is safe or has a low impact when it comes to greenhouse gasses. Dam failures have killed many more people than nuclear even if you throw in the intentional nuclear events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hydro would be almost as good as nuclear when it comes to climate costs if they would clear the reservoir footprint before flooding, but they do not and the decaying plant matter in the flood zone adds a greenhouse gas cost that takes decades for the dam to counter in “clean” energy.

OscarCunningham• 4 years ago

How would you clear the floodzone without releasing the carbon anyway?

dade_• 4 years ago

Site C should not have been built. It is in a relatively remote area, so the government was able to strong-arm local residents. Hydro has major impacts on the environment, river ecology, eliminates farmland, but this is all greenwashed away.

HPsquared• 4 years ago

The difficult thing is all types of power have their own externalities. Dams flood large areas of land in normal operation and can potentially collapse. Wind power is intermittent and can have 'calm spell', takes up a large area and is generally just really big. Nuclear has difficulties around permanent waste disposal, and possible risks of accident and proliferation.

All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value judgements - inevitably people disagree.

bobthepanda• 4 years ago

Dams are also uniquely vulnerable to climate change, since drought can affect their power output.

otherme1233• 4 years ago

Nuclear power also have calm spells. France is enduring one, with over 50% of their nuclear capacity stopped due to manteinance and other issues (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/a-french-nuclear...), and are expecting blackouts in the next winter if neighbors cannot provide.

arcticbull10• 4 years ago

I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win

It doesn't emit anything, radioactive waste is captured entirely on the other side. They also don't go boom.

They're in the same category because they're both zero-carbon power. If you want to compare safety, deaths per TWh has nuclear right in the same area as wind and solar - less than rooftop solar.

otikik2• 4 years ago

That’s a good point. Of course installing solar on a rooftop has a small possibility of accident, and the energy produced on a single house is not that big. Multiply and you get … a big number, perhaps? Do you happen to have sources?

dTal• 4 years ago

Nuclear does not "emit" solid waste, it returns it in nice sealed containers (in small quantities, over a long period of time). When the goal is to minimize environmental impact, it is absolutely fair to class it as "non-emission".

jszymborski• 4 years ago

Well yes, everything emits something. Solar, wind, bananas; they all emit radiation as well. “Non-emission” is short hand for “non-emission of carbon dioxide” or perhaps more generally “greenhouse gases”.

If you’re concerned about human health, nuclear waste disposal is well studied and so are nuclear reactor safety. In fact, these small reactors are designed to be too small to create any catastrophic event in the astronomically unlikely event of a critical malfunction.

It’s odd to me that we all take planes despite the fact historically many have gone boom, and many a life has been lost. Must be something to do with no other viable alternatives…

raydiatian• 4 years ago

[The economics of a nuclear reactor](https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY)

In case this hasn’t already been shared

walrus01• 4 years ago

Have been seeing tech news articles about mini nuclear reactor coming really soon now for about 22 years, so far, none have actually happened.

usrnm• 4 years ago

so far, none have actually happened

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

Not without its fair share of criticism, budget overruns and all other problems associated with building new nuclear reactors these days, but it did happen

p1mrx5• 4 years ago

China connected an SMR to the grid several months ago: https://www.powermag.com/china-starts-up-first-fourth-genera...

ncmncm16• 4 years ago

There is less scope for corruption around SMR, so little demand when the main attraction of nukes is their prospect for a long-term corruption cash cow.

fefe23• 4 years ago

I'm stunned by the price difference. 1-1.5 billion for this power plant, but only 300-400 million for wind or solar.

We really have come a long way in bringing down prices for wind and solar!

fenk85• 4 years ago

Considering those produce 20-25% (at random) of time, are you adding he cost of storage to this?

JohnJamesRambo• 4 years ago

This is why nuclear is dying and you don’t need the tinfoil hat explanations for why. Just like always, it comes down to money.

T-A• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that wind and solar power figures typically quoted are for max effect. For solar that means noon on a cloud-free day. Most hours of most days, and all the nights, are not like that. So if you want a realistic comparison with something like a nuclear reactor, which can run steadily for months on end, you need to apply a significant multiplier for additional area and batteries.

nixass4• 4 years ago

The problem being you can only cry when there's no wind (or solar) while nuclear works 24/7/365 (minus maintenance)

stinos2• 4 years ago

Or according to another comment: spend the saved money (vs nuclear) on storage and smile instead? I don't know a lot about it, but what I know is enough to be pretty sure dismissive single-line statements (in either way) are usually not at all the full picture.

multiplegeorges9• 4 years ago

Multiply those by the actual production and you'll get an equivalent cost.

Per the article, they estimate wind and solar to produce at ~40%. The reactors will operate at ~98%, some downtime for maintenance.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

Like the maintenance in Fukushima?

I don't think handwaving away the long term storage of nuclear waste and the risk of contaminating large areas can just be ignored, especially with a new unproven reactor design.

naasking7• 4 years ago

At least double the renewable estimate to add storage to make them truly viable.

Add 50% to the nuclear cost because they always go over cost and time budgets.

That's probably a fairer overall estimate.

bratwurst3000• 4 years ago

I made once an estimate that to power the whole energy( not power,current,ampere) of the world we need a surface of the sice of spain. And I took bad Sunlight into account. …. So I wonder why for most countries … why not go all in solar? Nuclear seems so much expensive and wastefull compared to solar.

I know there is the storage problem. But most energy is directly consumed or has to be stores for a short period . Heat for example. And heat is stored in water.

st_goliath• 4 years ago

... approximately 240,0000 homes.
...
A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million.

... watt??

Neil44• 4 years ago

Yeah those numbers don't make sense, 300W should fit on a van but wouldn't power very much. Wonder how much sunshine they get up there.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

Must be 300 MW just like the nuclear reactor.

tonyarkles2• 4 years ago

The thing to keep in mind about that number and how small it seems... the entire province of Saskatchewan only has 1.17M people, about half of us are concentrated across two major cities (~600k people) and the rest are very sparsely distributed throughout the rest of the huge land mass. Overall, the 2016 census listed 432,620 private households through the province, so one of these reactors is providing half of our residential power. It's a huge win for us, since our base load is currently coal...

tiku• 4 years ago

Perhaps change the headline.. "by 2030".

chendii• 4 years ago

Does this still create waste that is dangerous for thousands of years?

My understanding is that there is no long term solution for storing dangerous nuclear waste. They try burying it super deep in mountains. But can't be sure that it won't get out in the next few thousands of years.

Everybody watch the documentary "Into Eternity" on the subject. Amazing.

foota• 4 years ago

The earth is full of uranium, and yet we don't worry about it leaking out.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

Are you even serious?

gizmo• 4 years ago

Nuclear waste is somewhat dangerous, but deep inside mountains it won't do any harm barring some kind of black swan event.

Compare the risks of living near a nuclear waste storage facility and living downstream of a hydroelectric dam. I know what I would choose! If you demand absolute certainty over a thousand year period you'll be paralyzed into inaction. Any new technology and any political action could result in the eventual collapse of civilization. But inaction guarantees disaster because the status quo is unsustainable. So we have to make mundane risk/reward evaluations and from those we conclude that we can't do without nuclear energy.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

You are comparing the aftermath of a power plant with a plant that is producing energy.

Would you rather live next to an active nuclear power plant or next to an active hydroelectic dam?

There have been cases of increased cancer near nuclear power plants.

mabbo3• 4 years ago

I think it's worth pointing out that nuclear is pretty well loved in Ontario. Around 2/3 of our energy is coming from it already.

https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

Nuclear is the base load, alternatives supply what they can, and hydroelectric dams and gas plants act as the variable load supply.

If we can just lose the gas plants, we'd be pretty close to zero carbon. And I think that achievable.

throw0101a2• 4 years ago

If we can just lose the gas plants, we'd be pretty close to zero carbon. And I think that achievable.

Another 2500-3000 MW of nuclear would take up some more of the base load, and allow hydro to deal with most of the variable load.

mabbo3• 4 years ago

Maybe. There's an open question around whether hydro can handle that much more variable load. Climate change is changing rain patterns, which changes the parameters around hydro dams.

Look at Texas- they only fall apart 1-2 days per year, but that's enough that it's a crisis every time. How confident are we that our hydro dams can sustain us in the worst case every year or decade?

I think to achieve it, we would need to see financial incentives, direct or indirect, to have everyone buying up power batteries for their homes, reducing the variable load. Maybe price incentives like nearly free electricity at night and extra costs during the day, etc.

cmrdporcupine• 4 years ago

Nuclear is appreciated here but there is definitely controversy about the usual: cost overruns and waste disposal.

e.g. refurbishement of Darlington was hundreds of millions over budget: https://globalnews.ca/news/3795801/darlington-refurbishment-...

I just came back from a few days up in Grey-Bruce and there are signs all over the place angry about the proposed NWMO waste diposal site up in Teeswater there. Very divided community about the issue. (Then again the same rough area or just east of it was extremely bitter about wind turbines some years ago, too, so can't please everyone...)

multiplegeorges9• 4 years ago

Waste disposal is being handled. We're going to dispose of it in very deep tunnels in very geologically stable Canadian Shield rock formations.

https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Site-selection/Study-Areas

brightball• 4 years ago

Whatever happened to the idea of Thorium reactors? It seems like this would be the ideal use for them.

sushibowl2• 4 years ago

Still very much in the research stage. China has one experimental Molten Salt Reactor that was supposed to start up last year, but I'm not sure what's happening to it right now. If everything went as planned that would be the only operating thorium-fueled nuclear plant in the world. I think they are expecting to have commercially ready designs by 2030.

India has a plan based on a three-stage fuel cycle, where the third stage runs on thorium. However they've had significant delays and the first prototype breeder reactor of the second stage is projected to be finished at the end of this year. The third stage is probably still some years away.

India and China are probably the most ambitious in terms of thorium fuel cycle research. India has the world's largest thorium reserves, and hope to utilize it for their power generation. China's most pressing concern is their smog crisis, which they hope to solve partly with nuclear power. They are also aiming to own most of the intellectual property with regards to thorium reactors, and it is part of Xi Jinping's drive toward making China carbon neutral by 2060.

Other countries have some small research initiatives but no concrete plans to build anything so far as I know.

0xTJ2• 4 years ago

I'm always shocked by how many anti-nuclear power people are on HN. So many have bought into fearmongering and lies about safety that oil and gas companies are happy to encourage. It's a non-reweable but quite clean and incredibly safe method of power generation.

It produces far less harm to the environment than fossil fuel generation, which should be decommissioned as quickly as possible. Every time a government chooses too replace nuclear generation with fossil fuels out of choice (I'm looking at you, Germany), they're a traitor to their own people, and to all humans.

And I'll never understand "green" people who actively protest against nuclear power. Yes, renewable power is better. But most of the power generated comes from fossil fuels, that needs to stop as soon as possible, which isn't happening in the short term via only renewable power.

I highly recommend watching this video by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

For me it's the opposite, there's a ton of pro-nuclear people on HN who ignore

• our past failures to get long-term storage of nuclear waste right

• the cost and time overruns for building nuclear plants in the last several decades

• the possible catastrophic failures even in a country like Japan

• the long term storage issue and its cost.

These serious unsolved issues are being hand-waved away again and again.

0xTJ2• 4 years ago

* Long-term storage plans tend to be pretty solid, but then people remotely near it get rallied to protest it.

* Any cases of that are management issues, not nuclear power generation issues.

* Making safe nuclear reactors is a well-understood challenge. Even if you do include all incidents that have happened with outdated, flawed reactors, going all the way back, nuclear reactors have cause far less environmental damage and far fewer deaths per power unit than fossil fuels do. Also, this article is about SMRs, which have very different requirements.

* Nuclear waste storage is a solved issue, this just repeats the first point.

thereddaikon2• 4 years ago

Good for them. The way forward is with nuclear.

AzzieElbab• 4 years ago

Oh man. Canada is doing something smart in a very welcome change

dagaci2• 4 years ago

These cost estimates do not include the maintenance of the waste products of nuclear energy production.

These costs are astonishingly!

If the 10,000 year costs fell on the producers and consumers directly (this is how it should be), they would quickly have a different point of different view

Nimitz142• 4 years ago

I believe the costs for nuclear are longterm.

p1mrx5• 4 years ago

Drill hole, insert waste: https://vimeo.com/458322589

It's really not that hard, except from a political standpoint.

dagaci2• 4 years ago

Thats fine, solutions are always fine. But ensure that only the consumers of this power and pay for its construction an upkeep

p1mrx5• 4 years ago

https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/BWRX-300_2020.pdf

The IC [Isolation Condenser] pool has an installed capacity that provides 7 days of reactor decay heat removal capability. The heat rejection process can be continued indefinitely by replenishing the IC pool inventory.

It would be nice if we were building reactors that could shut down without any external input. NuScale seems to be closest to production with a walk-away safe design. In other words, change "7 days" to "infinity days".

qwertox• 4 years ago

What happens when after 5 or 10 years of the deployment of a dozen of these one of these shows signs of a critical part getting cracks, for example a pipe. Then all the remaining reactors will have to be shut down as well until the part is not only replaced, but the replacement has been certified.

Isn't it better to put more effort into a big one instead?

djaychela• 4 years ago

Large reactors are generally much harder to maintain and keep safe - there are a lot of reasons why they become significantly more difficult to keep safe, so I think that's the reasoning behind this.

ComputerCat• 4 years ago

Tried to read the article, but just kept picturing Homer Simpson

tomohawk• 4 years ago

A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily,

It's worse than that. Let's say you get 12 hours of steady sunshine every day.

What to do the other 12 hours? For that you'll need storage.

Therefore, you will need to double the capacity of the solar array so that during that 12 hours you can both store power and deliver power to people who need it.

But then no power store is 100% efficient, so you'll also need to add more panels for that.

But then you're never going to get 12 hours of steady power every day. You're going to have to increase storage and panels to account for that too.

Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors

Related Stories