[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.

[mixdup]

>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

[OJFord]

> 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.

[nancyminusone]

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.

[cwillu]

15 years, to be clear.

[jmyeet]

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...

[fooster]

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.

[xp84]

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.

[loloquwowndueo]

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.

[rickydroll]

> 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.

[phil21]

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.

[awesome_dude]

> 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.