- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
Makes alot of sense. Canada has:
- one of the largest uranium reserves
- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
15 years, to be clear.
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
All forms of generation have downsides.
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
I’m not Canadian so news to me that Canada has built nuclear plants around the world.
As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor. More capacity is needed in most parts of the world. Lager reactors are needed.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
From what I've seen out of Canada, this is likely overly optimistic and probably will not be possible in that time frame.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.
Doesn’t help with the burning part. Or the stranded infrastructure once the demand goes away.
Can't wait for this to get bogged down in legislation and never get done
That might take a while. We need to bog down the HSR first.
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
But what do they do with the waste? And how much fresh water is that going to use?
> But what do they do with the waste?
The Canadian Shield [0] is uniquely well-suited for this: it's remote, sparsely populated, and geologically stable.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
If there's something Canada has in excess it's water and storage space.
The sun uses much more water on earth than people do.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.
Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)
CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world
Isn't it interesting? Now that power generation is seen as the deciding factor between who wins/loses AI, nuclear is back on the table again.
We are trying.
would be good
Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal.
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
How viable is Solar in Canada given its weather? (I am ignorant about it and only know that it's really cold and cloudy most of the time).
Cold is fine - solar panels perform better the lower the temperature.
That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.
Alberta is one of the best locales for solar on the continent -- it's sunny most of the year -- and had an exploding renewables sector.
Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
Calgary is quite sunny at 2400 hrs/year.
But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950).
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-...
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ontarios-costly-...
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Doesn't nuclear make sense to increase baseline capacity where hydro isn't available?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
A village near me in southern Alberta just built a huge wind farm.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
[0] - https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-renewable-energy-investment-co...
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
(Energy trader here)
I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Oh but you can.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Wind farms though. Terrible things. Eye sore.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
What other kind of subsidy is there?
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.