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...

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

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.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now

There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce

You could be right about the Korean plants. I only relied on google to give me the top 5 nuclear plants active in the world. The Korean plants you mention were not on the list.

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?

Like most industrial sites, large reactors are much more economical than small ones. This is why nobody has built SMRs since the 1950s.

The basic premise of "have a factory that produces reactors small enough to ship" always made sense to my uneducated mind. Is there a flaw in the idea? It seems like it should be much cheaper than if every reactor were bespoke

With smaller reactors, one needs more of everything: reactor vessels, containment structures, cooling systems, generators, etc. This is why industrial facilities are usually built as large as reasonably possible, and why SMRs fell out of fashion as soon as GW-class reactors became feasible in the 1960s.

Is that actual cost or projected cost because right now large reactors look prohibitively expensive meanwhile as you say we haven't really tried building SMR's on a production line.

Meanwhile Sweden is putting its money where its mouth is:

https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/2026/15-06-...

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%?

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)

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

What other kind of subsidy is there?

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.

Oh but you can.

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another

If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry

Could be a good way to kickstart a canadian nuclear industry that would expand into the US, exploiting the a big thing the US is bad at, coordinating infrastructure projects with multiple government groups, not making infrastructure builds incredibly overpriced and take an incredible amount of time and not being hyper litigious.

Are you also Canadian? I only ask because I feel expensive and overdue infrastructure is already something we (canada) suck at

Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint

How do you evolve the design then?

Same way you do for planes, cars, etc. You have long(ish) life-cycles and some pieces that can be independent (e.g., same turbine engine on several plane models).

Brings its own risks. See the 737max debacle. Now imagine that but causing a massive radiation leak and requiring all your power stations to be be put offline while a fix is found.

Nothing about the 737 MAX situation had anything to do with the fact that it was standardized and every plane wasn't bespoke. That is a weird thing to compare this to. You could absolutely still screw it up if you were designing each reactor from scratch every time

Huh, a lot on the 737 Max situation was due to standardisation.

Boeing didn't want the time, expense, and hassle of certifying (= standardising) a new narrow-body aeroplane, so they continued to reuse the FAA type certificate (= standardised design) of the original 737 from 1966.

This meant they had to keep, inter alia, the short landing gear, which in turn made the wings lower to the ground, which forced them to position the new big engines ahead of the CG, which forced them to add the faulty MCAS computer, which killed all those people.

Admittedly the decision to use just a single sensor on said MCAS was due to systematic, decades long corruption and emasculation of the FAA.

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.

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.

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.

Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.

For one thing, nuclear power plants produce much less waste than most people imagine.

Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it.

In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.

I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.

Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.

You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.

Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically

Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.

If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.

I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]

I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...

It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.

The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).

There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

You're repeating the problem - You're saying that there is less waste to deal with which magically means it's safe.

You do understand that don't you?

I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.

It's not.

The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage

Most waste isn't spent fuel, it's contaminated other things. You aren't reprocessing any of that.

Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.

Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.

Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.

What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built

Most electricity generation is handled by the government already, particularly in Canada. Worldwide approximately 88% of global electricity generation capacity is owned or controlled by national and local governments.

Some Canadian provinces have IPPs -- Independent Private-Power companies but they are often operating under the patronage of government. Many owe their existence to privatisation, lobbying and sweetheart contracts. (E.g. in British Columbia, private run-of-river hydro companies scandalously secured a 60 year guaranteed non-market rate on electricity. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/12/BC-Hydro-Public-Intere... )

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.

You have wind right?

Ontario _already_ gets a quarter of its power from storage, in the form of hydro. If you add some pumps you can use the existing dam capacity more.

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

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.

That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.

The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.

(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).

I chose those numbers to emphasize the system cost. Too many people go "Solar panels are cheap! Why don't we have them everywhere?" That's why.

Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.

It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found.

The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.

Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.

[1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/

[2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...

Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?

Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas.

"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."

https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before.

(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)

1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects.

2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy).

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark

1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can)

2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.

Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle.

Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.

You can combine solar with wind. And the good thing: wind is complementary to solar. So no need for solar overcapacity and massive energy storage.

https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s...

Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.

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?

nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute

This is not a technical problem, but nuclear plants already struggle to compete on cost of energy when running 24/7.

Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.

They actually do not. Struggle, that is.

But yes, it absolutely makes more sense to run those plants 24/7 at 100% capacity.

And we have base-load that matches this reliable generating capacity very well.

The 40%-60% base load absolutely should be provided by nuclear if you don't have hydro (and even if you have hydro, some nuclear still makes sense).

The remainder should almost certainly be a mix: some more reliable nuclear, some storage, some wind, some solar.

That's not how electricity markets operate. Say you have 100GW demand (number are not in any way related to reality) and your Nuclear plant has a capacity of 50 GW. However it's a sunny day and solar is producing 80 GW. That solar will be producing at a much lower price, so no one is interested in buying that extra expensive 30 GW from the Nuclear plant (I'm glancing a bit over how pricing works exactly, but it comes to the same thing).

So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.

The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.

when running 24/7.

Key word: running 24/7. Which neither solar nor wind can do.

Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.

Is that why countries that boast "we have so much renewable energy now" tend to import electricity from stable sources (nuclear and hydro) the moment there's a long period of overcast skies with little to no wind?

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...

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.

You’re missing the point which is to create jobs

I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.

Nuclear plants would reduce Canada’s energetic reliance on other countries but - is there any, really? Last I checked, Quebec at least exports power to other provinces and the US.

Sure with more power generation Canada has more to sell and any country would be happy to have more energy, but it doesn’t sound like something the country _needs_ as much as, say, more housing. Or deep health care system improvements and staffing. Or … jobs.

Sounds like California high speed rail, where the state government is actually touting the number of jobs created as the measure of its success, even without a single mile of working track.

you can create even more jobs with ren. But not all jobs are the same. With ren you compete with China. With nuclear - you are somewhat protected since many don't like the idea of a hualong near them

What’s ren? What’s hualong?

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.

Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...

Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.

Not convinced. The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.

Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.

Not convinced.

What, if anything, would convince you?

Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.

Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.

In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.

I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.

The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.

I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.

I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.

What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?

Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?

Chernobyl was triggered by humans but the ultimate problem was it's design. And it shows - Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design. But since the design was much better, the impact is much milder vs Chernobyl

Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design.

And honestly it wasn't, not really. It was hit with a record-breaking earthquake and a record-breaking tsunami... and more lives were lost due to evacuation than to the plant shutdown.

To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.

What's the worst accident involving a Model T, maybe a dozen dead? Early steam boilers aren't going to be much worse either. Nuclear accidents are essentially unlimited in size. Nothing else can do that kind of country-sized - let alone it being permanent.

Chernobyl showed the potential impact. Fukushima showed that even several decades down the line things can still rapidly run out of control. All the knowledge and experience in the world isn't going to save you when something unexpected happens and things are just waiting to spiral out of control.

Steam boilers have a lot of regulation, all written in blood. Entire boats would explode killing most/all onboard.

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

Isn't that a little hyperbolic? Sure cancer rates will be elevated wherever the fallout blows but it's not going to end anything.

Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.

It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.

You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.

Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.

If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.

Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.

Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.

It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:

1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];

2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];

3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.

Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?

But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.

[1]: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...

[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.

Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?

Ah yes, the ridiculous strawman engineering of saying batteries would be used for seasonal storage.

Then what would you use for seasonal storage?

Then what would you use for seasonal storage?

Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU. So Nordic countries hydro and nuclear, and some French nuclear.

While lobbying to make all those interconnections increase domestic prices for the providers.

In the short term, one would burn natural gas in turbines. The marginal cost of displacing this by using nuclear instead would lead to an enormous cost per unit of CO2 avoided, so high that most other uses of fossil fuels would be eliminated first (like, all use in ground vehicles).

In the long term, either non-fossil fuels burned in turbines (e-fuels like hydrogen or biofuels), or bulk thermal storage of renewable electricity. These both have lousy round trip efficiency (maybe 40%), but that's still cheaper than using batteries, because the capex per unit of storage capacity is far lower, and the cost of the RTE is low when there are so few charge-discharge cycles (as happens with seasonal storage); cost of seasonal storage is dominated by capex, which is why using high-capex batteries for it is such a bad idea.

Personally, I consider bulk thermal storage of cheap DC-coupled PV the most promising approach, as being pursued by Standard Thermal. They claim to be able to deliver 365/24/7 heat at 600 C for $3-5/GJ, which is competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.

You think they shouldn’t negotiate with native tribes?

If they're not building reactors on the land allocated to native tribes, why should they?

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.

I wouldn’t say you cannot but I also wouldn’t say it is proven that you can.

Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.

I asked Claude:

"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."

Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.

The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.

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.)

I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.

And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/

France has higher prices than several EU countries.

Spain in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.

It is a political choice. Pro-nuclear propaganda in Australia is all about the long time frames, and the fossil fuels needed until they start coming online. Climate targets get to be pushed back, scrapping 2030 targets in favor of 2050 targets. It keeps coal, gas and oil money flowing for another generation. And the problem of actually building and paying for the nuclear power plants is also next generations problem, as they are expected to all be over cost and delayed, and not a priority once all the new gas plants are online. Everybody knows all this, but nuclear still gets traction because when you put lipstick on it and take all the most optimistic estimates from the salesmen, it looks like a pro-environmental policy. One that the right and far right can get behind, because it is not what the greens are saying needs to happen and anything those communists want must be bad.

I don't know if it is similar in Canada. Solar is less viable, relying more on wind. And they have more experience building and running nuclear power plants.

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?

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.

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.

Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.

A lot of those rising costs are also due to a (much) heavier regulatory environment.

And the much heavier regulatory environment exists for a bloody reason.

The US alone spent billions to clean up superfund sites on the taxpayers dime (because companies created a huge mess in pursuit of profit and unhampered by regulation in the 20th century).

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.

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.

LCOE

Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.

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

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.

What doesnt add up? Almost all western industrialized nations are on a downward trajectory (or flat) regarding electricity use.

So there is simply little economic incentive to "greenify" electricity quickly because demand is already met by existing infrastructure.

Lots of people are completely unwilling to pay more for energy just to decrease emissions quickly (you might be surprised about peoples selfishness!).

But if you look at countries where electricity demand grows, you can clearly see renewables overtaking everything else; China had more growth in solar PV energy (GWh/y) in the last 2 years than nuclear power in 2 decades (and they're a pretty nuclear-friendly environment, too).

These Western countries are also still exporting their manufacturing and energy use to China. Meanwhile, Chinese CO2 emmissions are still increasing, regardless of how much renewables they are building. This would mean that the marginal cost of burning coal is still lower for them than the "dirt cheap" renewables, when accounting for everything. Either that or China can't count, which I doubt.

In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.

It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.

Always wanted to go to ... Uranium City.

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

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

Radium Hot Springs (BC), you mean? +Dildo (NF) +Dawson Creek (BC) +Regina (SK) +Snafu (YK) +Stoner (BC) +Climax (SK) +Radville (SK) +Emo (ON) +Crotch Lake (ON) +Sober Island (NS)

Elbow, Eyebrow, Heart’s Content, Heart’s Desire, and Heart’s Delight

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... !

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.

The trouble with molten salt thorium reactors is that they need an attached chemical plant that processes molten sodium mixed with radioactive elements. This is not something a utility wants to own, maintain, and operate. Here are some studies on such plants.[1] No full scale long-running salt reprocessing plant has ever been built.

The great thing about boiling water reactors is that you just have to handle water. The radioactive portion of the systems is simple. Which is good, because it can't be maintained much during the entire lifespan of the plant.

When you look at the history of nuclear reactors, almost all the problems involve plumbing. The less that can go wrong with the plumbing, over 60 years or so, the better. For molten salt reactors, the physics is promising, the chemistry is a pain (fluorine, for starters), and the plumbing has major corrosion and clogging problems (high temperature radioactive molten salts and pipes just do not get along, even with really exotic alloys.)

It's not impossible. But it's going to be prone to expensive problems, some of which probably will not be anticipated. Remember Ft. St. Vrain, the helium gas cooled reactor. Great idea. Ran for ten years. Even used some thorium. Troubles in the radioactive portion of the gas plumbing system meant it had to be shut down and dismantled.[2] That was sad, because it actually worked well for years.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1484689

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Saint_Vrain_Nuclear_Power...

I was at the first Thorium energy conference and presented a timeline for reactor development based on the timeline Oak Ridge had in the 1970s. I was still surprised that the Chinese nailed it!

These days I am more excited about Plutonium cycle reactors using chloride salts because they fix the problems of the FBR (occupational safety in fuel fabrication for one) and the fluoride salt reactors (having to dispose of used graphite cores). You do get some longer lived TRUs but you have so many excess neutrons you could burn some of the fission products. Most important the Pu cycle can be launched with the nuclear waste we already have, whereas the math doesn’t really work for launching LFTR.

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

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

That explains why Ontario built natural gas plants alongside its wind/solar rollout.

That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.

It needs nuclear to avoid using gas. Ren will be curtailed anyway. May as well curtail them for nuclear. Germany is a prime example of fossils+ren combo https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

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.

Will Alberta go along?

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.

Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.

An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.

Alberta ships through BC now and I think they’ve gone from half to full capacity. That profit might not survive Hormuz opening and unfortunately much of it leaves Canada.

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?

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

In Canada? I would have thought winter had by far the highest energy usage.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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-...

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).

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.

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.

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?

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.

Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)

One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.

I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.

If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.

But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.

Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.

The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.

Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable.

PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.

I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.

when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

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.

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.

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.

Solar farms come with batteries included these days https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-solar-farm-that-winds-down-a... and https://octopusaustralia.com.au/our-projects/fulham-solar-fa... and https://edp.com/en/asia-pacific/australia/merino-solar-farm and https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2026/06/23/australias-... That's a new trend and easy to miss but it will push out coal and gas.

And as much as a cyclist I dislike cars, the nice thing about electric cars is the potential that most often they can be charged at a time when it is convenient for the network. Mind you, cars just sit around 95% of the time.

The evening peak is well on its way to being a solved problem in Australia.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...

And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:

https://www.aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/renewables-li...

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.

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.

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

AtkinsRéalis (fka SNC-Lavalin) does build nuclear reactors and is headquartered in Montreal[0].

[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...

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.

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.

SMR's seem like a pipe dream tbh.

Why? It's a proven concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant

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

CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world

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...