this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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We should have done this 50 years ago
I agree. I think the four nuclear plants we built almost 60 years ago still supply 17% of the entire country's energy, and one of them are being shut down this decade because refurbishing is way too expensive.
8 of the 19 reactors in the country are being shut down because they're too old in the next 3 years. It takes about 10 to make a new reactor/plant.
Late is better than never, but we really should've done this at least a decade ago. Hell, it's weird we didn't do it when we were shutting down all the coal power plants over a decade ago. Now Ontario is facing an energy deficit and the infrastructure can't handle incoming energy because Ontario's been a net exporter for pretty much the entirely of the existence of the east coast power grid.
We're going to have to spend billions one way or another, and now the only choice is to build up new transmission systems that'll only be used for a decade or so until the new plants can be built? This is crazy, though not as crazy as how Germany's shutting down all its nuclear power plants and now relies on France's nuclear plants so supply over 60% of its energy, with coal that spews uranium into the air to cover the rest.
It's no great mystery. 3500MW Darlington cost the equivalent of $23B in today's money. OPG just couldn't afford to replace something like Nanticoke (~4000MW) with reactors at the time.
Point Lepreau cost $3.8B in today's money, and needed an extensive refurbishment 28 years later. The refurbishment was supposed to take 18 months and cost $1.5B (2010). It ended up taking almost 5 years and cost $2.5B ($3.1B in today's money). For only 660MW, that's some expensive power.
Edit: There was supposed to be a Unit 2 at Lepreau. Some of the concrete work was done for a second reactor at the same time as work on the first unit started. After all of the construction delays and overruns, they decided not to go ahead with it. It's been brought up a number of times since, but the economics kill it.
When the identical reactor at Gentilly was due for refurbishment, Quebec Hydro was "Naw" and decommissioned it.
The sale of AECL to SNC-Lavalin by Harper, and their change to emphasize support and maintenance rather than new reactor sales means that utilities would be looking at reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 or Areva EPR/EPR-2. They've got a really bad track record for massive cost overruns.
I'm not arguing that it's not difficult and expensive. Nuclear power plants are basically megaprojects. But they're megaprojects that have dividends that last a good half century, and Canada is basically 100% self sufficient when it comes to nuclear operations making it not only up to us if it's green or not, but energy security is guaranteed.
Of course excluding events like the cascade failure of the entire east or west coast power grids.
The issue is that we've had few governments strong enough to actually get shit done this last decade. And of them, the only one squandered that power (IMO) and made the country worse.
China seems to be able to churn out nuclear plants on a sub-5-year timeline...
Because they've built the production systems and talent to do it. Once you ramp up those systems then you can build quicker. We can't anymore because of decades of anti-nuclear advocacy.
They also each discharge like 8-20 times the nuclear waste a year compared to the entire proposed discharge of Fukushima over the next 10 years.
Those plants are poorly built, like pretty much everything else over there. Just check how many hydro dams have broken this year so far.
Wasn't the whole point of CANDU to be able to use nuclear waste?
Also, Fukushima literally sits in one of the most seismically active areas in the world in a country that's notorious for having not enough land to build on. China has neither problem (neither does the US): you can't build a Yucca Mountain in Japan.
The point of CANDU was that Canada at the time didn't have the technology to build high pressure reactors that were the norm in the states. They had to find a different way to make power, and the solution was to use a fast neutron reaction. This meant that in exchange for not needing to contain a high pressure vessel, we needed a ready supply of heavy water. The side effect of all that meant that the CANDU reactors don't need refined uranium, and can even run off of nuclear waste from the states, though the actual export of that wasn't legal for most of the last half century.
BTW, Canada is one of the top exporters of heavy water thanks to this, in addition to all the money we made exporting CANDU reactors to other countries as well.
Fukushima is seismically active, but that doesn't matter as long as it's properly taken into consideration. In fact, the earthquake did no real damage to the plant in the first place. The issue was a design fault that the Americans put into the plant in the original design because they prioritized on the wrong thing. The backup generators were placed under the plant to protect them from terrorists, but the Japanese argued that the generators needed to be placed on the roofs or on nearby mountains to protect them from tsunamis. In the Fukushima incident, the plant was mostly unharmed, but the generator room got flooded, ruining the generators and the plant was unable to keep the coolant flowing because of it, and the partial meltdown happened.
Though the plant was like 10 years past it's decommission date on top of things, so that just tells you how good of a job it did surviving earthquakes all this time.
Many of them have been 2-3 years late, but Taishan-1&2 was 6 years late. Instead of less than 4 years, it took a bit over 10.
But you can't realistically compare construction projects in China to those in the West based on labour and environmental regs alone.
Hasn't China been pretty good about environmental/labour regs in their nuclear industry? I seem to remember reading that their nuclear industry is more tightly regulated than general industry because, y'know, nuclear.