There is a push by conservative Canadian politicians in Ontario and Saskatchewan to use Uranium.
Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the province, and has actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.
I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after Doug Ford leaves.
While I also hate Ford and think he's a national embarrassment, 60% of Ontario's power comes from 3 nuclear power plants: Bruce, Darlington and Pickering. We're happy with our nuclear [1]. We'd be happy with wind and solar too - but substantially the entire Ontario grid is already renewable. 92% zero-carbon power. [2]
100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean. Breeder technology, and (thorium fuel cycle) are pretty well understood at this point. In fact, CANDU reactors widely deployed already support thorium fuel cycle. The reason we don't use them is because with all the uranium available, it's not necessary.
We could say the same about lithium supplies. It turns out 'mining' something measured in the parts per billion is enormously damaging to environments and quite expensive to the point of impracticality
Early stages, but current state of the art involves putting fabric out that captures the uranium passively. [1]
> Mining of underground uranium has environmental challenges not encountered with extracting it from the oceans. And Wai says the fibers, which have affinity for more heavy metals than just uranium, can likely be used one day to clean up toxic waterways themselves. He says the fibers have potential to extract vanadium, an expensive metal used in large scale batteries, from the oceans instead of mining it from the ground.
Yes, filtering ocean water for material is a well known technique. You need a massive throughput of ocean water for a small output and you also filter salts, other metals, polymers, and sea life. You must further refine those materials to get the stuff you want. You also change the ph of the filtered water in a way that would be disastrous if reinjected, and you consume filter media quickly. That all adds up to a huge waste and massive ecological damage.its simply not practical at scale.
I'm curious why you think deploying some of these fabrics would change the pH of the ocean? There are geological processes which replenish dissolved uranium in the ocean per the article I linked. I haven't seen any particular waste or sustainability concerns. The nice thing about uranium is that it's so incredibly energy dense that you don't really need to pull out all that much. I'm not ready to be so defeatist.
I defer to the researcher.
> "We have chemically modified regular, inexpensive yarn, to convert it into an adsorbent which is selective for uranium, efficient and reusable," said Chien Wai, president of LCW Supercritical Technologies. "PNNL's capabilities in evaluating and testing the material, have been invaluable in moving this technology forward."
Surprisingly not really. The cost of fissile material is extremely small relative to the cost of generated electricity. Raw uranium contributes $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear power. In breeders it’s $0.000015/kWh. The article I linked suggested that even today sweater extraction costs just double what mining costs, so 3/10th of a cent per kWh.
This is why we don’t use breeder reactors right now. The cost of uranium is a rounding error relative to the value of the generated electricity.
"Suggested cost" is speculative. We won't know what it will really cost to scale until we actually start doing it.
There are also reasons to use breeders beyond fuel cost, such as dramatically decreasing the amount of waste and the time the waste is hazardous; both are reduced by 100x each IIRC.
This is from the 2020 IAEA world's uranium resources report [0];
"Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base recoverable at a cost of < USD 130/kgU (USD 50/lb U3O8) and 87% of identified resources available at a cost of < USD 80/kgU (equivalent USD 30/lb U3O8)."
Apply some exponential growth to that, and those allegedly 10.000 years would actually end up looking more like not even 50 years.
The 10,000 years refers to the 4 billion tons dissolved in the ocean. However consider that its possible to dramatically extend the useful life of supplies with breeder reactors - and also to use thorium in existing designs such as the CANDU.
Is that really a problem? I mean technically any energy resource is finite/non-renewable due to second law of thermodynamics. That doesn't mean anything in practice.
Darlington, Bruce and Pickering are reaching EoL and all three together supply 60% of Ontario’s electricity. How do you propose the province replace that amount of supply? The go with solar or wind would mean colossal investments in high tension transmission infrastructure, given the distributed nature of those power sources. We already have appropriate infrastructure in place for nuclear distribution; and the added benefit is that these SMRs can power northern regions as well when fully developped
That links says that (a) they were torn down, complete or incomplete, and (b) the company was paid a (huge!) contract break fee for this, as you would expect.
Yes, apparently they tore down 4 turbines, which is a waste of money.
But if you've ever been to Chatham-Kent you'd notice that there are places where you can do a 360 degree turn and never see fewer than 10 windmills in your field of vision. Ontario has 2,600 wind turbines.
Not to mention a MW of wind is not equivalent to a MW of nuke. If you want wind you need a substantial overbuild that is geographically diverse and the necessary transmission to support that, which will cost as much as the generation itself, or you need storage which again costs as much as the generation itself. I am all for wind power, but only when we realistically consider the real world engineering constraints involved.
Obviously if you will rely on wind or solar for baseline, you will need to build out storage. And, equally obviously, you don't waste money building out storage you don't yet have capacity to charge up.
You might consider it a trivial observation, but the economic and physical implications are not trivial. They still cost money, and the physics still don't work if you don't consider them. Any discussion of the cost or viability of a generation source must include the cost and viability of augmenting the weaknesses of that source to address these deficiencies. Anything else is wishful thinking at best and magical thinking at worst.
The physics of practical storage have been fully understood and well internalized in civil engineering for centuries: E = Fx. All that remains unclear is which forms will turn out to be cheapest at the time when they need to be built.
What is known now is that costs are falling even faster than did solar and wind, and are already of similar order.
Not a single country with any manufacturing and/or industry [0] to speak of [1], can just casually cut off their main hydrocarbon supplier without major consequences, nor do nuclear reactors replace such resource dependencies.
If Russia stops delivering gas, then ultimately that will translate to a higher German oil demand, as a lot of formerly gas tailored usage will be retooled to oil.
As Russia is sitting on the single largest gas supply on the planet, nearly a quarter of the worlds supply [2]. While with oil there are a few somewhat competitive non-Russian alternatives [3]
So if Russia's resources will continue to be geopolitically taboo, then a lot of Europe will shift back to oil instead of gas.
You're right, they aren't. Yes, thanks to decades of power-lobbying, viable wind and solar energy were both kept as low-key and forgettable as possible - and shut-down whenever possible. Apart from the vast sums of excessive money involved, lurking in the background was the fearful and sure knowledge that everyone, everwhere had potential and certain access to endless power ... without any constraints or arm-twisting politics.
Yes ... wind and solar ARE in a different universe ... one where all of humanity can and will survive and be free of the pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.
I live in the hotbed of Ontario wind power, the intersection of Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex, and if all those windmills only account for 140MW I am very curious where the space would come from to even reach 1000MW. It already feels like they're everywhere.
Exactly, wind and solar are massive environmental disrupters, huge amounts of land and habitat destroyed for small unreliable gains. Nuclear on the other hand is turned into the bogey man of clean energy.
Where do all the out of commission solar panels end up?
Definitely not as carefully stored as the nuclear waste.
Panels are recycled now. Wind and solar don't destroy habitats and don't take up "huge amounts of land". Wind turbines take up negligible land that can be used for other purposes. Agrivoltaics is showing you can even do this with solar and it boosts some crop outputs. I really don't get the renewable hate. It has its place in the energy mix.
Yes, PV waste isn't being addressed a lot right now, but research is ramping up alongside production on these. Alternatives to Si like perovskites may end up easier to recycle as well. Also, PV does produce waste, but it has the advantage of not being radioactive. That isn't to say it's not harmful, just quite a bit less volatile as nuclear. All in all, I do think nuclear should be reintroduced, but it has it's own issues, especially in the US due to construction difficulties (permits, safety, etc). In comparison, PV benefits greatly from economies of scale, and can be deployed at utility scale or in distributed micro-grids, which gives it more granularity then all-or-nothing nuclear.
You can lie, and lie, and lie. You might even get somebody to believe you, but it says more about you than about the topic.
Wind and solar are not, in fact, environmental disrupters. Waste panels are not an environmental hazard, and are in fact extremely valuable. Anyone not warehousing their dead panels is an idiot.
Nukes are lately the darling of big coal, because they guarantee another ten years of sales that in total exceed the cost of that much solar generation capacity. Spent on solar, it would displace the coal immediately.
Colossal investment in transmission infrastructure would be a much better bet than investing in nuclear. It would pay off the way that colossal investments in highways, railroads and fiber have. Betting on nuclear is like choosing circuit switching over packet switching for your network. A fear driven anxiety about reliability that prevents people from understanding that a new way of doing things is possible.
""For this government to rip up contracts and literally rip wind turbines out of the ground is a huge waste of money and makes absolutely no sense," said Green party Leader Mike Schreiner.""
Well, yes. $230m to prevent power being generated, either for ideological reasons or bribes.
At this point in time the cost is Wind: .75/kilowatt hour Nuclear: 0.05/kilowatt hour
Makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most costly energy was the fixed rate 75c per hour that was for ideological reasons going to transform Ontario into the solar power maker of the world. That went to California then and now China.
Building new dams in the west is almost entirely unfeasible. Too much environmental impact sensitivity (maybe a good thing) and NIMBYisim (not so good)
Manitoba Hydro spends a lot of marketing money on making renewable resources attractive, specifically Hydro Generating Stations. Isn't the newest one from 2018?
I have noticed that bad things' energy output is measured in watts, and good things' energy output is measured in "homes powered". It's probably taught in journalism school nowadays, it's pervasive.
