Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Originally Posted By: Trav
I wish they would work on safer nuclear power, that would solve so many problems but unfortunately lobbying is legal (IMO it should be a felony punishable by imprisonment for bribing politicians like that) and the gas, oil and oil companies wont allow that to happen at any cost as long as 10c worth of oil is in the ground.
Fossil fuels are a horror that needs to be minimized. I am no environmental nut job but we do live in a polluted world and IMHO there is not need to add more to it than we really have to. No don't throw the A/C units out.
The problem isn't safer nuclear power, it basically boils down to the cost per megawatt. Basically the cost is too high relative to the other options out there like gas turbines, solar and wind.
It has nothing at all to do with lobbying by gas/oil companies. It's the economics itself that doesn't work. You need to borrow lots of money for years without any production and with cost overruns, it's the rate payers who end up stuck with higher bills. It's been true historically where areas that had nuclear power plants built got stuck with higher rates than others that didn't have them. There's no evil conspiracy when simple economics is the answer most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Well, we can completely ignore wind and solar in that comparison because they cannot compete with Nuclear on density, reliability, load-following, lifespan...etc. They are in no way a drop-in for anything doing baseload. Now, GT's, that's a whole other discussion. Gas is cheap and so are gas plants when compared to building nuclear. The regulation and approval process is nowhere near as complex or expensive and so it is the "easy choice", despite having ~50% of the carbon emissions of coal. Ontario could have built two nuclear plants with the amount of money we wasted on wind and solar (that's not an exaggeration) and they barely account for a blip in our generating mix, of which almost 90% is nuclear and hydro-electric.
If we really cared about this stuff, we would build nuclear. It is a drop-in replacement for any fossil source and we've proven that in Ontario where our coal was almost entirely eliminated by nuclear reactivation and refurbishment (70%), and because it was existing nuclear, at quite reasonable cost.
As you've correctly indicated, new build nuclear requires a ton of up-front capital and long-term amortization. That, on top of the immense amount of red tape to be gone through makes them unattractive. While they are building them in China where there is no anti-nuclear lobby and the government does what it wants, in the rest of the world there is a lot of "GreenPeace"-style activism against it. All of the nukes in Canada were built through ventures that involved two Crown entities: AECL (Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Federal) and their respective provincial partner, which, in Ontario was Ontario Hydro (now OPG), in New Brunswick, NB Hydro and in Quebec, Hydro Quebec. While we have had private companies looking at new builds (Bruce Power) the only new build that was actually going to go ahead was that of OPG, who was going to, as recently as 6 years ago, build 2-4 ACR1000 1,200MW units at their Darlington site until that plan was squashed by the then-governing idiot Dalton McGuinty, and this was AFTER they had gotten all of the approvals and were ready to break-ground
Basically, you won't get private companies to build traditional nuclear power plants. They are too expensive, the build times too long and the time until an ROI is realized, also too long. That's where SMR's come in where the idea is that the modular construction and significantly lower capital costs will make them viable for small utilities and companies who can stomach the 600 million pricetag, versus the potential 10's of billions for a traditional plant.
