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

p2detar

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...

_aavaa_

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%?

chollida1

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.

sleepyguy

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.

whh

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

fsuts

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.

BIGFOOT_EXISTS

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

preisschild

CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world

NuclearPM

We are trying.

mig39

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

panny

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.

martinbfine

But what do they do with the waste? And how much fresh water is that going to use?

patmcc

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.

thelonelyborg

would be good

shevy-java

Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal. Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.

cmrdporcupine

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.

zuzululu

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

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

motohagiography

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.

slicktux

That’s great news ! Have they also solved the nuclear waste problem? Honest question; here in the USA we have not.