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Big week for nuclear power in Ontario
After France, I believe Ontario is the king of nuclear power generation: roughly 60% of the province's electricity is generated from its nuclear power plants. However there were growing issues: cost overruns and increased political opposition in the 1980s had prevented development of new reactors for decades, and the legal battles over just the initial environmental assessments of an attempt to build new reactors at the Darlington site beginning in 2006 meant the project ended up stillborn (the provincial government abandoned it in 2011, and the court scuffles went on for another five years past that). After that successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments were plenty happy to kick the can down the road: after all, getting new hydro or nuclear generation going is never something that's going to come online in time for next election, so it just all disappears beyond the political event horizon. Never mind the various projections anticipating a large and growing gap between generation and demand, a gap probably understated if electrification of heating/transport accelerates.
Then all of a sudden it becomes an issue because one of the major nuclear plants (Pickering) is all of a sudden due for retirement before the next election, and there's a mad scramble to fix things. But at least the positive is that it appears to have finally shaken decision-makers out of their reverie: 4,800 MW of new reactors at Bruce Power will see it reclaim its former status as the world's largest nuclear plant, and three new small modular reactors will add 1,200 MW more. The scale is considerable: just the three new SMRs will generate more electricity than Canada's ten largest windfarms combined.
And so far the response has been positive! Looking at Reddit comments might not necessarily be instructive of the general reaction but it's been nothing but relief so far. I've been scanning left-leaning legacy media (there isn't much left in Canada) and what criticism there has been so far has been mainly tepid concerns about cost (which are valid, controlling cost overruns are pretty important here).
It'll be interesting to see the federal response here. The current Minister of Environment, Steven Guilbeault, is a former Greenpeace guy and has been vocally anti-nuclear in the past. The regulatory hurdles these projects will have to mount are mainly federal and there is the potential for some kind of obstruction. On the other hand the current Trudeau government has been cautiously open, at least rhetorically, to new nuclear development and has been helping fund SMR development. We shall see how it pans out. In general public sentiment isn't an issue: the large majority of Ontario's population already lives close to a nuclear power plant and public support is high. The concern is how interest groups or specific influential individuals might use the legal system or regulatory requirements to kill by a thousand cuts.
I'm going to take this chance to indulge in just a little bit of optimism!
The question with cost overruns is always why. In the US, litigation is generally the reason why. Is that the same in Canada?
It's more than litigation issues in the U.S. The EPC (general contractors) that build nuclear power plants in the U.S. have generally lost the technical ability to build such complex engineering projects. The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers. We should all be embarrassed by this. We likely would be bot embarrassed and angry if it was even acknowledged as a problem. Instead we hear about nebulous "legislation and regulation". Those are certainly part of the problem, but only one part.
I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.
Modular plants are probably much more sensible efficiency wise, and US hasn't lost the ability to build thermal power plants.
E.g. the Danish design that provides 50 MWt through a molten salt loop from a module the size of a shipping container.
Stack 20 of these in a row in concrete coffins underground, and you have 1 GWt of heat. Do people really think it'd be more expensive than giant pressure reactors in giant containment domes that can melt down and need lots of infrastructure for safety?
The molten salt modules can't overheat, and if they're punctured the salt solidifies under 600°C or so.
As if things buried underground in reinforced concrete were at risk of getting shot through.
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Maybe but the reason why that doesn’t exist is because litigation made it prohibitively expensive to build in the first instance resulting in depreciating the value of the goodwill.
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IMO, they were forced into bankruptcy. After Three Mile Island, the regulators simply refused to allow any new nuclear plants to be constructed. See the wikipedia list of US nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States
There's about five US nuclear plants started every year, up until 1978. Then there's a little excitement at Three Mile Island in 1979, where nobody is hurt. No nuclear plants begin construction until 2013.
How would Ford survive if the US government decreed that they could not produce any new cars for 30 years, they could only go on with cars in production in 1979? What use is there in having skills for nuclear power plant design and construction if they're de facto illegal to use for 30 years? And that doesn't include the insane forced cost overruns regulation imposed, requiring nuclear plants cope with physically impossible engineering failures, amongst other abuses:
Regulation was the assassin, gun and bullet while Westinghouse was the corpse on the floor.
Did you happen to see the Safe Enough guest book review on ACX? I thought it was a neat look into the genesis of this regulatory regime.
I did read that. But I think it's silly to go to huge such huge efforts to reduce risk in nuclear energy while we pump out enormous amounts of air pollution with coal. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone, millions worldwide... and people are worried about potential risks from freak events? We should worry about large, real, experienced dangers rather than small, unreal, conjecture-based dangers.
I see Fukushima and raise dam failures - those actually kill people in huge numbers. One dam failure in China made Fukushima look like a joke - 11 million homeless, 171,000 dead. Yet nobody scrambles to prevent dams being built, blanket-bans them by law.
As for the worst case scenarios... there's excessive hysteria about radiation. The methodology is dubious at best, linear no-limit threshold models are just a guessing game of extrapolating from real danger to effects that can't even be observed. It's unscientific and defies reason - should we build giant shades to blot out the sun (a major source of radiation)? If there's no safe threshold for nuclear-derived radiation, why should there be a safe threshold for UV (which again kills orders of magnitude more than nuclear energy ever has every single year). The cost of a major nuclear disaster is a social construct, people feeling like they ought to evacuate, be stressed or expensively clean up despite the effects being small. There's zero existential risk as well.
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Aren't Koreans pretty good too?
Better.
Best prices in the world, though given that it's Korea it could be a mirage.
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It's basically exactly what happened to the UK nuclear submarine program.
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