Pickering Nuclear plant needs to be 'un-retired' if Ontario hopes to meet zero carbon goals

[NNadir]

Pickering Nuclear plant needs to be ‘un-retired’ if Ontario hopes to meet zero carbon goals

The hope of net zero carbon emissions will not be possible without finding more nuclear power for the grid, says the President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy.

The best way to achieve that lofty goal, added Dr. Chris Keefer, is to reverse the decision to mothball the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, which is scheduled to shut down, beginning in 2024.

Keefer, who is an emergency room doctor when he’s not advocating for clean energy solutions, said there is “indeed hope” for Pickering to be back online as the Independent Electrical Service Operator (IESO) – which represents all the individual electricity providers in Ontario – is “panicking” because of forecasted energy shortfalls which “threatens” Ontario’s ‘Open for Business’ status.

Ontario’s electricity system is searching for more power producers as demand rises and Pickering Nuclear nears a forced retirement, a process likely to secure more natural gas generation while the government seeks to end reliance on it.

It means that for at least the next two decades, greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector are set to rise by as much as 400 per cent, though the IESO projects the net greenhouse gas emission reductions from electric vehicles will offset those carbon emissions by 2038...

... “Pickering B refurbishment offers the province the fastest and cheapest route to locking in 550MW of clean baseload power per unit refurbished,” Keefer said, citing the ongoing $12.8 Billion refurbishing project at the Darlington Nuclear Plant near Bowmanville that is coming in “below budget and on time” and is expected to provide emissions-free electricity for 30-plus years.

“We are quickly becoming masters of refurbishment and the supply chain and workforce is optimized. Darlington refurbs will be done in 2027 and we will be ready to move hammer in hand to Pickering.”

Johnston and the Society of United Professionals are also on board with the Pickering refurbishing project, with other trade unions also likely to support the plan.

“The cheapest sources of zero-emission energy are the refurbished Bruce and Darlington nuclear reactors. It’s time for Ontario to reconsider a similar refurbishment of Pickering Nuclear,” she said “The case for Pickering has changed drastically since it was last reviewed. Today, Ontario faces an electricity shortage, natural gas prices have spiked, and there is broad consensus on the need for a massive shift to electrification to fight climate change.”

“Nuclear got us off dirty coal and now it can keep us off dirty gas...”

[David__77]

1. The quickest path to decarbonization is a nuclear one.

It would help bide time for the development of other non-carbon sources. Also, even with efficiency efforts, energy usage per capita will rise and not fall and that is a sign of human progress.

[NNadir]

2. Well, yes, given that it took half a century of cheering for solar and wind to get to 1/3 of what...

Last edited Fri Jul 22, 2022, 07:58 AM - Edit history (1)

...the annual amount of energy that nuclear energy started producing when new construction was stopped by appeals to fear and ignorance with a huge dollop of selective attention.




Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A

Despite this data, compiled for more than 3 decades, we still hear nonsense that solar and wind are quick to build. It's true they're quick to industrialize huge tracts of land that would otherwise be, in many cases, wild, but they are useless at addressing climate change. They're really lipstick on the fossil fuel pig, a big lie people tell themselves.

We don't really need "other" no carbon resources beyond nuclear, and the claim that we do is rapidly being shown to be absurd by the fact that the planet is in flames, while a vicious thug like Putin holds Europe (and the world really) hostage.

[Finishline42]

3. By 2030 according to the very conservative IEA

Wind and solar will be nearly equal nuclear and all that investment you note will continue to pay dividends in making wind and solar cheaper while the opposite will be true of nuclear.

[NNadir]

5. I'm actually familiar with decades of energy soothsaying.

The antinuke community which consists largely of faith based bourgeois airheads who seem not to have noticed that half a century of bullshit ouija board prognostications have left the planet in flames, loves to talk about money.

Even in this they engage in selective attention. For example they routinely ignore the environmental and financial cost of redundancy. They like to cherry pick the cost of their junk systems by isolating them from the total system when the wind is blowing at a summer solstice. If the wind isn't blowing, they couldn't care less who suffers and who dies.

When presented with data that obviously contradicts their now clearly destructive and useless faith, they pull out the ouija board again.

I think the realization that their fantasies are collapsing in flames, the flames of the planet burning, is about to be broadly recognized.

I mean after all the Germans are killing people by burning coal; all of the lives that will be lost might have been saved had they kept their reactors open rather than buy into this endless and deadly horseshit and Tarot card reading by antinukes.

[NickB79]

7. By 2030 our global electricity demands will be hundreds of GW higher than today

By 2050? Possibly 50% more than what we use now. So we'll STILL not be adding enough renewables to start retiring fossil fuels. We'll be covering the new demand, but not the old demand.

People like to point to the potential high electricity demand from EV's, but that's not what worries me. The unspoken elephant in the room is skyrocketing A/C demand as the planet warms. Cheap A/C units are flooding nations like India, and Europeans are going to start installing them like gangbusters here as well. Record heatwaves tend to motivate people to do so.

[David__77]

4. I think both paths should be taken.

There are benefits to the distributed generation afforded by solar. The variables are shifting due to the emergence of much less expensive battery storage. That isn’t to say don’t do nuclear, just that multiple paths should be taken.

LEDs were very expensive and unviable until they weren’t, due to subsidization that facilitated R&D. To support electrification of transportation, we need distributed generation, not least due to problems with grid integrity.

[NNadir]

6. I don't agree. The solar and wind industry are not worth the huge...

...resources sunk into them for no result.

[hunter]

8. CANDU refurbishment is becoming a big business...

...recently at Darlington, Bruce and Point Lepreau in Canada, at Wolsong in South Korea, and at Embalse in Argentina, according to World Nuclear News.

Romania has just signed the first contract for refurbishment of unit 1 at its Cernavoda nuclear power plant.

Shutting down nuclear power plants and replacing them with dangerous and environmentally destructive natural gas power plants is a bad idea.

Hybrid natural gas / wind / solar schemes will not save the world but they will make the fossil fuel industry a lot of short term profits.

There's abundant evidence now that solar and wind energy schemes are only viable in systems where fossil fuels or hydroelectricity are the primary power source, and only by some additional creative accounting that is generally harmful to lower income consumers.

[NNadir]

9. I've added myself to an ANS news feed. There's a conference...

...being held next month in Florida where one of the talks will be on the subject of extending plant life to 80 to 100 years.

My son is joining a prominent laboratory in nuclear materials research and I'll be interested in hearing from him on this topic. He's already turning me on to topics I hadn't considered.

The original understanding was that lifetimes would be 40 years. A number of issues in materials science have caused those numbers to vary. Many reactors went well beyond that. A key point concerns welds, currently an issue in the French reactors on inspection. Of course, the reactors have been poorly maintained, apparently because the Hollande administration drank the so called "renewable energy" koolaid, and took much of the revenue stream from the nuclear cash cow that might have saved Europe and sank it into the wind and solar scam. This is, anyway what I heard. It sounds credible.

All of humanity and Europeans in particular are paying for that egregious mistake.