Kanada hat gelernt, gut in der Kernenergie zu sein
https://infrastory.substack.com/p/rebuilding-nuclear-reactors-is-hard
Kanada hat gelernt, gut in der Kernenergie zu sein
https://infrastory.substack.com/p/rebuilding-nuclear-reactors-is-hard
2 Kommentare
What they don’t tell you about is how much extra it will cost Ontarians. Nuclear is much, much more expensive than renewables.
A good rule for nuclear is 1. you can have it safe 2. you can have it reliable 3. You can have it affordable. Pick two.
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ontario-power-generation-rate-increase-application-electricity-nuclear/
> Will soaring electricity rates kill Ontario’s nuclear expansion? Future plans include what would be two of the largest nuclear plants on Earth, which will cost hundreds of billions of dollars https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-will-soaring-electricity-rates-kill-ontarios-nuclear-expansion/
> Could a new nuclear reactor double or triple electricity rates in New Brunswick? https://nbmediacoop.org/2026/04/13/could-a-new-nuclear-reactor-double-or-triple-electricity-rates-in-new-brunswick/
> Ontario’s Latest Nuclear Megaproject Confronts Soaring Cost Concerns The Wesleyville proposal arrives as Ontario faces rising nuclear electricity prices tied to refurbishments of aging reactors. According to Michael Barnard at Clean Technica, OPG has asked the Ontario Energy Board to raise the regulated price it receives for nuclear power from about $78 per megawatt-hour in 2026 to roughly $110/MWh in 2027. https://www.theenergymix.com/ontarios-latest-nuclear-megaproject-confronts-soaring-cost-concerns/
Ontario is now stuck with decades of super expensive power as other jurisdictions go to renewables that are cheaper and cheaper build and more scalable.
Nuclear math is tricky. 1) you have to price in the mandatory nature of baseload power and specifically the need for AC to be connected to real dynamos spinning keeping sync. Right now the EAFs at Algoma Steel are doing real havoc to the grid because they draw so load the grid starts to lose sync and AC systems don’t like that. I know a ISP that can see the power issues in their power data. Ontairo is a place where we are use to very clean line power and aren’t use to expensive electronics dying due to grid instability. Why? Hydro and Nuclear means massive amounts of real dynamos moving with momentum. Look at Spain’s recent blackout due to renewable DC instability.
2) people who say renewables (DC systems) never really price in the real cost of storage, pumped hydro or batteries, the mining requires the fact batteries degrade so you have life cycle costs and mining/manufacturing pressures. Nor do they price in rectifiers and the cost of building a stable DC renewables to AC grid which is largely still a unknown.
3) nuclear in Ontario a legacy of our scientific achievements especially in the 30s and 40s, has a massive supply chain in Ontairo that’s supports lots of GDP – a measurement of *economic activity* which supports 10s of 1000s of high paying careers and trades that have lots of knock on effects. Maybe if we just kept building nuclear instead of doing the Green Energy Act we might be able to build transit and other large scale projects because we’d have some capable project managers and tradesmen and the entire ecosystem of building big complex shit
4) CANDUs which are great great reactor designs because they already are modular are effectively century + assets so the true cost of nuclear needs to account for intergenerational assets that give us low cost base load. You refurb them and replace some pressure tubes and not the whole pressure vessel like some other designs and it can keep running for another 30 years.
*The CANDUs are the greatest achievement of Canadian political economy.*
The fact Ontario made a *massively expensive misadventure into the Green Energy Act which was an attempt to build a supply chain in Ontario* (industrial policy) – but I am more and more suspecting was really just a way to funnel cash into the TSX through private generation and grossly inflated feed in tariffs (
returning cash to shareholders) – while doing *large scale nuclear refurbishments* a very expensive endeavour, and still has low to middle of the pack energy prices in North America I think tells you it – nuclear- can’t be that expensive. We already blew a huge wad on the grossly inflated feed in tarrifs because the OLP was afraid to touch nuclear and kicked that can down the road because CFL light bulbs where reducing demand temporarily. Ontairo peak electricity demand is IIRC August 2006.