The Energy Transition and technologies

[Tiger]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

^ This is why high rise wood construction is so important. It reduces concrete use, and also sequesters a bunch of carbon.

I never got this argument. Wood is already sequesters carbon. So making stuff out of wood is not sequestering more carbon. it is just cutting down more large forest so smaller forests can grow, and they in turn don't take as much CO2 out of the air until they are grown to the same size.

Burning biomass instead of coal for the same reasons seems stupid to me. Like lets burn inefficient coal precursors instead of coal. Doesn't move the needle much in my opinion, with the argument being the trees grow back in 30 years.

[ripTDR]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

The cement industry is one of those "hard to abate" sectors. It's responsible for 8% of all GHG emissions which is more than almost all countries.

To understand why it's so tough to eliminate emissions, you need to know a bit about how cement is made. Concrete is essentially Cement + water +/- aggregate. The cement is the emissions intensive stuff. Cement is made by mixing silicates (a bunch of fairly common rocks) with a product from limestone that's been heated. To make the cement, you need to turn limestone (CaCO3) into Calcium oxide (CaO) by removing a CO2. To do that we heat up a large kiln to 900°F, then 1400°F and the carbon dioxide releases from the limestone. Total emissions from cement production are approximately 50% from the coal used to heat the kiln and 50% from the process of removing the CO2 from the limestone. That means that even if you fully electrified the heating (which many have tried to no success so far), you've only eliminated half of the emissions. On the chemical side, some companies have found ways to add materials like coal ash to decrease CO2 emitted by making the reaction more efficient, but you can only decrease it so much. Some companies have found alternate building materials in place of concrete, but they are expensive and don't have the same properties.

A new company, Sublime Systems, has found a new way to get the Calcium Oxide from non carbonated rocks at room temperature in an electrically powered process. This means you can now completely remove emissions from both sides of the equation. They've made their first production plant and are actively selling cement now, but it's small volume. They have plans to open a megaton production facility by 2026, but that's still 2 years away. The biggest issue with scaling the technology is due to the logistics of the concrete industry. It's very cheap, heavy, voluminous material and therefore financially impossible to ship long distances. That means you have to have these plants located near whatever building needs the concrete. That means you can't just build massive factories to cut down costs, because you need to build lots of smaller factories all over the place. The good news though is that concrete is a very cheap material. That means it's total portion of building costs is very small, so having even a doubling of cement costs doesn't change things much

I recall listening to a stuff you should know podcast where they were essentially saying the sand necessary for the use of concrete is a finite resource and is non renewable.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Tiger

I never got this argument. Wood is already sequesters carbon. So making stuff out of wood is not sequestering more carbon. it is just cutting down more large forest so smaller forests can grow, and they in turn don't take as much CO2 out of the air until they are grown to the same size.

Burning biomass instead of coal for the same reasons seems stupid to me. Like lets burn inefficient coal precursors instead of coal. Doesn't move the needle much in my opinion, with the argument being the trees grow back in 30 years.

Far as I understand the end to end carbon sequestering cycle is higher with wood construction even if trees are being harvested.

Properly harvested forests are a net positive for the environment. We just need to find more innovative ways extend the lifespan of wood products.

With biomass, I agree. Makes no sense, unless the wood waste is a byproduct of another process.

I.E. saw mills burning wood waste for heat.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

I'm not antinuclear. It would be awesome if we could provide carbon free energy with very little downside. The economics just mean it isn't likely to work though. This article goes through the various issues fairly well if you can get through the author's "know it all" style. Barnard is one if the smartest people in the space, but if you listen to any of his podcasts or read his writing, he'll make sure you know that. And he's Canadian.

While the Bruce story is great, it's vastly outnumbered by the opposite cases and they already had their "new nuclear" plant cancelled. There's way too much precedent suggesting a new plant will not be on time or in budget. The only US example since the 3 mile Island accident [Cites Vogtle].

People act like this is a new phenomenon due to changes in America's ability to build big things like red tape and bureaucracy. Except it's always been this awful. In 1986 a study found that the during the nuclear explosion in the 60's and 70's the projects were more than 200% over budget and way behind schedule. This is just how nuclear is in North America.

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6071600

Sorry to keep jumping you on nuclear specific subject matter. You do a very good job of remaining as objective as possible, so please accept my props for that.

Barnard is a good researcher and convincing author and does have his biases (which to his credit he does his best to disclose), but he is a bully and does need to signal his allegiance to the 100% renewables crowd to maintain access to the group broadly, especially academics. Take the conclusions he and his in-group members (Jacobson, Sovacool, Ramana, etc) present with a HUGE grain of salt.

These nuclear opponents aren't wrong in some senses. The market for gigawatt scale electric plants is extremely limited, and these things could be practically immortal if you refurbished them sensibly along the way. NPPs are insanely productive. There is a lot of excess to hand out over it's lifetime and the pigs have long figured out how to line up at the trough. You correctly point out that those in or adjacent to the nuclear industry (even in opposition) have figured out way too many clever ways to make money that does not involve building more capacity. This is a problem not exclusive to nuclear, but acutely expressed in US nuclear.

Vogtle was brutal for so many reasons. I don't know why the AEC industry and those who give FID to megaprojects continue to follow a process that allows site work to begin before detailed engineering is complete. Vogtle was a new design that started work too soon, with a trade and supply chain that hadn't built anything meaningful for decades, and ended up doing the complex concrete, cable and module work essentially twice. Of course a project is going to look crap when this happens. True in any industry, worse here because you get to charge premiums for nuclear grade works because... reasons? But guess what, SO MANY participants made serious bank doing this. No lessons will be learned, sadly. But is it actually "too slow and expensive"?

Yes, the 11 years and 17B numbers at Vogtle look like a pair of big, scary cherries on top of a poo sundae of experience curve data in North America. It is easy to point to and say "wow, too slow and so expensive/unaffordable".

But these data points are not compared to other jurisdictions or points in time where nuclear buildouts did work, or presented with context as to why there were overruns, nor contrasted against the projected benefits nor analysed from the perspective of total delivered cost to the consumer! People are innumerate, and it gets worse as the figures get larger.

For Vogtle, Georgians will pay $75/MWh for the first few decades and $25/MWh after that. Is 2.5 - 7.5c/kWh "too expensive" for the average person in Georgia in 30 years from now? Fat f'ing chance. We pay more than that right now in Alberta, one of the lowest cost power generation bases in the world. How does that work?

Not only that, Vogtle's 4 pack will run for 80-100 years+ and will produce as much economic output as a small rich nation's supply of power over it's lifetime.

It will ensure that Georgia will continue to be able to attract and subsidize major factories in appliances, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals away from places like Alberta.

It will provide multiple generations with very well-paying jobs in multiple areas of high value add skills, and is fully capable of funding pension obligations to union workers. Etc, etc etc.

How can one look at the entire picture of benefits stacked against an outlay of 17B that is rapidly being inflated away and say "that's a bad investment"? The ONLY way is by having interests that are not aligned with the typical consumer. That's it.

The real problem is that the story goes well beyond the scope of any economic analysis that we can conduct today. Our "economics" attribute zero value to anything more than a few decades out at best. "It's too expensive" is a near meaningless protest and should make you question from what perspective is that statement being made before believing who utters it.

Check out Lovering et al (2016) for an updated look at global experience curves. This does not include UAE Barakah which was a stunning success by nearly every measure to supplement the nice OSTI paper you shared. Nuclear is not expensive everywhere, but it does take forceful owners to ensure that the benefits of production are not left to unabated lechery. It typically also requires institutional involvement with a commitment to long time horizons and drivers outside of maximizing NPV/next quarter's earnings per share, which is antithetical to the Age of Narcissistic Individualism we currently find ourselves within.

For more Canadian context, check out C4NE's "Case For Candu" (2023) as Ontario is one of the few jurisdictions that would be well suited to build more GW scale capacity. Atkin Realis' rebranded EC9, the Monark (barf) could be a very good fit for a modern GW scale build out should Ontario commit to what is being discussed at planning levels wrt to expanding nuclear capacity, or is evident when analyzing forward supply-demand projections. It's plausible to see room for an additional 10GW in nuclear capacity in that Province, lest it be built out with gas.

I do tend to agree that SMRs are not going to be the silver bullet some promote them as. They do represent interesting tools if they ever make it to market. NuScale for example looks DOA, GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 looks much more promising. TerraPower's Natrium and Oklo's Aurora look better than ever now that Gates/Altman have been able to use the threat of AI's capabilities to convince Washington to increase access to HALEU. Many others are in the race with specific end users in mind... those who are not relying on random municipalities to invest in major civil works for the first time in 75 years (or ever) are going to do better than those who are still running that playbook. Municipalities are always awful customers, not sure that is news.

From a Canadian perspective that might look to contradict my position... OPG's foray into building out SMRs at Darlington is unique. As stated, I do not think that SMRs will be very successful in GW scale, electricity only markets, which is what the SMR project at Darlington is. But it is a sensible step to leverage an existing site license and parlay it into stepping out of the GTA as a business. Only a matter of time until the OPG-SaskPower JV is announced to build out a twin 4 pack in the Estevan area. They'll be fighting for their spot in the delivery queue as GE fulfils orders in Poland and elsewhere. By that time, Alberta might have a coherent stanza to add to the Canadian nuclear epic. It really should be addressing our incredible heat and energetic substitution demands which dwarf our electricity consumption, but... we will see.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by Tiger

I never got this argument. Wood is already sequesters carbon. So making stuff out of wood is not sequestering more carbon. it is just cutting down more large forest so smaller forests can grow, and they in turn don't take as much CO2 out of the air until they are grown to the same size.

Burning biomass instead of coal for the same reasons seems stupid to me. Like lets burn inefficient coal precursors instead of coal. Doesn't move the needle much in my opinion, with the argument being the trees grow back in 30 years.

Wood sequesters carbon once it is put into permanent geologic storage, otherwise it is just part of the normal carbon cycle in the biosphere. Any individual tree will temporarily take carbon out of the atmosphere, but could release it back to the atmosphere at any time if that tree is burned or becomes deadfall without being buried.

Trees die and rot if they aren't used for materials, or buried by sediment and locked away in a petrified form. And when they do rot, methane is the typical form of emission, so that's kind of worse from a climate forcing perspective.

Putting particulate matter (PM>2.5) in the air is bad, period.

[Bill Bumface]

Edit: Browser was stale and replied, I see other people beat me to it.

Originally Posted by Tiger

I never got this argument. Wood is already sequesters carbon. So making stuff out of wood is not sequestering more carbon. it is just cutting down more large forest so smaller forests can grow, and they in turn don't take as much CO2 out of the air until they are grown to the same size.

Burning biomass instead of coal for the same reasons seems stupid to me. Like lets burn inefficient coal precursors instead of coal. Doesn't move the needle much in my opinion, with the argument being the trees grow back in 30 years.

A little tree seedling turning into a full grown tree captures a bunch of carbon (the trunk, limbs etc are all essentially solid carbon).

A mature tree is really not growing much at all, and captures a minimal amount of carbon.

A dead tree that will rot, or a tree that burns down turns all that solid carbon in the wood back to CO2 in the atmosphere. As mentioned above, rotting is even worse as methane is 28x more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

So the only way to capture CO2 with forests besides planting new ones, is to cut down existing ones and either bury the wood where it can't rot, or store the wood. Building wood buildings, furniture etc. is a great way to store wood in a useful manner.

So if you cut down 1 tree and build something with it, you've gotten rid of something sitting there not collecting much CO2 that was destined to burn down or rot and release all it had stored anyway.

In it's place, a new try can grow, and capture a tree's worth of CO2. So you just increased the CO2 in the world stored as a solid by one tree's worth.

Spoiler!

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

Sorry to keep jumping you on nuclear specific subject matter. You do a very good job of remaining as objective as possible, so please accept my props for that.



Barnard is a good researcher and convincing author and does have his biases (which to his credit he does his best to disclose), but he is a bully and does need to signal his allegiance to the 100% renewables crowd to maintain access to the group broadly, especially academics. Take the conclusions he and his in-group members (Jacobson, Sovacool, Ramana, etc) present with a HUGE grain of salt.



These nuclear opponents aren't wrong in some senses. The market for gigawatt scale electric plants is extremely limited, and these things could be practically immortal if you refurbished them sensibly along the way. NPPs are insanely productive. There is a lot of excess to hand out over it's lifetime and the pigs have long figured out how to line up at the trough. You correctly point out that those in or adjacent to the nuclear industry (even in opposition) have figured out way too many clever ways to make money that does not involve building more capacity. This is a problem not exclusive to nuclear, but acutely expressed in US nuclear.



Vogtle was brutal for so many reasons. I don't know why the AEC industry and those who give FID to megaprojects continue to follow a process that allows site work to begin before detailed engineering is complete. Vogtle was a new design that started work too soon, with a trade and supply chain that hadn't built anything meaningful for decades, and ended up doing the complex concrete, cable and module work essentially twice. Of course a project is going to look crap when this happens. True in any industry, worse here because you get to charge premiums for nuclear grade works because... reasons? But guess what, SO MANY participants made serious bank doing this. No lessons will be learned, sadly. But is it actually "too slow and expensive"?



Yes, the 11 years and 17B numbers at Vogtle look like a pair of big, scary cherries on top of a poo sundae of experience curve data in North America. It is easy to point to and say "wow, too slow and so expensive/unaffordable".



But these data points are not compared to other jurisdictions or points in time where nuclear buildouts did work, or presented with context as to why there were overruns, nor contrasted against the projected benefits nor analysed from the perspective of total delivered cost to the consumer! People are innumerate, and it gets worse as the figures get larger.



For Vogtle, Georgians will pay $75/MWh for the first few decades and $25/MWh after that. Is 2.5 - 7.5c/kWh "too expensive" for the average person in Georgia in 30 years from now? Fat f'ing chance. We pay more than that right now in Alberta, one of the lowest cost power generation bases in the world. How does that work?



Not only that, Vogtle's 4 pack will run for 80-100 years+ and will produce as much economic output as a small rich nation's supply of power over it's lifetime.



It will ensure that Georgia will continue to be able to attract and subsidize major factories in appliances, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals away from places like Alberta.



It will provide multiple generations with very well-paying jobs in multiple areas of high value add skills, and is fully capable of funding pension obligations to union workers. Etc, etc etc.



How can one look at the entire picture of benefits stacked against an outlay of 17B that is rapidly being inflated away and say "that's a bad investment"? The ONLY way is by having interests that are not aligned with the typical consumer. That's it.



The real problem is that the story goes well beyond the scope of any economic analysis that we can conduct today. Our "economics" attribute zero value to anything more than a few decades out at best. "It's too expensive" is a near meaningless protest and should make you question from what perspective is that statement being made before believing who utters it.



Check out Lovering et al (2016) for an updated look at global experience curves. This does not include UAE Barakah which was a stunning success by nearly every measure to supplement the nice OSTI paper you shared. Nuclear is not expensive everywhere, but it does take forceful owners to ensure that the benefits of production are not left to unabated lechery. It typically also requires institutional involvement with a commitment to long time horizons and drivers outside of maximizing NPV/next quarter's earnings per share, which is antithetical to the Age of Narcissistic Individualism we currently find ourselves within.



For more Canadian context, check out C4NE's "Case For Candu" (2023) as Ontario is one of the few jurisdictions that would be well suited to build more GW scale capacity. Atkin Realis' rebranded EC9, the Monark (barf) could be a very good fit for a modern GW scale build out should Ontario commit to what is being discussed at planning levels wrt to expanding nuclear capacity, or is evident when analyzing forward supply-demand projections. It's plausible to see room for an additional 10GW in nuclear capacity in that Province, lest it be built out with gas.



I do tend to agree that SMRs are not going to be the silver bullet some promote them as. They do represent interesting tools if they ever make it to market. NuScale for example looks DOA, GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 looks much more promising. TerraPower's Natrium and Oklo's Aurora look better than ever now that Gates/Altman have been able to use the threat of AI's capabilities to convince Washington to increase access to HALEU. Many others are in the race with specific end users in mind... those who are not relying on random municipalities to invest in major civil works for the first time in 75 years (or ever) are going to do better than those who are still running that playbook. Municipalities are always awful customers, not sure that is news.



From a Canadian perspective that might look to contradict my position... OPG's foray into building out SMRs at Darlington is unique. As stated, I do not think that SMRs will be very successful in GW scale, electricity only markets, which is what the SMR project at Darlington is. But it is a sensible step to leverage an existing site license and parlay it into stepping out of the GTA as a business. Only a matter of time until the OPG-SaskPower JV is announced to build out a twin 4 pack in the Estevan area. They'll be fighting for their spot in the delivery queue as GE fulfils orders in Poland and elsewhere. By that time, Alberta might have a coherent stanza to add to the Canadian nuclear epic. It really should be addressing our incredible heat and energetic substitution demands which dwarf our electricity consumption, but... we will see.

I love debates in this space that teach me things because my favorite hobby is just to learn things about the energy transition. My wife and children took me to the hydro dam in Revelstoke for Father's Day this year and it was legitimately like a kid going to a theme park. If I'm wrong about something I have zero ego and am happy to change my priors. It's easy to keep reading the same writers and listening to the same speakers and be as wrong about stuff as them so I gladly take opposing viewpoints.

There will be (and needs to be) more nuclear coming, and you're right that "it's too expensive" is not the right viewpoint. But the current economics do mean that without heavy government involvement, it just ain't happening. As for Vogtle, that's not how the electricity market works. Rate payers are paying an extra premium to the owners on top of the normal rate to make them whole. The wholesale cost to produce the electricity is not the rate people pay, and the rate payers are paying additional money every month on top of their normal bill to keep the owners on the plant from losing money. The economic issue for nuclear is similar to the one that's now facing the pipeline industry. Expensive capital project that no longer pencils out without government intervention so no one wants to pony up a whole bunch of billions. The simple reason nuclear isn't being built outside Poland and China is that no one wants to risk their billions on individual projects with huge risk.

[DoubleK]

Originally Posted by Azure

I.E. saw mills burning wood waste for heat.

Minor correction: Sawmills don't burn wood waste for heat. Pulp mills definitely do, usually to fire the recovery boiler, they'd probably go broke if they didn't.

Sawmills produce tons of wood waste and it's referred to as "hog fuel".

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by ripTDR

I recall listening to a stuff you should know podcast where they were essentially saying the sand necessary for the use of concrete is a finite resource and is non renewable.

I believe this is more about the high quality sand. There are lots of alternatives, but become more costly

[darockwilder]

Wasn't sand a big deal near the end of "Barry"?

[Street Pharmacist]

I wonder if the timing of this announcement was moved due to recent grid constraints...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1746890809931182462

[Tiger]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Edit: Browser was stale and replied, I see other people beat me to it.



A little tree seedling turning into a full grown tree captures a bunch of carbon (the trunk, limbs etc are all essentially solid carbon).

A mature tree is really not growing much at all, and captures a minimal amount of carbon.

A dead tree that will rot, or a tree that burns down turns all that solid carbon in the wood back to CO2 in the atmosphere. As mentioned above, rotting is even worse as methane is 28x more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

So the only way to capture CO2 with forests besides planting new ones, is to cut down existing ones and either bury the wood where it can't rot, or store the wood. Building wood buildings, furniture etc. is a great way to store wood in a useful manner.

So if you cut down 1 tree and build something with it, you've gotten rid of something sitting there not collecting much CO2 that was destined to burn down or rot and release all it had stored anyway.

In it's place, a new try can grow, and capture a tree's worth of CO2. So you just increased the CO2 in the world stored as a solid by one tree's worth.

Spoiler!

Thanks for this, but say you burn it in biomass, you release that 30 years of carbon capture immediately, and take 30 years to grow it back. so I get the building a little more, but these wood buildings are not going to last too much longer, then what? they are waste again, maybe burned, so over the long term is that a better option?

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

I wonder if the timing of this announcement was moved due to recent grid constraints...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1746890809931182462

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.

Whether with large-scale plants or SMRs, I do think having some sort of standard is going to be important moving forward. Just like with EV industry trending to making the Tesla charger standard, having one nuclear standard would make permitting, construction, and maintenance much more efficient.

[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.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by Tiger

Thanks for this, but say you burn it in biomass, you release that 30 years of carbon capture immediately, and take 30 years to grow it back. so I get the building a little more, but these wood buildings are not going to last too much longer, then what? they are waste again, maybe burned, so over the long term is that a better option?

It mostly doesn't matter.

If the building burns down, and you build a new one, you're still at the same net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at the end of the day, just with a little lag while the trees that got cut down to build the building grow back.

Also, it's a pretty apocalyptic world if most buildings burn down haha. There are extremely old wood buildings in the world, no reason they can't last. Most buildings that get torn down end up in the dump. We could also recycle the wood to some extent, but let's assume they all get dumped. In anaerobic conditions, ~90% of the wood will still be there in 50 years. So most of it is still sequestered carbon in the dump.

[Bill Bumface]

I found this pretty interesting on the cost front of nuclear. I didn't realize they were getting built for so much less elsewhere:

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspu...he-best-energy

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by opendoor

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.

I won't pretend to know the the intricacies of electricity markets, but I don't think you have large-scale electricity grid changes without government involvement and subsidies, no matter what energy source you try to transition to.

But if you DO have a problem with subsidies going into nuclear, then you're really going to have issues with subsidies going into renewables, as they make up the vast majority of subsidies (and in the US have doubled since 2016).

Wind and solar combined represented 94 percent of the federal renewable electricity-related subsidies in FY 2022, while producing a combined 5.5 percent of primary energy.

You want cheap energy? Well then you better stick to hydrocarbons, because they are abundant and energy-dense. There's a reason why developing countries rely on coal first.

You want clean energy, that's also cheap? Well that's just not going happen considering the poorer energy density and added complexity. If we're adamant that we're going to transition, then somebody has to pay for that difference, and it's going to be the end-user/tax-payer.

Nuclear isn't cheap, and we won't build more without subsidies, but it still provides the most energy-dense option amongst the renewable options. It also happens to be great for baseload energy, is safe and reliable, and is not reliant on geography to work. If we're going all in the transition, it needs to not only be a part of the mix, I think it needs to lead the way.

[Table 5]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

I found this pretty interesting on the cost front of nuclear. I didn't realize they were getting built for so much less elsewhere:

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspu...he-best-energy

Damn, this is the most comprehensive depository for the pro-nuclear argument I've yet to see. Thanks for sharing this.

[Firebot]

Originally Posted by Table 5

Nuclear isn't cheap, and we won't build more without subsidies, but it still provides the most energy-dense option amongst the renewable options. It also happens to be great for baseload energy, is safe and reliable, and is not reliant on geography to work. If we're going all in the transition, it needs to not only be a part of the mix, I think it needs to lead the way.

Unfortunately our current federal government has seen it fit to specifically exclude nuclear from green energy plan subsidies such as the 5 billion dollar Green Bond Program and has nuclear, I kid you not, listed next to gambling, alcohol and firearms for exclusions

https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/fi...amework_EN.pdf

Summary of Exclusions
⊲ Transportation, exploration and production of fossil fuels
⊲ Nuclear energy
⊲ Arms manufacturing
⊲ Gambling
⊲ Manufacture and production of tobacco products
⊲ Manufacture and production of alcoholic beverages

While Canada does offer token investments for SMRs via its innovation ministry, investment in nuclear in general pales in comparison to subsidies and investments in non-reliable renewables as your posted graph shows. It's a shame. The current realities should have us look into already tried and proven reliable green technology such as traditional nuclear plants, with heavy investment in progressives ones like SMRs that function and be reliable in Canada's climate situation, supplemented by wind and solar, and be part of a focused provincial and federal energy transition strategy.

[Fuzz]

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