[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Table 5

I know SMR's are the hot thing to talk about, and I think more exploration/research makes sense, but I wish Alberta (and Canada in general) would just forge ahead with a large scale plant design that is already existing and proven first. The biggest impediment to nuclear is the time it takes for permitting and regulations, so the more efficient we can make the process the better. There are 60 reactors under construction around the world (and 110 planned)...it would probably be most efficient to pick whatever design we think works best/safest from S.Korea or France etc, and go forward with that. A 1 Gigawatt reactor can power about 750,000 homes (and most large scale plants range from 1-7 Gigawatts). Let's build one around Calgary and one around Edmonton, and we should be sitting pretty for decades while the SMR stuff figures itself out.

I agree that large nuclear should continue to be supported, but Alberta is not well suited for GW scale plants the way somewhere like Ontario is. The already proven CANDU EC6 would be an excellent choice for Alberta, for instance. What OPG and Capital Power are talking about is a 300MWe design from GE-Hitachi called the BWRX-300, and would be one of dozens of such reactors being delivered as part of an expansion strategy that OPG has been quietly assembling for years. Darlington, Saskatchewan (likely Estevan area), and Poland have committed to ~90 units in total, Alberta would be added to that list.

Keep in mind that the last time Alberta got into heavy petting stages with a nuclear build, it was for TWO twin ACRs. The ACR has a design output of 1,100MWe per reactor, so it would have added 4,400MWe to the grid at a time when the grid was about 8,000MWe, did not have meaningful interconnection between the north and south, did not have a meaningful amount of gas fired cogeneration being supplied by SAGD sites, was at a time when AECO gas prices touched $12/GJ, and carbon pricing was an itch in Gilbo's greasy nutsack. Things are very different today.

That project stopped because AESO could not wrap it's head around how to maintain uptime in the event the system lost 1.1GWe due to a trip event or whatever reason. They asked if the capacity could be built in smaller bites, but AECL was not in the business of selling it's smaller capacity designs at the time, so it all went away.

Now we have a 12 GW demand peak, and ironically 4.5GW of nameplate wind that can at any time (typically the WORST times), crap out and provide exactly zero. Single 50-100MWe installations do not receive the amount of reliability scrutiny that a single GWe plant would (reasonably so), but here we are with a system that behaves as if we have a jittery nuke plant because of the amount of VRE and the nature that VRE experiences common mode failures (both predictable and random), and therefore do not provide inherent redundancy or resilience.

If you believe in the future of electrification (EVs, Heat pumps, BES back up), this would add roughly 25GWe in new demand to our profile. Even MORE if you believe what Shell and others believed at the time of the Lac Cardinal project about electric based production of bitumen resource from carbonate formations. Even MORE if you believe there is a future in providing excess export capacity for Western Grid Regions more broadly. And if you believe in all of that and are willing to pre-invest, then sure, go for the GW scale builds.

Personally, I don't think it's a bad idea to let the government and local talent develop with smaller projects to begin with. I'm not saying AB will NEVER see GW scale plants built, but it would surprise me.

This is not including the potential for high temperature SMRs to be co-located with major heat consumers in the province. Remember, only 7% of our total energy consumption is in the form of electricity. We have a WAY bigger project on our hands in addressing how to make our thermal demand and our energetic substitution demand more sustainable. The only viable way I see to do this is with fission heat. While the OPG-CP announcement about the BWRX will not address this need directly, it will lay a lot of foundation towards taking on that much larger task.

Originally Posted by opendoor

Alberta would likely have to change the whole electricity market for nuclear to work. As far as I'm aware, there are essentially zero examples worldwide of nuclear being built in a deregulated market, as its viability normally depends on state-run or heavily regulated utilities setting prices.

In an open market, nuclear can't compete at current energy prices. That's why the US government is spending billions of dollars every year to subsidize plants in deregulated markets so they can stay open. And those are existing plants which have already incurred the capital costs of construction. The math gets even tougher with new plants.

There's a lot to say about this topic for sure, and I would expect changes in Alberta to come if it happens. But the fact is that jurisdictions with significant contributions from fission enjoy some of the lowest and most stable total delivered system prices to end users; and in comparison, there are NO markets with significant contributions from VRE that enjoy low or stable prices. Hydro is the exception. Nuclear is basically hydro for places that have no water, with far less environmental footprint.

IMO delivered costs to end users are the only numbers that actually matter. Everything else is subject to deep biases being promoted, and homie don't play that.

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Didn't Canada once have a government owned research arm for nuclear? What happened to that?

AECL shut down Whiteshell in Manitoba in 1996, but bundled Chalk River in the IP deal it made with SNC-Lavalin under Harper around 2014. CNL continues to operate Chalk River and several other smaller facilities under their operating agreement.