Collaborative Proposal Creation

"So you're saying that nuclear power plants in China are awesome but solar PV panels from China are not. Huh! Have you scrutinized the labour and accounting practices of the Chinese nuclear industry too?"

No Tom. China's nuclear supply chain is probably not scrutinized in North America because Western nuclear doesn't depend on China. Not like Western solar depends on China. And if you are familiar with the use of rare earth magnets in wind turbines, not like how Western wind power depends on China as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-solar-companies-forced-labor-xinjiang.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/business/economy/china-forced-labor-solar.html

But now that you mention it, when I try to Google: nuclear china forced labour

...I only see stories about SOLAR FORCED LABOUR.

So it might be happening, but it certainly isn't being reported on.

"Yes, mega projects in general have budget and schedule overrun problems. That's another reason why wind, solar, and storage shine."

Ontario Energy Board Regulated Price Plan Price Report see Page 21:

https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20211022.pdf

Nuclear 9.6¢ /kWh
Hydro 5.8¢ /kWh
Gas 12.5¢ /kWh
Wind 15.4¢ /kWh
Solar 49.8¢ /kWh
Bioenergy 26.7¢ /kWh

"FOAK's are expensive, even more so when in the nuclear industry. Why throw $B's away on a wild card gamble when we have ready solutions that work now?"

Because the more you deploy intermittent energy, the greater the firming costs.

Because the first iPhone cost $150 million to produce, yet Apple sells them for ~$1000.

I'm not asking GPC roll out the red carpet for nuclear power. Just that we cease blanket opposition to the single lowest-carbon energy generation tech on planet Earth. Provinces and markets can then decide what sources of energy they'd like to pay for.

"You're complaining about human rights abuses in China then hold up UAE as a shining example of what to do? You have got to be kidding!?!?!"

Hmm.

David,

What I find surprising is the incredibly irrational faith some people have in nuclear power. Lazrd's cost numbers show that nuclear is the most expensive option. If you don't believe it then check out the world nuclear capacity figures published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) for the last 20 years. They are essentially flat. If nuclear is so awesome why isn't it growing?

Now, check out the IEA World Energy Outlook figures for the same period for wind and solar capacity. Explosive growth.

If nuclear is so cheap and fast why isn't the first SMR already finished? They've been at it for almost ten years. If CANDU is so awesome why is the nuclear industry now pushing SMRs? Sorry, your industry is just not supporting your own claims.

The French nuclear industry is held up as the pinnacle of nuclear achievement but last year half their national fleet was offline due to corrosion, maintenance issues, and rivers which were too hot to cool reactors due to (duh!) a heat wave. Also, EDF, the giant nuclear company in France which is building UK's vastly over-budget Hinkley Point C, had to be nationalized by France to save it from bankruptcy.

The most economical way to use storage is to fill it will cheap wind & solar energy. Plenty of energy system analysts have already done that math.

Back in 2014 I bought my first battery electric vehicle (BEV). Hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) advocates told me that HFC would win out despite the basic cost advantages of BEV over HFC. It was like the old mime showing all of the lines of a project diagram converging into a box saying "miracle happens". We are just repeating that debate with nuclear vs renewables. Nuclear just don't measure up in any possible way, unless that miracle you're wishing for happens.

The question isn't whether renewables will win over nuclear, they already have and major institutions such as the IEA and IPCC continue to confirm it. The question is how much time and money do we have to waste on nuclear before we can move on.

Tom, you close your argument with reference to the big, bad three: cost, time, and the risks associated with its waste.
So many people have pointed out that the waste problem is easy, already solved, and tiny, that I will not even go there. It is almost impossible to allay irrational fears.

The time problem is also imaginary. Everyone in this discussion must know that Ontario built 21 reactors in 21 years - so many that the province enjoyed a surplus of electricity for decades.
That was when Ontario had half the population and before huge improvements in technology. There is no technical or economic reason that Ontario alone could not build 63 reactors in 21 years. We would need a 5-year planning run-up, but we could have 2.5 times our current generation capacity by 2050. That is nearly enough to totally decarbonize the Ontario economy.

Finally, there is the old question of cost. You do know that except for the last reactors, Ontario's plants were delivered on time and on budget? That is like the Korean plants, the CANDU refurbishments, and most of the french system.
You know that the reason for the huge overruns at the end was political delays, regulation changes, and the 20% interest rate at the beginning of the 80s that drove up financing costs.
And you do know that the debt of Ontario Hydro was partly a political shifting of costs onto Hydro and partly due to a recession that cut hydro revenues from electricity sales?

Knowing all that, I imagine you are starting to lean in favour of the motion.

Tom, Advancing storage technology is not an argument for reneweables.

You listed a bunch of interesting and promising storage technology advances. Obviously, storage is great for nuclear. Nuclear can provide continuous power, so batteries can carry power produced at low demand times over into high demand high-value times. That is precisely the reason you want storage for wind and solar.

I think if you do the arithmetic you find storage solutions actually have a higher payoff with nuclear than with renewables.

Gordon,

So you're saying that nuclear power plants in China are awesome but solar PV panels from China are not. Huh! Have you scrutinized the labour and accounting practices of the Chinese nuclear industry too?

The enriched uranium required for many SMRs is only produced in Russia. Does that mean we should not develop those SMRs? Let me guess, you'll find another country to produce it...

Again, other countries produce solar PV panels. Prices bumps do not a trend make. Although nuclear has quite a lengthy trend of years of high cost even with direct and indirect subsidies from governments.

Yes, mega projects in general have budget and schedule overrun problems. That's another reason why wind, solar, and storage shine.

Refurbishments are not new builds but it is nice to see a project on schedule. The nuclear refurbishment in NB was a $1B+ financial disaster. That's a lot of coin for a province the size of NB. Even after that, the plant unexpectedly shutdown for months. We could have installed a lot of working wind, solar, and storage for $1B.

FOAK's are expensive, even more so when in the nuclear industry. Why throw $B's away on a wild card gamble when we have ready solutions that work now? The reason is lobbying from a well connected nuclear industry, not a legitimate solution for urgent climate action.

You're complaining about human rights abuses in China then hold up UAE as an shining example of what to do? You have got to be kidding!?!?!

By the time any SMR FOAK is successful, if ever, and trying to moving onto NOAK we could have the energy emissions problem solved without them. That's based on the nuclear industry's own timelines. Nuclear has simply been outclassed by the solar PV, wind and storage revolution. Nuclear is just a dangerous distraction and money pit.

"The IREN report"

...as I said, "solar panels from China use unsustainable forced labour in their supply chain"

Here is what the IREN report says:

"China was the key driver of the global decline in costs for solar PV and onshore wind in 2022, with other markets experiencing a much more heterogeneous set of outcomes that saw costs increase in many major markets."

That was BEFORE prices went up... the OTHER 2 URLS...

Process them all 3 together... the low-prices were in-part due to forced labour in China, the 2022 link. AND that prices have risen since.

Forced labour. Rising prices. Solar.

I'm not opposed to solar power. I don't think GPC needs to declare that an electron hitting a photovoltaic cell is a form of energy generation we simply can't abide!

Solar CAN be useful, and it CAN be harmful, if manufactured using forced labour.

It is simplistic to toss such a fundamental technology into a good-or-bad basket because of how the majority of it is manufactured today. In China. With forced labour. The poly-silicone is not at fault.

"Lots of wind turbines and solar PV panels are not made in China."

Lots of nuclear projects come in on-budget, on-schedule.

As of 2023, the CANDU refurbs ARE on-budget, on-shedule.

As of 2023, what solar-farms in Canada, what wind-farms in Canada are manufactured in Canada?

I can't find a database of solar farms that includes manufacturers, but I have checked out a database of wind-turbine manufacturers who supplied Canadian wind farms.

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/79fdad93-9025-49ad-ba16-c26d718cc070

...my Google Sheet of the data...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1smheiigesR_DFYhErVQrGW3rZFoFMKHQUGwmUP9QeEU/edit?usp=sharing

...what's your take on that? vs CANDU refurbs have >90% Canadian supply chain.

What do we do? Keep importing wind-energy hardware? If we're going to firm that energy, are we going to do it with domestic resources, or import those too?

All you need for reliable domestic low-carbon energy is CANDU (very similar to recent refurbs) and domestic natural uranium.

Could you please speak to SUPPLY CHAINS.

Could you please speak to RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS.

Please paint a picture of Canada manufacturing solar + wind + firming hardware.

As opposed to more CANDU (for example) and continued resource extraction of Canadian Uranium.

The resource (if domestic) implications of solar+wind+renewables are significant. Same (as we know) with hydrocarbon resource extraction.

https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options

Isn't it significant that UN ECE finds nuclear to be THE lowest-impact on the environment?

Tom,

"Stranded Debt"

The stranded debt encompassed more than just the costs associated with Darlington, there were pension liabilities and unfavourable power purchase agreements.

This charge was applied from 2002 though 2018. I'm citing Bruce's 2021 Annual Report.

"Nuclear power cost overruns are typical"

Megaproject cost over-runs are typical. BC's Site-C hydro project being a typical example.

Recent CANDU refurbs are megaprojects. In some ways, refurbishments are even more difficult than new builds. Unlike new construction, refurbishments occur within the tight confines of existing concrete structures, sensitive equipment, and radiation. Six years in, despite COVID, they're on-budget but ahead of schedule.

SMR might start out as mega projects... First Of A Kind projects are hard, and there's no telling how smoothly any FOAK SMR project will unfold. But once we're past FOAK we should have easily deployable hardware. Mass produced hardware. They won't be megaprojects.

Chinese, South Korean and Russian nuclear projects do not typically suffer cost over-runs. The very least expensive nuclear on Earth is Indian. UAE will be hosting COP28, and will be explaining to us how they transitioned 25% of their nation's electricity consumption from hydrocarbon combustion to nuclear power with Barakah. There are many examples beyond just CANDU refurbs of nuclear projects NOT spiralling out of control. And all it should take is a single example to make the case that nuclear projects can go smoothly if properly managed. WESTERN mega-project style nuclear cost-over-runs are typical. But Canadian nuclear mega-projects are NOT, with CANDU refurbs. And world-wide nuclear mega-projects are NOT, with South Korea, China, India and Russia demonstrating what is possible.

Colin,

The learning cycle is so fast with these renewable technologies, esp. compared with nuclear, that the implementation gets cleaner each year.

I've not seen any references to problems with silicon mining. But there are lots of examples of how renewable technology has quickly adapted to address issues. Cobalt is no longer used for grid storage batteries. (https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tesla-shifts-battery-chemistry-for-utility-scale-storage-megawall/600315/) The Salton Sea in the US has been identified as a huge clean source of lithium. (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/04/the-salton-sea-could-produce-the-worlds-greenest-lithium.html).

Oh, and iron-air batteries are expected be commercially available in 2024. They use iron and air and may be as little as 10% of the cost of lithium-ion batteries. (https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/)

To reduce the need for mining, recycling is being put in place for all renewable technologies: solar PV, lithium-ion batteries, and wind turbines all have high levels of recycling and/or reuse. Yes, even wind turbine blades are now recycled (https://www.up-to-us.veolia.com/en/recycling/recycling-used-wind-turbine-blades), some places have found it worthwhile to dig them up to recycle them. Manufacturers are now making blades even easier to recycle. (https://newatlas.com/energy/ge-worlds-largest-recyclable-wind-turbine-blade)

Nuclear reactor equipment and radioactive waste can't be recycled. Calling the reprocessing of nuclear waste "recycling" is nuclear industry spin. The process is risky and, even if it works, very little material is extracted for use. That material is plutonium which make the process is a nuclear weapons proliferation risk. Also, the process produces liquid radioactive waste which is even more difficult to maintain than the original solid waste. Now, ignoring those risks places us all at a grossly unfair disadvantage. (https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-reprocessing-dangerous-dirty-and-expensive)

I'm not sure what you mean by "highly variable solar record". Solar has an excellent track record of falling costs and predictable performance, it's called weather forecasting.

Nuclear needs to be ignored since its empty promises are just those of an industry that's trying to save itself, not the biosphere. The cost and time required to deployed nuclear and the risks associated with its waste just make it a distraction from the clean, fast, affordable and effective solutions we have today.

Climate change needs action now, not expensive grand promises from a defunct nuclear industry.

Tom, you are right, "There is an energy revolution happening in solar, wind and storage. We ignore it at our peril." I dont think this motion is doing so, rather asking that we NOT ignore nuclear.

But, what we continue to ignore with solar, wind and storage, is that these energy sources, while green in the sense of their fuel, are far from green in their implementation. They are all doing enormous damage to the environment through their mining, processing and delivery (silicon in particular). Ignoring these costs, and then also ignoring the highly variable solar record, puts nuclear at a grossly unfair disadvantage.