5 ms·

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

• pfisch 4mo ago
  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...
  • triceratops 4mo ago
    > Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
  • stackghost 4mo ago
    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.
    • markvdb 4mo ago
      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.
      • stackghost 4mo ago
        >Not convinced. What, if anything, would convince you?
        • markvdb 4mo ago
          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.
          • DennisP 4mo ago
            Some of the GenIV designs would be compact and easily mass-produced. You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore. As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years. Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore. It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics. Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
  • AngryData 4mo ago
    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.
    • crote 4mo ago
      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.
      • themaninthedark 4mo ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boiler_explosions
        • pfisch 4mo ago
          Do you understand the scale of Chernobyl if they had failed to stop the meltdown? Half of eastern europe would be uninhabitable. It would've killed 100s of millions.
    • mpweiher 4mo ago
      It's even worse: the problems of that reactor type were, in fact, well-known at the time. Which is one of the reasons that reactor would never have gotten an operating license in any western country. Oh, and not having any containment.
  • foobarian 4mo ago
    Isn't that a little hyperbolic? Sure cancer rates will be elevated wherever the fallout blows but it's not going to end anything.
    • danielheath 4mo ago
      In terms of severity, Chernobyl was a long way from the worst case. If the core had melted down to a body of water, the steam flash could have vaporized it & ejected it high into the atmosphere. That's city-ending, if not quite "continent rendered uninhabitable".
    • Moldoteck 4mo ago
      The problem is more about Chernobyl affecting global nuclear deployments imo
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • leonidasrup 4mo ago
    When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths). Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
• pydry 4mo ago
  >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.
  • coryrc 4mo ago
    We're not allowed to flood valleys anymore, so pumped storage is not cheap. Maybe that would change if there was a climate emergency cough They could mass replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community and drop country-wide fossil fuel consumption about 1/3 and save money, but there's no big company pushing that.
  • samarthr1 4mo ago
    What if, we actually instead overbuild power gen and distribution, that it actually supresses price? Imo, the answer should always be, yes, build, please. Heavy industries (which support blue collar growth) come to places with cheaper power.
• jmyeet 4mo ago
  > 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_chernobyl_costs_report.pdf https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016... [2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
  • orthecreedence 4mo ago
    > 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?
• garbagewoman 4mo ago
  You think they shouldn’t negotiate with native tribes?
  • llbbdd 4mo ago
    If they're not building reactors on the land allocated to native tribes, why should they?
    • rhines 4mo ago
      That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.
    • Tiktaalik 4mo ago
      First Nations have treaties with Canada with constitutionally protected land use rights that have implications beyond tiny reserves. Rights to hunt and fish can be implicated by heavy industrial land use which compels a duty to consult. Doesn't mean that First Nations can veto a project, but also doesn't mean that all this can be ignored. All of this is more complex in British Columbia where in many places treaties were never signed and so the land is unceded and under unresolved land claim.
  • xp84 4mo ago
    Did the native tribes negotiate with whoever they last defeated? Or did Europeans literally invent the concept of conflict and war, and all the tribes of North America just filed into America in an orderly fashion and never battled each other? I'm not saying every square mile of land in Canada, America, Europe has been controlled by at least two distinct tribes or nations, and been fought over at some point since the dawn of man, however I would say that most desirable land probably has. Many cultures have been partly or fully wiped out over human history. It's sad in all cases, but I'm not convinced there's any purpose served by arbitrarily elevating some of those cultures as noble and deserving of special veto power. Note: I acknowledge that regardless of the above, Canada has formally granted them such powers anyway, so, yep, they get to live in that system they've created.
• Moldoteck 4mo ago
  It could take much less in Canada. And recent refurbs being on time and budget are encouraging. We'll see in fact Canada's capacity to deliver sooner, but not in Canada - Romania already signed for Cernavoda expansion to a full 4 unit plant.