There’s a pretty obvious choice for where nuclear power development should go in Saskatchewan.
And it’s not Elbow.
On Sept. 20, SaskPower announced they were considering two areas as possible sites for Saskatchewan’s first two nuclear reactors. One is at Lake Diefenbaker, near Elbow, and the other is Estevan, with three nearby reservoirs under consideration.
When it comes to choosing between Estevan and Elbow for future nuclear power development, Estevan would have to try really hard to lose.
Really, really hard.
Site preparation has begun at Darlington NGS for the construction of the first SMR. It’s supposed to be operational in ten years. This is actually going ( hopefully) to happen.
People are being corralled and sent up the cattle chute.
Why have a discussion re. location A vs B when the premise for building the thing in the first place is based on a false CO2 narrative.
There will be a public consultation (environmental assessment) where science based facts will determine what gets done where. Right?
Mostly wrong. No one is being ‘corralled’. Saskatchewan needs new electrical generation, and its experiments in wind generation have mostly failed to provide reliable power at reasonable cost. And it needs new power generation regardless of narratives about CO2. There is a well-defined process for public consultation managed by the regulator the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
My knowledge is out of date having retired in 2005 from the job that would have kept me current of SP’s situation.
I moved to SK from a similar job in AB in 1990. AB’s grid was stiff. SK’s was spongy and didn’t get a lot better.
A disturbance should attenuate as it moves away from the source. When we started a big motor (16 khp) the dip was worse 320 km away then 160 km away. The system amplified!
Maybe things have improved but I doubt it. They are going to need more generation sooner rather than later.
No one is being corralled?”””Trudeau says we can’t burn coal here because coal emissions are bad, so the federal government is forcing us to shut it down.””/frontline center for publicpolicy
Taking 650Mws of coal generation out of service would require new generation to be built. But clean coal like other countries are building is not an option? If not, why not? Cuz of Fed climate change commitments?
Clean coal? What’s that? Various substances can be scrubbed from coal emissions, particularly SOx emissions and heavy metal particulates. But you can’t avoid O3 emissions and reducing NOx emissions is difficult. By and large, these emission reduction technologies are not much deployed in most of the world’s existing coal-fired stations. In China, none at all.
But on top of all that, Saskatchewan’s coal fired stations tend to be old, in increasingly poor condition and in need of replacement anyway. So refurbishment or replacement, it’s going to be much the same in terms of net cost anyway.
This has nothing to do with Justatwit and his delusions about global warming. Provinces determine how their electricity is produced, not the feds. So this will be a made-in-Saskatchewan decision. But nothing will happen all that quickly. It will be about a decade before a new reactor type can be built and put in service. But that presumes that a decision to proceed with nuclear power is made now.
“Clean coal? What’s that?” It means different things to different people given the various clean coal technologies BEING APPLIED. It’s important to talk emissions. Making generalizations doesn’t help when comparing the available technologies for reducing the emissions.
Ontario sidelined coal. Coal was killing all these people with respiratory problems so the story went. They built windfarms backed up by gas plants. The NOx & particulate spewing gas plants were built in urban areas adding to the air pollution. As the pollution levels increased, the government raised the pollution limits so that the pollution levels were kept within the limits.
When talking wind power, we are really talking a wind/gas mix with 75% of the power being NOx & particulate spewing gas.
Why not both?
A bit of info on the quantity/quality of uranium ore in Sask… 22% of the world’s uranium is here.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/canada-uranium.aspx
There’s a huge coal deposit in north central SK. So there’s that…
There’s lots of good rational options, but to paraphrase Alexander Pope – “man is not a rational being he is a being capable of reasoning”
I understand there’s coal in SK, there’s +1100 years supply in AB, but the purple haired folks may be screaming too loudly for coal to be utilised much longer. I have no problem with either (nuke or coal) method of electrical generation, and prefer to cook on natural gas or see it being made into fertiliser than being burned up while a mountain of coal is “right there”.
As my old philosophy prof said, “It is in mankind’s nature to reason. It is not in mankind’s nature to reason well.”
Nuclear power is a joke. They still have not developed a safe storage method for spent fuel. Nuclear energy is a continual drain on the tax payer from start to finish. Nuclear power requires tax dollars for every single phase of its construction and operation and even for its destruction and moth balling. Industry on their own never build them because they can not make any money. The taxpayer has to pay to store the waste for thousands of years. What other industry can not even get insurance even this the tax payer must provide. Back away from the crack pipe. Clear your head.
Most of that is because of safety regulations that are absolutely ridiculous, and only exist because of successful propaganda campaigns by the USSR in the 1980s.
As the late Kathy Shaidle used to say, more people died in Ira Einhorn’s apartment than at Three Mile Island. Fukushima got hit by an earthquake and a tidal wave and still retained integrity. All the nuclear waste generated from a conventional 700+ MW nuclear plant over its 1-2 year fueling cycle can fit under an office desk. A single Chinese chip fab factory produces more and more permanent environmental damage than any modern nuclear reactor.
Nuclear power has some unique safety concerns, but those concerns are not more severe than most other industrial operations, or other forms of power generation.
You sidestepped every point i made. The taxpayer has to pay for every step in the nuclear process and is on the hook forever. All to make SNC Langevin wealthy. The Candu is owned by SNC Langevin. Look up the decommissioning cost that the UK and Germany face. Meaning the UK taxpayers. Nuke is a major scam
In Ontario most power generation is owned by the province. Coal, gas, solar, wind and nuclear are all paid for with government cheese. BTW that is SNC Lavalin. The Langevin block is on Parliament Hill.
As far as nuclear waste goes, there is reprocessing, which will more than triple the amount of energy extracted from the fuel.
Technically, the answer seems to be liquid fluoride thorium reactors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
Currently stored nuclear waste products would be added to the thorium salts and burned in the reactor. The waste of this process is considerably less than current uranium based reactors. The other benefit of thorium salt reactors is the waste heat. That heat can be used to create synthetic fuel from coal.
I understand the main problem with the design of these future reactors is vessel containment. Hot salts running ~800C corrode almost everything. You need materials that can stand up to many, many years in a high temperature, corrosive environment.
What a stupid comment from Watcher. There’s lots of safe methods for dealing with used nuclear fuel. Have you ever heard of anyone being injured by used fuel? Your comment about tax dollars is simply wrong. The utilities that own NPPs have to finance their decommissioning as a condition of licensing to operate. The taxpayer has to pay nothing for thousands of years; the electricity customers do that through their electricity rates every day.
In fact, this comment is so dismally stupid that it likely came straight out of a Green Energy playbook.
Nuclear waste storage is the biggest non problem that hysteria pimps have ever employed. The entire nuclear power used fuel rods in the US to date is the size of a football field 10 metres high, in Canada two Olympic swimming pools and all can be safely shielded under 3 metres of water. This issue alone is the litmus test for nuclear illiteracy. Absent the politically nurtured and employed hysteria, nuclear power is the cleanest, overwhelmingly safest and most economical large scale producer of reliable baseload.
I appreciate your concern. I live in a community that was paid off to take nuclear waste. I watched the consultation go down. I received the mailings. They kept me warm in the winter. To get to the point, they are following some “adaptive management approach” meaning they have no final solution for the nuke fuel waste and are making things up as they go along. One would think before they sink billions into the ground they would know what the final use of the used fuel would be. At the end of the day, to best best of my recollection, it came down to how much the local native community was to receive in a pay off if the project was to go ahead. I stopped paying attention once they resorted to their “adaptive management” baffle gab.
The reasons for considering Elbow, is likely the water supply for cooling, but mostly for it’s centralized location between Regina and S’toon.
If PP becomes PM and changes government policy, accepts carbon capture, does that put Elbow in the preferred location?
Lots of transmission lines leading out of Estevan, the infrastructure is already there.
Isn’t Elbow producing “acceptable” power now with hydro-electric?
Do you mean Coteau Creek Hydro Station? It’s been producing electricity for over 50 years and still functioning well. There is rumblings about closing it down at some point because of the massive provincial irrigation project that will draw water from Lake Diefenbaker.
Regarding Estevan – it is the logical choice I think. The only possible issue I can think of is it’s proximity to the USA. I know the coal fired generating station in coronach had to jump through hoops regarding water and pollution over international boundaries. Would the USA also have issues with a nuclear plant that close the the border? I have no idea but it might come up.
Good Article Kate..once again.
I love this take: “..And when it comes to nuclear, this is a real consideration, especially when people go BANANAS – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything, Silly.
That encompasses the entire world of Climatardness.
I have no issue with nuclear power… there’s only so many large rivers that can be dammed, and it seems to me, they already have. A note to Alberta/Yukon/Nunavut/North West Territories etc.
Don’t even think of damming the Nahani River.
https://nahanni.com/blog/virginia-falls-on-the-nahanni-river/
Actually, quite right. Saskpower inventoried the available hydraulic resources decades ago. There’s nothing remaining in the Province of any substance. Ontario, New Brunswick and Alberta are all in the same position: no remaining hydraulic. This isn’t really about global warming or any other such nonsense. All these provinces need new generating capacity, and wind/solar have already demonstrated their failure to be reliable.
~20 years ago I heard of a Deloitte? study for the long term development of an industrial area between Moose Jaw and Regina. It was thought this area between the two cities would build on the hub created at Belle Plaine for the various potash mines, fertilizer plant, and ethanol plant. SaskPower has a power grid hub set up there, and Buffalo Pound (cooling pond) is just to the north.
There was discussion of a nuclear plant placed there as transmission losses would be minimized.
UK nuclear decommissioning estimated at 3b pounds per year for 120 years. Tax payer funded of course.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy
Those were military projects. Of course the taxpayer pays for government defense programs. Are you saying governments should not have military programs?
It is still nuclear decommissioning and it is all paid always by the taxpayer. Nuclear power generation can not even get insurance. No insurance company will cover them. So the tax payer has to cover that as well. A total scam.
Wrong all kinds of ways. All nuclear power plants are insured by the private insurance industry members of the Nuclear Insurance Association of Canada. The taxpayer pays nothing.
As for nuclear decommissioning, the utility pays for the decommissioning of its facilities, not the taxpayer.
Any other stupid lies you want to get off your chest? I’m sure Greenpeace can supply you with some propaganda.
Watcher, those are legitimate questions. If they are insured, how much coverage are they carrying vs. what is the cost of a clean up after a worst case event?
As for decommissioning, I am of the understanding they are putting money aside coming out of electricity bills. The question remains, how are they calculating the costs and are they putting enough aside given the investment climate.
And there is no need to split hairs between “taxpayers” and “ratepayers” cuz it comes out of the same pocket.
Maybe cgh can clarify.
SMRs are still experimental. I’m not aware of any deployments, let alone successful deployments. I don’t think government should be in the business of energy R&D.
Remember, the first hydroelectric power generating station at Niagara Falls was privately owned and operated until it was seized by the government.
Governments are not in the business. Private industry is doing the R&D for nuclear SMRs.
Slowpoke reactors ran for decades, safely, and quietly in the hearts of many Canadian cities (mostly for research purposes at university campuses).
The SMR concept is proven.
We should keep coal and nat gas generation, as well as nucular. It makes sense to have diversity of energy supply. Of course, the greens want none of it; they don’t want energy, or food, or people.
Correct. Each can serve a purpose in the power mix, e.g. nuke for base load.
Reading SDA, these past days I’ve come to realize that the nuke lobby is on board with the CO2 / Climate change narrative to sell their nukes. It’s not the nukes I am concerned about. It’s the narrative. It’s about the social controls, i.e., your activities controlled per your carbon footprint. The nuke lobby needs to change its tune.
How can we have confidence in any environmental assessment when they resort to BS science?
I recommended Vonda as the site. Buffer Lake is there for cooling water and I have a little two bedroom that’s currently empty that you can have for the reactor structure. Garage behind the house – built in the 70s from wood salvaged from a demolished grain elevator – can be the turbine hall.
You’re welcome.
Just don’t put it near Cudworth.
Keep it away from those lunatics.
I love it that there’s a town in Saskatchewan called “Elbow”. There really should be one called “Arse” as well. Of course, I’d never be able to tell them apart.