Nuclear Power Debate: Cost and Speed in Canada

Nuclear debate with Green Party of Canada (GPC)’s anti-nuclear consultant Dr. Gordon Edwards. Here’s an excerpt focusing on COST and SPEED.

Dr. Chris Keefer is his nuclear opponent who founded C4NE, Canadians For Nuclear Energy.

The full debate can be watched here: https://youtu.be/LvMC8TK025w

I’m particularly concerned about the rush to build a whole new generation of nuclear reactors when except for four reactors that were ordered in the southern United States. There has not been a single other reactor ordered in North America since before 1978. 25 years ago, nuclear provided 17% of the world’s electricity.

Today, it’s less than 10% and still going down. the older reactors, most of them are quite old, are going to be shut down faster than the new ones will be built. it’s really a question here of whether the climate change is an emergency or not.

Nuclear power is at least four times more expensive than renewable energies and at least four times slower to deploy. in combination you could build 16 times the renewable energy capacity with the same money and the same amount of time as building nuclear equivalents.

I think that you have to deal with the emergency as an emergency. You have to work fast to reduce carbon emissions. when nuclear reactors are planned and under construction, under licensing and so on, nothing is being done about greenhouse gases. But the key is energy efficiency.

We have to have an energy efficient, energy conscious energy conserving society. Canadians are very wasteful in energy. so right here in Ontario, again, 61% of our electricity is from nuclear. How long does it take to build our fleet? We commissioned 20 large CANDU reactors in 22 years.

Let’s talk about France for a second. 56 reactors commissioned in 15 years decarbonizing their electricity grids. You’ll hear a lot about four times faster. We produce a lot of wind and solar. That’s true. But Germany is number one source of electricity is coal. you know, Gordon,

If it’s true that you don’t support the immediate shutdown of nuclear, if you support the German shutdown, because it is a disaster for the climate. Gordon is absolutely right. Energy efficiency is key. However, we’re talking about electrifying everything. The consensus there is

We need, even with efficiency, to double or triple our electricity grid. When we were growing our grid rapidly here in Ontario, we quickly exhausted our hydroelectricity, Niagara Falls. We started building a lot of coal, the biggest coal plant in North America, in Nanticoke. These big eight boiler units, extraordinary things.

And we made a decision in the seventies to try nuclear and we did an amazing job of it. And we built those nuclear plants instead of coal plants. Pickering was supposed to be another whopper, like Nanticoke, a four gigawatt coal plant. like Nanticoke, a four gigawatt coal plant.

So if you want to talk about climate solutions and lives saved from avoided air pollution. Nuclear is certainly on the table and it can be done quickly. The demand is there now and that’s why nuclear’s back on the table. You don’t invest in really expensive capital intensive infrastructure

Like bridges, like hydro dams if they’re not going to get used. And it’s true, the last 20 years, you know, you build that thing and maybe it wouldn’t be good to sell those kilowatt hours. But now the emerging consensus is we need to grow the grid

So that we can not only mitigate climate change, but adapt to it. elderly people, mentally ill people die in heat waves. They need air conditioning. That requires energy desalination. the global average has been eight years around the world. Japan. Japan has achieved the numbers of every four years.

Once we get into good practice, as we have with our candu refurbishments, we’re currently refurbishing probably our entire fleet Those are mega-projects. They’re hard to do well, but we’re learning how to do them well. They’re ahead of schedule and on budget, and that gives me a lot of confidence

That we can move into building nuclear quickly. But the best time to build it was ten years ago. Second best time is now. AP1000 The price went from $12 billion to currently $28 billion, and they still have not really started producing electricity. the latest example of reactors in North America.

In Finland, they had a reactor that was ordered from Areva and it took 18 years to bring that reactor online, So these are promises that are not being kept in terms of rapidly building these reactors because they hadn’t built a reactor, as Gordon was saying, for 20 or 30 years.

That’s not the case here in Canada, where our workforce is teed up. Our supply chain is totally ready because we’re rebuilding our CANDUreactors one after the other. You know, I’ve interviewed some really impressive folks who used to work at Nanticoke, who now work in better, better paying

Jobs, better working conditions over in a nuclear plant. jobs, better working conditions over in a nuclear plant. the inflation adjusted cost of our candu build out here in Ontario was $55.4 billion. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, our Green Energy Act, solar and wind contracts of the last 15 to 20 years

Have the price tag of $60 billion by the time that their lifespan expires. CANDU fleet has produced 3300 terawatt hours to date by the end of the lifespan of the wind and solar we’ve installed in the last 15 or 20 years, they’ll have produced 200 terawatt hours.

That’s 16 times less for essentially the same cost and The value of the energy that we get out of our nuclear fleet is very high because we can match it to demand. You have to remember that electricity is not a commodity. if you look around the world where they deployed

If you look around the world where they deployed the most wind and solar in places like Germany and California, Germany, highest electricity prices in Europe, California, the lead deployed renewables, highest cost of electricity in the continental U.S. So something’s not making sense here. The developers are making a fortune, private developers mostly.

Whereas our Crown Corporation or publicly own nuclear assets are providing the second cheapest source of electricity on our grid after hydroelectricity. you’ll find that the Lazard Company has published figures on the cost. you’ll find that the Lazard Company has published figures on the cost. And nuclear is always at the top level

Of cost for energy production. They’re all small minded reactors. One of them is a micro modular reactor, Chalk River. One of them has a liquid sodium cooled reactor in New Brunswick. Another is a molten salt cooled reactor. And then there’s a boiling water reactor, which is American design, which being planned for Darlington.

So when when Chris is talking about CANDU and the Crown Corporation, this seems to be a misfit with what’s actually happening today. These are U.S. and U.K. companies who are selling their products here in Canada. And we are going to be facing the problems of the waste management Three generations

Of electricity from a nuclear reactor results in 300,000 generations of toxic waste management, and the cost of these are quite considerable. 26 billion, for example, is estimated for the cost of the existing waste. And these new reactors that are being planned right now are going to have waste, which are more difficult.

They’re going to be a number more radioactive than candu fuel, and they’re going to be more difficult to manage than can to fill. Those costs are not being assessed. Lazard actually just released another report recently, which was the cost of wind and solar plus firming plus batteries.

We don’t have enough lithium in the world. We don’t have enough batteries in the world to back up wind and solar. And that’s why we use natural gas and coal to do it. Nuclear works great with storage. Actually, a lot of nuclear plants were built with pumped storage. Next door.

And the great thing about nuclear plus storage is that how long you need to store for is a 24 hour cycle with wind and solar. It’s months, it’s seasonal. I’ll remind you, during our summer heat waves here in Ontario, you might notice, but there’s no wind blowing that sweat off your brow.

Wind fleet was operating at 6% capacity factor for two weeks last year during our hottest heat waves. When our grid demand maxed out. With the firming costs factored in, Lazard is saying wind and solar start to approach the price of Vogel. That nuclear plant in the U.S. that’s gone so over budget.

We brought up the cost of decommissioning, cost of waste management. You know, it’s incredible that nuclear is still the second cheapest source of electricity when it’s actually putting money aside for that. Right. So that 26 billion to build a deep geologic repository, that money

Sitting in then account gaining interest waiting to be used the decommissioning funds are there. No other source of electricity factors that in. You know, there’s no plan to recycle millions and millions and millions of solar panels.