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)
Firstly, the standard lifespan for modern solar panels is typically 25 to 30 years, while nearly all grid scale batteries are rated for 5000 to 8000 0-100% cycles, which is 13 to 20 years of daily cycling. If you are not completely discharging the batteries every day that lifetime can be far longer.
Secondly, it’s worth remembering that said rated lifespan is not when the pannel or battery stops working, but rather the point at which it hits 80% of the capacity it had when installed. This means that when that happens if you just do nothing for another decade or two, you are still getting well more than half of a brand new power plant’s worth of output for free, as this output is often not calculated in the cost of the plant. This also means you only need to replace panels on the same timeline as nuclear plants need far more expensive complete refurbishments.
Thirdly, yes, solar outputs less than it does in some parts of the world, which means you need proportionally more space and funding to build it. Still far less than the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, and as for land use, I was unaware that Canada was such a small dense country, completely devoid of parking lots much less vast grassland parries.
Finally, you realize that nuclear plants have far higher operational costs than wind and solar, with the Pickering plant for instance requiring over three thousand staff to keep operating, while most solar fields don’t even have a single full time employee?
Ultimately however, the largest demonstration that nuclear will not clean up Canada’s energy is that in the quarter century that Canada had known without doubt that it must replace its oil and gas plants, it has not tried to do so with nuclear despite building nuclear reactors only getting more and more expensive with each passing year. As such, of the government has so thoroughly demonstrated it is unwilling to replace oil and gas with a more expensive option, maybe we should focus our efforts on getting them replaced with less expensive options instead.
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)
Firstly, the standard lifespan for modern solar panels is typically 25 to 30 years, while nearly all grid scale batteries are rated for 5000 to 8000 0-100% cycles, which is 13 to 20 years of daily cycling. If you are not completely discharging the batteries every day that lifetime can be far longer.
Secondly, it’s worth remembering that said rated lifespan is not when the pannel or battery stops working, but rather the point at which it hits 80% of the capacity it had when installed. This means that when that happens if you just do nothing for another decade or two, you are still getting well more than half of a brand new power plant’s worth of output for free, as this output is often not calculated in the cost of the plant. This also means you only need to replace panels on the same timeline as nuclear plants need far more expensive complete refurbishments.
Thirdly, yes, solar outputs less than it does in some parts of the world, which means you need proportionally more space and funding to build it. Still far less than the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, and as for land use, I was unaware that Canada was such a small dense country, completely devoid of parking lots much less vast grassland parries.
Finally, you realize that nuclear plants have far higher operational costs than wind and solar, with the Pickering plant for instance requiring over three thousand staff to keep operating, while most solar fields don’t even have a single full time employee?
Ultimately however, the largest demonstration that nuclear will not clean up Canada’s energy is that in the quarter century that Canada had known without doubt that it must replace its oil and gas plants, it has not tried to do so with nuclear despite building nuclear reactors only getting more and more expensive with each passing year. As such, of the government has so thoroughly demonstrated it is unwilling to replace oil and gas with a more expensive option, maybe we should focus our efforts on getting them replaced with less expensive options instead.
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.