The Ontario government’s new policy directive to allow bids from natural gas and nuclear energy may hinder the province’s ability to transition to a cleaner and more sustainable energy future.
The risk with nuclear isn’t safety, it’s in the cost overruns and ever expanding build timelines. When it at best takes ten years and twice the funding to match what battery backed solar can do in six months, there is significantly more time for things like inflation and fossil fuel funded lawsuits to turn what is already a questionably profitable investment into a significant loss.
When the primary thing limiting the energy transition is lack of funding, it makes sense to foucus said funding on renewables which can be built cheaply and quickly over more expensive and slower build methods like Nuclear, conventional Hydro, and deep Geothermal.
Solar is fast to install and “cheap” but the lifespan of panels is no more than 20 years, and batteries last 1s of years if cycled every day. Not to mention Ontario only gets ~1200kWh/m2 per year of sunlight, in the southern US it’s >2000.
Nuclear is very expensive and takes a long time to build you are getting a plant that will last for decades without needing to have every part replaced and gives you more than 20kWh/m2 including the area taken up by support buildings and employee parking. (The Pickering plant is about 1km2 and puts out 23.6TWh)
I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. A modem nuclear plant can run at 80-90% capacity and have an output of 1200MW. How many acres of solar panels are needed to achieve that power output, and how big would the energy storage systems be? Of course you can build solar distributed, but I think I recall equivalent area of solar panels for one modern nuclear plant is on the order of 10000s of acres. Building that with appropriate batteries and hooking it up could easily take a decade or more.
Anyway we should never aim to put all of our energy generation eggs in one basket. The technologies are complementary and diversity is a key principle of integrity and reliability of the supply.
The risk with nuclear isn’t safety, it’s in the cost overruns and ever expanding build timelines. When it at best takes ten years and twice the funding to match what battery backed solar can do in six months, there is significantly more time for things like inflation and fossil fuel funded lawsuits to turn what is already a questionably profitable investment into a significant loss.
When the primary thing limiting the energy transition is lack of funding, it makes sense to foucus said funding on renewables which can be built cheaply and quickly over more expensive and slower build methods like Nuclear, conventional Hydro, and deep Geothermal.
Solar is fast to install and “cheap” but the lifespan of panels is no more than 20 years, and batteries last 1s of years if cycled every day. Not to mention Ontario only gets ~1200kWh/m2 per year of sunlight, in the southern US it’s >2000.
Nuclear is very expensive and takes a long time to build you are getting a plant that will last for decades without needing to have every part replaced and gives you more than 20kWh/m2 including the area taken up by support buildings and employee parking. (The Pickering plant is about 1km2 and puts out 23.6TWh)
I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. A modem nuclear plant can run at 80-90% capacity and have an output of 1200MW. How many acres of solar panels are needed to achieve that power output, and how big would the energy storage systems be? Of course you can build solar distributed, but I think I recall equivalent area of solar panels for one modern nuclear plant is on the order of 10000s of acres. Building that with appropriate batteries and hooking it up could easily take a decade or more.
Anyway we should never aim to put all of our energy generation eggs in one basket. The technologies are complementary and diversity is a key principle of integrity and reliability of the supply.