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Canada’s nuclear drive picks up speed [Reuters]
(www.reuters.com)
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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.