Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-nuclear-strategy-9.7244509

by geox • 1 month ago

593 456 1 month ago

p2detar2• 1 month ago

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...

preisschild3• 1 month ago

Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor. More capacity is needed in most parts of the world. Lager reactors are needed.

chollida13• 1 month ago

I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.

credit_guy4• 1 month ago

Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.

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.

nomel• 30 days ago

Larger reactors are needed.

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?

_aavaa_4• 1 month ago

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%?

hodder• 1 month ago

The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.

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)

actionfromafar2• 1 month ago

Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.

What other kind of subsidy is there?

swader999• 1 month ago

I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.

_aavaa_4• 30 days ago

The Alberta government absolutely banned new solar and wind development, first a short-lived moratorium and then with regulations meant to "protect the natural beauty", restrictions mind you that absolutely do not apply to the pump jacks any company can place on your land and which you do not have the right to refuse. Or to the vast stretches of Mordor-like tailing ponds.

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.

qlte3• 30 days ago

  > Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.

If this principle is applied to all energy sources it would hurt new nuclear development far more than new solar/wind given the huge capital requirements of a new nuclear plant.

zybftjmvs• 1 month ago

A village near me in southern Alberta just built a huge wind farm.

alephnerd• 1 month ago

That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].

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...

barbazoo• 1 month ago

Doesn't nuclear make sense to increase baseline capacity where hydro isn't available?

cmrdporcupine7• 1 month ago

Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.

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.

chollida13• 1 month ago

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.

cwillu• 1 month ago

15 years, to be clear.

nancyminusone• 1 month ago

Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.

486sx332• 1 month ago

It’s not that far off, a major benefit is insitu refueling, so that’s a major reason it looks like that.

mixdup6• 1 month ago

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

OJFord• 1 month ago

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.

rickydroll• 1 month ago

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.

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.

phil21• 1 month ago

Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.

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.

chongli3• 30 days ago

We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.

red75prime3• 30 days ago

The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear.

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.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3

Manuel_D3• 30 days ago

You don't need storage if you have enough non-intermittent power to satisfy peak load.

Canada uses 1,500 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 750 GWh of storage. Estimated for grid storage costs range from $125 to $250 per kwh for fully installed and connected systems (not just the cost of the cells alone). At $200/KWh Canada would be looking at $150 billion for 12 hours of storage.

troupo12• 30 days ago

Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced.

That's why all modern (aka the last 40-50 years or so) nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

This way you don't need to ridiculously overbuild solar and wind, and you have a better guarantee for power supply. Especially in colder climates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640358

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

So, at best 20 hours of power supply from storage?

mpweiher6• 30 days ago

Baseload is a large part of the total load, so it absolutely makes sense to provide solid plants that can run predictably at close to 100% capacity for most of the time (maintenance and occasional outages excepted).

Storage can paper over the unreliability problems of the intermittent producers to some extent, but at relatively high cost for comparatively short amount of times.

Filling constant demand with intermittent producers + storage does not make sense.

jmyeet2• 1 month ago

I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.

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...

loloquwowndueo4• 1 month ago

You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.

Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.

xp843• 1 month ago

All forms of generation have downsides.

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.

fooster2• 1 month ago

Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.

exmadscientist• 1 month ago

I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.

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.)

reaperducer• 1 month ago

Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now

Canada won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?

roenxi5• 1 month ago

Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].

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.

Shitty-kitty• 1 month ago

China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.

kvakerok2• 30 days ago

We can't generate power out of thin air and the coal/natural gas powerplants got shut down what do you propose?

jleyank4• 30 days ago

What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.

1over1374• 30 days ago

Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now.

Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.

thedrbrian• 30 days ago

LCOE

Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...

rich_sasha2• 30 days ago

It cuts both ways. Solar and wind are great but intermittent, and the storage issue seems to be treated as a solvable ergo solved problem. Add a sprinkle of "overcapacity", gas peakers and demand shaping and we can have a fully green grid.

So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production? Where are the seasonal battery storage facilities that places like Europe or I guess most of NA would need?

My only conclusion is that renewables are also far more expensive than the sticker price, due to the needed grid investment, batteries and frankly unsolved problems of seasonal storage.

I don't mind being wrong, but status quo seems to be, let's not build nuclear because it's too expensive, we're sort of building renewables, but CO2 emmissions, never mind levels, keep on increasing.

It doesn't seem to add up to a coherent story.

cyberax4• 30 days ago

Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].

That's utterly incorrect. For a country like Canada (or Germany), the priciest form of energy is solar. Wind is close second.

And no, I'm not hallucinating. The key here is _guaranteed_ power during wintertime. There are no generally feasible renewable solutions for that.

arkh2• 30 days ago

I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical.

Independence from China and the US. Once you have your reactor engineering set and can churn them like China almost everything can be sourced either locally or you have multiple providers. Solar and wind? China. Batteries? China.

When you get in a spat with China you suddenly have to setup those industries from 0 at home. And that won't be just 15 years to ramp-up.

So the best is to start building nuclear reactors, silicon fabs, rare earth processing etc. now instead of having the exact same argument we had 20 years ago in 2045.

eudamoniac• 29 days ago

I don't know if this is true; I'm not making any claim; weren't renewable energy figures also not economical before we invested a ton of money in them? In other words, is there a situation where nuclear becomes economical because we build a lot of it before it's economical?

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

It's because you dont want to. Nuclear env impact is low https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

France has lower prices vs Germany and now, during peak summer heatwaves you can see who does best https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... . Germany spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french fleet. Results are clear

HPC is not a rule but exception. And it'll work for more than 60 for sure. Existing nuclear is in fact cheap https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or check Lazard data for it

crypttales3• 1 month ago

"A well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU"

A very expensive to build with lower utilization rates than PWRs despite online refueling. A solution AECL has been trying to move away from for the last thirty years.

And that online refueling? Looks a lot like a weapons grade Pu pipeline.

genxy• 1 month ago

Always wanted to go to ... Uranium City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_City

morkalork2• 30 days ago

While you're at it, add Radium Springs and Asbestos to your itinerary!

PaulHoule4• 1 month ago

They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran.

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... !

kelseydh4• 30 days ago

Exciting development. I really wish somebody would nail a commercially viable Thorium reactor but it seems there are real engineering complications around scaling molten salt reactors.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

i still hope it'll be candus even if lot of bwrx supply chain is in Canada

jtbayly• 1 month ago

More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.

486sx332• 1 month ago

It shouldn’t be the first time, this is what natural gas peaker plants have been about for 20 years. Solar and wind can’t sync the grid, they require sync or the grid collapses. Sync (Hz) can only be provided by base load that quickly spin up or down to balance out the frequency of the grid

mynegation• 1 month ago

Probably the assumption is that renewables replace a different base load like coal or gas powered plants.

pfdietz13• 30 days ago

Yeah, it's utter crap.

jleyank4• 30 days ago

Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.

kasey_junk• 1 month ago

Will Alberta go along?

jleyank4• 30 days ago

Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.

tgtweak• 30 days ago

Nuclear also works well with grid batteries to smooth demand curves, which Ontario is targeting 2700MW of scale by 2030.

ViewTrick10022• 30 days ago

Ignoring that the last time Ontario attempted to build nuclear power the utility went into bankruptcy forcing the public to take on an absolutely enormous stranded debt.

tonyedgecombe2• 30 days ago

A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.

Once you have base load from nuclear why do you need solar and wind at all?

Symbiote• 30 days ago

It's still cheaper, and especially solar production correlates well with increased electricity usage.

kelseydh4• 30 days ago

Because solar and wind are renewable, cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. They don't require destructive mining for enriched uranium or create the security implications of dealing with fissile material. Solar/wind do not create long term hazardous waste that's complicated to dispose or create the risk of widespread radioactive fallout. They also help to decentralise the energy grid making it less dependent on a single point of failure.

Nuclear power has its advantages, and may be worth it short term because climate change is a threat to humanity, but nuclear is not a renewable resource. Solar/wind with proper recycling could in theory sustain itself into perpetuity. Humanity needs to find sustainable ways for powering itself in the long term.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

you can get cheaper power if you play the cards well. By this I mean sacrificing a bit nuclear CF but not too much. Also VRE can be paired with hydro up to it's capacity and the rest would be nuclear. This will give better results vs nuclear only grid

stymaar• 30 days ago

And you forgot the most important one, that justify nuclear over the alternatives:

- is very far North and can't really use solar at all for 3 month per year because in winter the nights are long, the weather is terrible and the sun is always low in the sky.

bildung• 30 days ago

Canada (at least the part with people) seems to be significantly more in the south than most of Northern Europe, where PV seems to work just fine?

mpweiher6• 30 days ago

Canada just finished the Bruce Power refurbishment ahead of schedule and under budget, and that seems to generally be the track record in Canada.

https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007558/ontario-delivers-...

France built 55 reactors in around 15 years during its first build-out and that wasn't an accident, we both know how to do this and Canada seems to be in a good place for that kind of performance.

blitzar• 30 days ago

Winter district heating would be the icing on the cake.

mrbluecoat• 29 days ago

Canada also has cold weather, which makes Nvidia's pairing of closed-loop liquid coolant and passive cooling datacenter design more attractive.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

I just hope it'll be Candu and not bwrx

sleepyguy3• 1 month 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.

preisschild3• 1 month 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.

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-...

sleepyguy3• 1 month ago

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).

thisislife2• 1 month ago

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).

sleepyguy3• 1 month ago

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.

cmrdporcupine7• 1 month ago

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_• 1 month ago

Cold is fine - solar panels perform better the lower the temperature.

That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.

Marsymars• 30 days ago

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.

singpolyma3• 1 month ago

Since it is a make work project, costing more and tried longer is an advantage

reppap• 30 days ago

I wonder how much much renewables you would get for the same 100 billion investment though. How much battery storage does even 50 billion get you.

burnt-resistor• 30 days ago

Metric shittons. A 650 MW solar plant is around $900M USD, so $100B translates into 72 GW. That would power ½ of Canada. It's cheaper to use hydro (PES) rather than batteries (BESS) at scale, and Canada already has a lot of hydro power. $50B would buy lots of PES and distribution/transmission levelizing BESS that would allow greater flexibility in generation production.

TomK322• 30 days ago

With the prices for solar (the expensive parts are not the panels but the inverters and labour costs) and batteries still going down you will get more than what you thought when you started to spend the first billion.

whh• 1 month ago

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

tuna74• 1 month ago

Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?

echelon• 1 month ago

Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?

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.

protocolture6• 30 days ago

I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind.

Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.

Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.

Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.

Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.

Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.

rgmerk3• 30 days ago

You pay for it.

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.

stinkbeetle3• 30 days ago

A biogas turbine for the last few percent of demand??

Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns).

If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing.

Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything.

Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda.

This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.

fsuts2• 1 month ago

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.

crypttales3• 1 month ago

Because the Candu is insanely expensive.

HerbManic2• 1 month ago

So France and Canada both build nuclear plants. Must be something in the french language that makes folks just want to do the cool stuff.

If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.

badc0ffee• 1 month ago

This analysis is missing that Quebec doesn't have any nuclear plants. (Although NB has one, which counts for half?)

QGQBGdeZREunxLe• 1 month ago

The French are undoubtedly a good choice considering nuclear produces the majority of their electricity and EDF already operates in the UK.

protocolture6• 30 days ago

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.

fsuts2• 30 days ago

If not aware - uk government is backing Roll Royce to produce small reactor solutions (SMR). And Rolls is going around the world signing up sales agreements for them.

The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.

pjc50• 29 days ago

should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse

It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire ; so much so that the site had to be renamed to Sellafield.

The rollout was hampered by the choice of two ultimately dead end technologies, Magnox and AGR. Then it ran into the industrial unrest and general lack of money of the 1970s, during which the government cancelled its space program (Black Arrow), and very nearly cancelled Concorde. The "white heat of technology" had worn off. Thatcher attempted to restart it, resulting in Sizewell B, but of course after 26 April 1986 any new nuclear was completely unthinkable and that was the end until Hinkley C. Which is still not finished.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

UK's regulations are so bad that even Hitachi pulled out from building ABWR

BIGFOOT_EXISTS• 1 month ago

Can't wait for this to get bogged down in legislation and never get done

Plasmoid• 1 month ago

That might take a while. We need to bog down the HSR first.

preisschild3• 1 month ago

CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world

credit_guy4• 30 days ago

I love nuclear reactors and CANDU are quite cool. But I don't think that today we have any reasons to build CANDU reactors, except possibly that Canada can demonstrate they can build them for cheaper than others can build light water reactors. The ability to build is something that has little to do with the technical merits of a nuclear reactor design. But all things being equal, a PWR or a BWR should cost less per GW than a CANDU reactor and have other advantages too:

- 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...

Moldoteck39• 28 days ago

Proliferation is irrelevant. It was not a Candu reactor what India have used and without Russia's help it's unlikely it would have happened. But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy

Related to US, it'll happen sooner or later https://www.nucnet.org/news/atkinsrealis-to-begin-licensing-...

NuclearPM2• 1 month ago

We are trying.

mig39• 1 month ago

A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.

_aavaa_4• 1 month ago

Doesn’t help with the burning part. Or the stranded infrastructure once the demand goes away.

speed_spread• 30 days ago

Demand will not go away. There'll be toxic waste to clean up for decades after.

bonesss• 29 days ago

Nuclear process heat in refining would enable releasing less CO2 per fuel-unit. It doesn’t solve burning directly, but reduces the impact of what is going to happen anyways.

panny• 1 month ago

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.

patmcc2• 1 month ago

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.

II2II• 1 month ago

Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.

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).

patmcc2• 1 month ago

I was being a little flippant there - but I think we've gone way too far in the "nuclear is risky" direction, largely because of Chernobyl, which was a) a very specific disaster caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck and b) not that deadly. In the US about as many people die every year due to coal pollution as have yet (or will ever) die because of Chernobyl. About the same number die in Europe every year because of a lack of AC. Those are just invisible risks that we accept already and we need to start seeing them.

thelonelyborg• 1 month ago

would be good

shevy-java• 1 month ago

Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal.

Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.

crypttales3• 1 month ago

Well those online refueling channels look mighty interesting don't they?

cmrdporcupine7• 1 month ago

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.

stackghost3• 1 month ago

Nuclear industry in Canada is federally-regulated, not provincial.

cmrdporcupine7• 1 month ago

The regulation of it is an entirely different thing from the budgeting and promotion of it. Promotion of nuclear power has become a very vocal Ford government thing in the last few months.

wmoxam• 30 days ago

Darlington nuclear refurbishment finished ahead of schedule and under budget

https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2026/0...

tempest_• 30 days ago

Yeah the last decade of Nuclear work is the ONE thing that they have been successful at wrt to project planning.

Hopefully that expertise is well placed to execute on these other projects.

zuzululu• 1 month ago

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.

ungreased0675• 1 month ago

This is great. Hopefully they can make enough to supply the US energy. Because we seem to be incapable of building new reactors.

fastball• 1 month ago

Microreactor initiatives in the US are at least promising.

motohagiography2• 1 month ago

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.

pfdietz13• 30 days ago

Micro reactors have micro markets. The diseconomies of scale kill it for general grid power.

motohagiography2• 27 days ago

that's a philosophical view. We don't want a single grid, we want power in places we need it. Building for a single grid has a bunch of expensive opinions that serve mainly to provide a control layer instead of serving the basic economic need.

A micro reactor can practically fund itself on model training, data processing, and cryptocurrencies, and where it can't there is actual usage.

slicktux• 30 days ago

That’s great news ! Have they also solved the nuclear waste problem?

Honest question; here in the USA we have not.

measurablefunc• 30 days ago

Something for future generations to figure out with their AI chatbots.

thfuran• 30 days ago

It's not really a problem. The alternative is to grind it up into fine dust, spray it into the air, and call it "clean coal".

fsh3• 30 days ago

That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radioactive emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.

fennecbutt2• 29 days ago

Excuse me that's "beautiful clean coal" I still can't believe that you guys actually chose him as president.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

Yes, canada aproved repository site. Similar to Onkalo

anotheraccount9• 30 days ago

Hopefully, Canada will not get bullied by US for selling it cheaply.

newsclues2• 30 days ago

Who else can Canada sell excess power to?

boringg• 30 days ago

Hydrolysis.

1over1374• 30 days ago

No one else I guess. But they could use it themselves, building whatever plants/factories/server farms needed to use it.

Jedd4• 30 days ago

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.

gottorf5• 30 days ago

These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.

locallost• 29 days ago

They're not building anything. The French are building it and doing a terrible job for the third time straight. Flamanville at home, Olkiluoto in Finland and now Hinkley.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

Also relevant - all recent Canadian refurbs were on time and budget

Jedd4• 29 days ago

When you say 'all' - is that five?

Since 1999?

rangestransform• 30 days ago

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.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

depends if you like gas/coal or not https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

kvakerok2• 30 days ago

The idea is great, the timeline is super unrealistic. We'll see those reactors in 2070 the earliest, more likely in 2080.

deadbabe• 30 days ago

Society grows great when old men build nuclear plants whose power they will never get to enjoy.

_heimdall3• 30 days ago

Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence.

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.

jibal3• 30 days ago

From the article:

"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.

b1123• 30 days ago

Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists

Is it?

Nothing is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric dams. In Canada, there are endless rivers to dam, while also leaving endless rivers undammed. Further, damming a river doesn't destroy nature, it does however turn a river into a lake. Over the years it takes to build and complete the project, including the initial flooding, some species leave, new species take their place, and a healthy ecosystem remains.

Yet dams are attacked with a ferocity in this country, as if somehow having a dam is worse than a coal power plant. And while nuclear is great, we're therefore left with nuclear power, and all the outcome if that goes wrong, because using 0.0000001% of our rivers to build a few more dams, is "bad" for the environment.

Canada is massive.

I'm sure someone will want to reply with how horrible dams are, the concrete and carbon cost of concrete. Yet what's really the problem is that some want nothing ever built. Not a single method of new power generation, ever.

And so? This is what we end up with. Nuclear it is.

_heimdall3• 30 days ago

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

Right, and that's my point. The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.

myrmidon6• 30 days ago

I think its mainly just different "environmentalist" subgroups: You have the oldschool environmentalists that are more "holistically" concerned with sustainability, ecological footprint, species preservation, pollution, etc.

I'd argue that this subgroup already achieved *tons* of goals over the last half century, and are nowadays playing second fiddle to the subgroup that is first and foremost concerned about climate change: Because those goals are far from met and much more urgent.

Those subgroups tend to have a very different outlook on nuclear energy: Nonsustainable superfund sites in the making for the first group, and highly useful emission stopgap for the second...

_heimdall3• 29 days ago

Yeah that's always possible. I only remember seeing the change after Russia escalated their war a few years ago, but maybe my memory is failing me there.

brikym• 30 days ago

It's obvious to me there will be a renaisance, but the question is which design will win. There are so many companies building small modular reactors right and various different designs with different fuels and cooling mediums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...

TurdF3rguson• 30 days ago

I wonder if anyone will tell them that's an oxymoron.

gaiagraphia• 30 days ago

Always thought it was weird that the Commonwealth Realm nations had never pooled resources to have standardised reactor designs and expertise. Canada and Australia have loads of uranium - seems like an obvious strategic move. Instead, the UK turns to China, lol.

Animats4• 30 days ago

OK, so when does the first one come online? "The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035."

That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.

epistasis• 30 days ago

Ok, I was kind of excited about this, until you pointed out the dates.

Of all Western developed countries, Canada is pretty much the last hope for a country with the skills to build nuclear at something that's within spitting distance of being economical.

The US and France have shat the bed royally over the past two decades, they're out of the game of construction competence. The UK stopped doing their own and outsourced to overpriced and unreasonable French reactors, that are only going forward with what be massive amounts of corruption in order to justify such expensive energy when there's cheaper batteries + offshore wind. Finland had France build them a reactor, and wisely negotiated a fixed price up front, and the construction overruns bankrupted the French company which is now really French in the sense that it bankrupted itself on Olkiluoto and had to be nationalized in the name of national security.

That leaves Canada, with their famous CANDU reactors and can-do attitudes. But 9 years of planning before construction? Perhaps that's what's actually needed, and they'll have a chance of actually constructing it in five years, but.... super super doubtful.

Canada, do not fall into the same trap as the rest of the nuclear frauds in the Western world. Five years for construction? Don't kid yourselves, even China breaks ridiculous timelines like that, and as good as you are, Canada, you're no China when it comes to massive massive construction projects. Just look at how hard it is to build in Vancouver, for example...

Animats4• 30 days ago

China's current plan: Since the country’s first Hualong One unit came online in 2021, 6 additional units have begun commercial operation, 16 units are under construction, and 18 units have received government approval in China. According to the CNNC, the Hualong One will become the country’s mainstream type of third-generation thermal reactor by 2030.

The Hualong One is a successor of the Westinghouse AP1000. The US has two of those operational, at Vogtle. Then Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt. China has four operational. All later units in China are Hualong One units or later designs.

These are all classic pressurized water reactors, all about 1 gigawatt. Nothing exotic here. The technology is known and works well.

b1123• 30 days ago

Environmental assessments and consultation with native groups will quite literally require 2+ years. Impact assessments and community approval will take at least another year. None of this will run in parallel, at least not much of the time. Beyond that, while laudable, there is a quite rigid tender process which must be followed, to ensure contracts are fair, equitable, and not influenced by government officials.

That tender process will take a few years on its own, and can only conclude once locations have been vetted, and passed environmental + native approval. Even once approved, at any moment the entire process could be derailed, even if billions have been spent.

There is a lot to be said in terms of dealing with native groups correctly. Yet we've been seeing groups, "historical" native nations which have never been recognized before, or even really heard of before, simply appearing and stalling development of, well, anything.

Recently:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-yet-another-...

To see a project stall which has billions of investment, was planned for 20 years, and still have roadblocks due to 58 people is ... disheartening. Yet in most cases such native groups are simply paid off. EG, kickbacks.

In terms of environmental assessments, of personal note, I was trying to buy some land from a farmer. This farmer spent 2+ years going through all the required steps to sell a few pieces of his land, this was to be for his retirement.

He successfully conducted all the surveys, applied for and had zoning work done, land separated into a few parcels, while still keeping most of his farm. He just wanted to sell a small portion of land, so he and his wife could retire comfortably. This process took 2+ years.

He and I had negotiated a fair price, and were working on the purchase, and then the environmental assessment came to play. This took an additional 6 months, and found one, I repeat one bird that was seen in the branches of a tree of "special concern". For clarity:

Extinct (X) A wildlife species that no longer exists. Extirpated (XT) A wildlife species no longer existing in the wild in Canada, but occurring elsewhere.

Endangered (E) A wildlife species facing imminent extirpation or extinction.

Threatened (T) A wildlife species likely to become endangered if limiting factors are not reversed.

Special Concern (SC) (Note: Formerly described as “Vulnerable” from 1990 to 1999, or “Rare” prior to 1990.) A wildlife species that may become a threatened or an endangered species because of a combination of biological characteristics and identified threats.

Not at Risk (NAR) (Note: Formerly described as “Not In Any Category”, or “No Designation Required.”) A wildlife species that has been evaluated and found to be not at risk of extinction given the current circumstances.

Note the language. Special concern is May become threatened. Not threatened, just "May become".

This bird was not nesting on site. No other members of the species were seen on the land. The bird was simply seen on a tree branch.

Entire sale?

Terminated. Land can not be sold without multiple follow-up assessments.

I could understand if the species was threatened and nesting. Or at least even just threatened.

Even so, this region of Canada has trillions of acres of untamed land, and millions upon millions of acres of farmland surrounding this area. Further, building a house on a multi-acre lot, does not mean "all the trees and land will be destroyed".

I guess my point is, there is sensible custodianship of the land and relationships with first nations, and there is bad-shit crazy, bend over backwards, destroy everything around you custodianship.

As you can likely tell, I think there's too much red tape.

And that red tape is why it takes a decade to even hope to start. And there's no way, unless things change dramatically, that a decade will be enough. We'll have fusion power before a shovel hits dirt.

moltar2• 30 days ago

Agreed. Look at the light rail project in Ottawa for an example of Canadian land issues, timelines and quality. It’s a disaster.

1970-01-01• 29 days ago

It's hard not to fully agree with this take. The facts are obviously putting the actual timelines into fantasy territory, where projects fizzle and die. Even a 10-year plan should be flagged as high-risk as solar and wind builds tied to grid battery continues to explode in growth.

arjie• 30 days ago

These are a bunch of contradictory quotes. We'll have to wait till NRCan or whatever comes up with a real plan. "Up to 10 reactors built by 2040" doesn't really match "two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035". Like, what is that. "planned or under development" seems like a big "or". Like how BART has 1500 lines completed or described in concepts online.

jgord2• 30 days ago

Im surprised they haven't doubled down on deep drill geothermal.

jgord2• 30 days ago

not least because of the bureaucratic delays making nuclear slow to roll out.

lo_fye• 30 days ago

So we're willing to put our greatest national asset (the environment) at risk in the name of "moar power". Well that's just great.

I hope Jimmy Carter's ghost will be just as willing to help us out the next time a reactor goes into meltdown as his physical self was the first time that happened. RIP Jimmy Carter.

beloch• 30 days ago

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.

Even if Canada winds up relying more on CANDU reactors than SMR's, there is a case to be made for enriching domestically. There are a lot of potential customers looking for a reliable, ethical supplier. Canada has the raw minerals, political stability, and a long record of refusing to weaponize despite having the capability.

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

Enrichment is already more or less done by Orano and Urenco. They could expand faster if assured that EU bans russian imports

totetsu• 30 days ago

The Decouple podcast has taught me more about the Canadian Nuclear industry than I ever wanted to know. https://www.decouple.media/

AugustusCrunch• 30 days ago

Alberta has energy. Canada wants energy without Alberta. The Candu reactor program is so defunct that the feds have been trying to sell it for about a decade. Candu makes plutonium and was responsible for a lot of nuclear weapons proliferation in the 1980s, but again, Candu isn't Alberta. Also it's a way to spend an enormous amount of money, and Canada isn't quite bankrupt yet. I say go for it.

anon-3988• 30 days ago

I am baffled why Canada don't have massive data centres yet? It is cold with abundant water and energy. Why not?

GL26• 30 days ago

10 new reactos by 2040 is huge when you come to think of it, this is just in 14 years, this is about 0.72 reactors built each year. Knowing you need to build : the whole reactor building, the machines building, the whole plumbery system, the electrical system, the control command system, the reactor, reliability features, and all of that knowing you have to pass the nuclear regulation authorities controls.

kioleanu• 30 days ago

Hopefully it will go better than the last time someone had such an ambitious plan with nuclear plants

lasky• 30 days ago

to begin in 2035, eh?

just join the US already

tmellon2• 30 days ago

Totally unnecessary : I did the Math to cross-verify - Elon Musk is 100 % right !

Just ONE square mile of batteries and a TOTAL of 100 x 100 square miles of Solar can power the entire USA 24/7. Area required will be much lesser for Canada.

See : https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/elon-musk-...

fennecbutt2• 29 days ago

How convenient for Musk that technology connections did this exact topic and these exact calculations (and much more) as a topic months and months ago: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?is=wOjIwPKFuYj2Smrh

Why up Musk? Is he your primary source of news and ideas?

MeteorMarc• 30 days ago

Lets see if there will be any private investments unless gov guarantees fixed minimum price of MWh.

WhereIsTheTruth• 30 days ago

That's fire! pun intended, IYKYK

Jokes aside, Canada is well positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance, now that they have easy access to raw materials, easy access to cooling facilities and they can export surplus to energy hungry neighbor, it also makes it a good candidate for hosting lots of datacenters

Geee• 29 days ago

Are we finally re-entering the Atomic Age? It seems that the Soviets extended the Oil Age by about 40 years, by blowing up the Chernobyl plant in 1986.

rireads• 29 days ago

Did people really forget just how much nuclear power sucks? Storage may not be a problem now but that's pushing the problem onto future generations yet again

Moldoteck39• 29 days ago

it doesnt suck as much as fossils https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

4b11b4• 27 days ago

The beginning of Shinra?

Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

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