That’s an accurate but misleading description of what’s going on because Ontario is part of a much larger grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss... It’s like saying a town next to a nuclear power plant is 90% nuclear, that’s “true” but only works because other areas don’t rely on 90% nuclear.

Just like the town, Ontario exports power to other areas and imports non nuclear power. If everyone used 50-60% nuclear there wouldn’t be anyone to export that power to on low demand weekends etc which would drive up prices. The area also has a great deal of hydroelectric power which reduces the need for peaking power plants.

Nuclear has already played a significant role in reducing climate change, but it just can’t economically scale to supply nearly as much power as wind and solar. And much worse when you have a high percentage of Wind and Solar adding Nuclear to the mix just doesn’t work very well because base load power becomes less valuable.

It's not just about the cost. The mix of nuclear and locally-available gas and hydroelectric makes for a self-sufficient energy strategy, and that has always been a major concern. Yes, Ontario is synchronized with the US grid but it could disconnect if necessary. Electricity is a valuable but not critical export economically.

As with France, a substantial influence on historic policy was to build surplus generation for economic security reasons. Could have just imported coal and oil. But Ontario does not have much coal or oil. Same with Quebec and hydroelectric.

Renewables provide the same sort of decentralized benefit, of course.

At the scale of the worldwide electricity grid cost is a major concern.

If the difference was a few billion globally then that’s trivial compared to the issues from climate change, but you can’t hand wave things once the difference starts crossing into the trillions.

France was able to heavily subsidize Nuclear and while their economy took a real hit it wasn’t such a big deal. Bangladesh and other developing countries simply aren’t capable of making those kinds of trade offs and nobody is going to subsidize nuclear power in the 3rd world on the scale they would need.

> Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s - 1990s.

Cf, "Supply" tab:

* https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But what happens on the weekend when power drops even more?

Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

Based on the graphs from that site, demand never drops low enough to need to lower the output of the nuclear plants.

Nuclear isn’t the only type of power that has low marginal costs. Curtailing wind for nuclear is just as much an economic loss as curtailing nuclear for wind.

Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity plans, not only nuclear.

Renewables are even more susceptible to this because the weather affects all renewable plants of the same type similarly across wide geographic areas, so there will be times when they all generate more than is needed and nothing can be done about it. What's worse, the output is unpredictable, so there's little opportunity for some business to base its operation on renewable electricity generation patterns.

At least the weekend demand drop is predictable, so businesses can use this predictable opportunity to reduce their costs and thus reduce the impact the weekends have on the profitability of nuclear and similar dispatchable plants.

Low is relative, in most areas a 3c/kWh wholesale price is wildly profitable for solar and a massive loss for nuclear.

Renewables very much provide surplus power at scale, but they don’t always provide that massive surplus. So, Solar could provide 3/4 of its power when wholesale prices are below 1c/kWh and the economics still end up working out over the year. Meanwhile every other source of power needs to deal with electricity being increasingly cheap for most of the day.

> At least the weekend demand drop is predictable, so businesses can use this predictable opportunity to reduce their costs and thus reduce the impact the weekends have on the profitability of nuclear and similar dispatchable plants.

There’s almost nothing nuclear can do to reduce its costs when demand is low for a few days. They still need to pay interest, still need security guards, the reinforced concrete is still aging etc. They do major maintenance when seasonal demand drops normally in the spring or fall, but they don’t have any way to make use of downtown over weekends because weekends are so frequent. In a world with cheap electricity for 1/3 the day and cheap electricity 2/7 days a week and cheap electricity for 3-6 months out of the year, they need very high prices the rest of the time to break even.

> So, Solar could provide 3/4 of its power when wholesale prices are below 1c/kWh […]

Except at night.

Batteries fed cheap solar power can provide relatively cheap peaking power whenever you want. That’s going to effectively be the maximum daily wholesale price per kWh long term.

Wind/Hydro and possibly some Nuclear might survive in that kind of an environment, but most industry insiders think Nuclear is basically doomed without truly massive subsidies.

Small problem, we don't have enough batteries to power even one large city for a day and we won't have those for at least a decade.

A decade is fine.

While it would be nice if all the required nuclear or storage was installed decades ago, (1) we don't need to do this transition overnight, (2) a decade is on the optimistic side for rolling out new nuclear on this scale so it's not much of an improvement in that regard, and (3) most of the existing power infrastructure can be kept running until the batteries are available, and we get to keep looking at storage supply in the supply is still growing appropriately for the targets.

>Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity plans, not only nuclear.

No, it's worst for the more expensive, capital intense sources.

Gas is expensive but not capital intense. An idled plant doesnt lose too much because fuel costs dominate. Solar/wind is capital intense but not expensive - idling is cheap if the whole thing is cheap.

Nuclear power is capital intense and expensive. Idling burns through a lot of cash.

> Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money even faster than they are right now.

Note that Ontario Power Generation, who owns all the nuclear plants in Ontario, has a positive net income of roughly 20% of gross, and is building Canada's first new nuclear plant in a couple decades. Your generalization is incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Power_Generation

Sure they own nuclear but they also own a great deal of hydroelectric.

Their finances are very healthy because they essentially got 50 billion in assets from privatization of public assets including a great deal of very low maintenance hydroelectric generation and significant nuclear again without any upfront cost.

Things don’t look nearly as rosy when you consider their generating $1.20 billion in net profits off of 60 billion in assets - 10 billion in debt.

Yes, debt financing is awful, and something that has guaranteed long term revenue but large up front capital costs is something that should be publicly owned (i.e. a crown corporation like OPG), not financed by private debt.

> But what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops even more?

Umm… generation is taken offline?

Usually Gas and Hydro if renewables are available. If renewables drop then Gas and Hydro are brought back up.

It’s not just that power is taken offline but wholesale prices drop at the same time. In extreme cases the grid will charge you money for every kWh you’re dumping on it. That’s obviously not a profitable time to be generating electricity.

>Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province

Even after 50 years you have accumulated only a small percentage of the total costs related to the plant. They will most likely cost more money after they have been decommissioned than they did during operation.

This is a straightforward lie. Decommissioning a nuclear power plant down to a "brown field" can cost about 10% of its construction cost. Even grossly mismanaged decommissioning projects are at about 25%.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating...

Nuclear decommissioning costs in the UK are estimated to reach £260 billion[1]. It would be interesting to compare that to the inflation-adjusted construction costs for the plants. My suspicion is that it’s significantly higher.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

This is mostly because of the Sellafield site, which was used for nuclear weapons production. It's also the site of the infamous Windscale nuclear reactor fire.

The US has the same problems with Hanford.

But I don't think this is fair to ascribe these costs to modern civilian nuclear power programs.

It's not a lie, I am obviously not talking about the cost of decommissioning but the costs that keep ticking after the decommissioning has been done.

Rancho seco is an interesting example, it was closed in 1989 and is still costing millions today. "SMUD estimates that it spends roughly $5 million each year to essentially "babysit" the waste, which requires tight security and a small crew to oversee its proper storage”

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article210858009.html"

Also worth noting is that the DoE has paid SMUD over 100 million dollars to date for contract violations (failing to present a storage site for the waste).

The funny thing is that operators book this money as _income_ related to the nuclear plant, when it is in fact costs to the taxpayers.

Also keep in mind of course that if and when SMUD finally gets rid of the waste, that only stops the costs ticking for SMUD, not for the taxpayers.

This is only if you demolish them, which makes as much sense as demolishing the Hover Dam.

There is nothing intrinsic that requires the plant to be ripped apart. It can be run indefinitely like any large concrete structure.

What are you basing these statements on?

Take the UK as an example. It’s estimated that to decommission our former nuclear sites (built between the 1950s and 1980s) will cost around £260 billion [1] and take 120 years to complete.

This includes the cost of decommissioning closed nuclear plants, disposing of waste, and cleaning up contaminated sites.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

The UK is very much an outlier in the nuclear sector as they went with impossible to refurbish gas cooled reactors. Their experience is unlikely to resemble other countries.

In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.

>In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.

That was the plan, but it has failed. The mechanism varies but the end result is the same - the operator doesn't pay the actual costs, so they don't charge the actual costs from the customers. The actual costs are paid by taxpayers from some anonymized bucket of money, like a government entity.

As an example, the DOE has so far paid over 100 million USD to SMUD for the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant and will continue to pay for decades more. The operator doesn't pay - the government does.

This has been proven to be true in best-case scenarios like the US, France, Germany and Sweden, and of course once anything deviates from best-case the costs become astronomical almost immediately (Japan).

Without doing a lick of research into the particulars of this plant the statement scans based on storage requirements for high level radioactive waste alone. Some of this shit has to be stored for several multiples of recorded civilization before it becomes anything like safe. We're talking borderline geologic time scales.

Fortunately that's not true. The fission products that are actually dangerous only stick around for 300 to 600 years [1]. After that, you'd have to ingest what is left to be harmed. We have existing facilities [2] in the US where we can bury waste in such a way that it essentially becomes crystalized in salt after 100 years. Water moves centimeters per billion years in this salt. This one facility could easily service the entire country in perpetuity, even with 100x increase in nuclear energy.

Despite what the antis will tell you, the waste aspect of nuclear energy is overwhelmingly positive. And the crazy thing is, spent nuclear fuel isn't even waste. 90% of the energy is still in there. So why on earth would you bury it?

[1]:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fs4euEoWYAAx65C?format=jpg&name=... [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6no0FmPk84

Except it is true because Pu-239 and other transuranic isotopes absolutely are a thing. In the case of Pu-239 it's half-life is ~20,000 years. Given the 10 half-life minimum storage requirements for high level radioactive waste, we're at 200,000 years, which is 40 times the length of recorded human history or if you prefer 2/3 of the time our species has provably existed on the planet.

Nope, half life is inversely proportional to danger. The longer the half life, the less dangerous it is to handle an isotope. You can hold Plutonium and Uranium in your hand without issue.

You'd have to eat lots of Pu-239 to get sick and we know this for a fact unfortunately because of the insane story of Albert Stevens [1] who got the highest radiation dose of any known human and lived to be 79. He was one of 18 people injected with plutonium. None of the patients died from the injections. Why injection instead of ingestion? Because the body is actually very bad at absorbing Pu when it is eaten.

Let me just emphasize again that we INJECTED A MAN WITH PURE PLUTONIUM and he was fine. Nuclear waste is not the problem you think it is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

Nuclear waste contains a lot more than plutonium (and also a lot more plutonium than was injected into Albert Stevens).

The sad fact is that nobody has correctly estimated how big a problem nuclear waste is. We keep having to pay more for it than any previous estimate predicted.

You can hold these isotopes in your hand for how long without issue? I've got known alpha and gamma emitters in the house as we speak (side effect of fossil hunting in the Morrison formation) so I'm not exactly harboring some delusion that radioactive == WERE ALL GOING TO DIE. You don't get to use short-term exposure non-effects to sweep long term exposure effects under the rug, and given the only institution in recorded history that has maintained it's existence long enough to even start considering them viable to manage a nuclear waste containment project is the Catholic Church I'd say yeah it absolutely is the problem I think it is.

Indefinitely since they are alpha emitters. This kind of radiation is stopped by almost anything like paper and the dead outer layer of skin and so is harmless unless you ingest the source.

Fact is, the waste that everyone is worried about (used nuclear rods) is not actually waste. 90%+ of the energy is still in there. It's just that the dominant reactor technology isn't designed to extract it. It would be dumb to bury this energy. It would be better to reprocess it like France does or even better, build the kinds of reactors that can directly use it as fuel.

Then you're left with fission products that you can bury it several kilometers underground in a deep borehole using oil/gas technology. It will naturally decay away in 300 to 600 years. Remember, most industrial toxins are toxic forever. There is no amount of time that will render it safe, and we don't even particularly try to isolate it because there's so much. It is only for nuclear waste that we try so hard. And it's only feasible because there's so little of it. All the spent nuclear rods (civilian) the US has EVER produced in 70 years fits in a football field at 30 feet high. Meanwhile a single coal plant produces 1100 tons of just ash a DAY. Not to mention all the air pollution and greenhouse gases. A single plant.

The waste aspect of nuclear energy is amazingly convenient in comparison.

Nah. You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles, and while you might be perfectly happy to hold an alpha emitting isotope in your hand you're gonna feel a lot different once you start ingesting them. As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude, and you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move. End of the day you're dead-ass wrong, as is evidenced by the fact that longterm stable storage of high level nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem despite the technology you're proposing having existed in some capacity for roughly a century before the first functional nuclear power plant went online.

> You ignore the fact that alpha emitters (like literally anything else) can crap up their surroundings with micro-particles

What on earth are you talking about? You realize you are full of alpha emitters?

> As stated above your 600 year timescale is off by close to three orders of magnitude

Nope, see this chart: https://whatisnuclear.com/img/ingestion-radiotoxicity-nuclea...

> you appear to be pretending groundwater either doesn't exist or can't move

That's why you bury it in rock where it doesn't move and we know it doesn't. Like the Permian Basin or where the Oklo natural reactors occurred in Gabon.

Oh yes, did you know nature formed fission reactors billions of years before we did ever existed? This always pisses off the hippies when I tell them. And guess what? The fission products from this natural process moved mere centimeters over 2 billion years.

This is a solved problem. It's just that some people desperately want it not to be.

I base it on common sense and several known examples. The common sense part is that we know that we have to keep managing the waste after the plants no longer produce any energy, or money. Managing the waste costs money, and since we can't make estimates for even a decade into the future it's self-evident that we don't know what 500 years of storage will cost.

Secondly from known examples where the logic has already proven itself in practice.

One example is France, where the taxpayers have recently had to pay over 50 bn euros in costs that were never planned or paid for by the operator.

Another example is the cleanup costs for the German Asse II storage site. Several billion Euros for the cleanup alone, and the things you extract from that site will have to be stored someplace else at high cost as well, so the costs will keep ticking. Operators don't pay that either, taxpayers do.

Another example is Sweden, where they have a storage facility for second-rate waste, (i.e. low-intensity waste), which is mandated to operate for at least 500 years. It is currently employing over 100 highly qualified people and is going to grow over the next few decades.

This facility is currently underfunded for its planned operations, and please note that this is not even accounting for the costs of handling high-intensity waste. This site will only manage secondary waste, like contaminated pipes, pumps, filters and such - so the actual total costs are severely underestimated. Taxpayers in Sweden will have to pay these costs in the years to come.