Their German neighbours may have shut down their last nuclear reactors in 2023, but Poland is ALL IN when it comes to nuclear power. They’re building large reactors, small reactors, maybe even some micro (not sure on the last one). But they are going to be building 24 small modular reactors of the same design SaskPower has chosen. And that number might go up. I’ve seen references to as many as 70 BWRX-300s for Poland. One thing is clear – the manuals will be written in Polish before English, it seems. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan will not formally decide to go ahead or not until 2029. I’m not sure where they’re going to get their reactor fuel from, but they’ll be damned if they buy a pound from Russia. That puts Saskatchewan uranium in good stead for the possible supply – and with the numerous large reactors planned for Poland, plus all the SMRs, that’s a good, new, long-term market for us.
If you’re committed to decarbonization, nuclear is the only viable option for most jurisdictions.
Under Soviet occupation, Poland was working on its own atomic weapons program…..against the Russians.
Moscow killed the lead scientist.
Poland has learned from Ukraine and will build its own nuclear weapons program. It remembers how noble, but uneffective was UK for it against the Nazis and Russians, and how it was sold out after surrender by FDR, Truman to Stalin. And it watched 2014-2022 Russia invade Ukraine.
Lesson? Don’t depend on anyone.
You can’t build the damn things without mining, coal, oil, and gas. Good god people are stupid.
Reactors by the dozen?
How are they going to protect them?
Here in Canada every Nuclear Power Plant is guarded by quite literally armed death squads. Armed to the teeth , highly trained cops that have everything from pistols up to belt fed machine guns mounted on APC’s ready at a moment’s notice to go into action if terrorists attempt to take over or attack the facility.
Security requirements will be specified by the operating licences granted to the reactor facilities. Organized in parks of multiple units the way most countries build their reactor facilities, this will be no signficant problem.
Security will have to be bilingual, maybe plus Cree too, or no license. Quebec excepted.
What I wonder about is these micro reactors – the ones that literally fit in a sea can. Will there be any sort of security for them? They will use highly enriched uranium. Organized thieves could simply severe the lines and haul it away on a truck, theoretically speaking. What will the security arrangements be for these? A 67 year old commissionaire?
That’s why regulatory authorities exist. Security will have to meet regulatory requirements as a condition of licencing. If not, no operating licence. Size and scale are not a problem for effective regulation.
“Organized thieves could simply severe the lines and haul it away on a truck, theoretically speaking.”
No. If not connected and generating electricity, it’s of no use to anyone.
it’s the few kilograms of highly enriched uranium that I’m concerned with, nothing else. It didn’t take a lot to make the Little Boy bomb. Snag a couple micro reactors like this, swipe the uranium, and you’ve got the start of a Little Boy, theoretically, at least. Still have to not irradiate yourself, but if you want to make a nuke, you’re probably a death cult, anyhow.
Irrelevant. LIttle Boy uranium was enriched to 90% U-235. Micro reactors will have enrichment of at most 25%. You cannot turn reactor fuel into a bomb, ever. You can only do this through enrichment via neutron bombardment. Only governments are large enough to build the industrial infrastructure capable of doing this.
Yes, it took a huge effort to make Little Boy. So much so that the uranium bomb was discarded for the plutonium used for the Fat Man bomb. Not anyone can build either of these things. The trigger mechanism alone is hugely complex, let alone the makeup of the explosive material. More difficult still, plutonium is pyrophoric and cannot be handled in normal atmosphere.
Please remember that James Bond movies are just fantasies and have no bearing on reality.
“You cannot turn reactor fuel into a bomb, ever. You can only do this through enrichment via neutron bombardment.”
Never heard of enrichment via neutron bombardment.
“it’s the few kilograms of highly enriched uranium that I’m concerned with”
Most commercial reactors employ LEU with a concentration upto 3-5%. None use HEU which has a concentration above 90% and that would be weapons grade.
Rizwan. “Never heard of enrichment via neutron bombardment.”
You are quite right; there are only two methods of uranium enrichment – isotope separation and gaseous diffusion. I was confusing the issue by referring to plutonium production which is only produced by neutron bombardment. Uranium enrichment requires a much larger facility than a simple research reactor for a neutron source.
“there are only two methods of uranium enrichment – isotope separation and gaseous diffusion”
Let me rewrite that: there are two principal methods by which the fissile isotope is separated from its nonfissile counterpart – gas centrifuge and gas diffusion.
@cgh
“James Bond movies are just fantasies and have no bearing on reality”
True. The funny thing is that the KGB had ordered that whatever 007 had, KGB spooks must also have.
Poland has 200,000 active soldiers and another 300,000 in reserve. If the reactors are placed in a properly equipped compound complete with a complement of heavily armed soldiers, i doubt many will try to attack them.
We could do the same in Canada instead of using our soldiers as firefighters and other emergency services. The C-G of the CAF said in an article a short while back that calling out the troops for every domestic emergency has become the norm as it’s easy and cheap to get well trained disciplined men out to your fire, flood, or ice storm. But in the meantime, Provincial EMO’s sit idle and their personnel are often not used.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-armed-forces-auchterlonie-wildfires-1.7060034
To CGH
“ Only governments are large enough to build the industrial infrastructure capable of doing this.”
True enough but to be precise it requires a rogue government practising their peaceful religion with pallet loads of US cash to do this
Greg, if it’s a rogue government, no one would steal reactor fuel to make a bomb. Even costs and difficulty matter to insane religious governments. Simplest way is to simply make your own bomb fuel with any cheap research reactor. That’s how Israel, South Africa, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India did it. So no need to reinvent the wheel; simply do what others have already succeeded in doing more than half a dozen times.
As for ‘pallet-loads of US cash’, remember, the one thing that the big five nuclear nations have in common is the desire to ensure that they are the only ones who have the technology. None of them will readily assist another nation in making a nuclear weapon. All of them will ‘quietly’ applaud when one would-be nuclear weapons nation gets violently taken out, as Israel did with Iraq in 1981 by destroying Osirak by airstrike.
They will find they are useless against a modified Manpad or even some better versions of the Lancet drone.
The Houthis for instance have enough firepower to smash ANY reactor if they can get within 100km of it.
Poland builds walls around their entire country so they don’t need to build walls around the things in the country.
Yeah but Poles are dumb, right?
You’ve got it backward. Germany is historically as dumb as a post. It’s Poland’s misery to have to endure them as neighbors.
Sarcasm a foreign concept to you?
That’s what’s frustrating about them, Thomas. They show flashes of brilliance and then stuff it up by making dumb choices. As it is, they are in a terrible position. Stuck between Germany and Russia, getting periodically spit-roasted by them. They should be trying to get along with those two countries at the expense of every other alliance.
Sure,and soldiers who fought with them in WW2 always mentioned how fearless and valiant the Polish soldiers were.
Polish pilots were the aces in the Battle of Britain.
The noblest war story I’ve ever encountered was one I saw posted on the wall of the city museum in the old Cloth Hall at Ypres. The museum had a substantial section devoted to the city’s experience of WWI, and as a footnote had posted the story of what happened in WWII. We forget today that Ypres had been a lovely medieval city and was blasted flat in the course of the war, but in its time it was what Hiroshima later became, the international symbol of wanton destruction.
The painstakingly rebuilt city was untouched by fighting in the second war, up until the Canadian Army approached late in 1944. The Germans initially decided to attempt to hold the city, and the Canadians were ordered to prepare the assault. They assigned the Free Polish Army to take the city, and headquarters asked the FPA command what artillery support and preparation they would require.
The commanding officer mustered his force and made a dramatic speech: “Every Pole knows how easy it is to destroy a city, and how hard and painful to rebuild. Ypres is a city that has suffered enough. It must never again be shelled.” With the full support of his men, he told his superiors that they would use no artillery and would take the city without bombardment. They might take higher casualties; so be it. They would not shell Ypres.
In the event, the Germans decided at the last minute that the situation was not favourable and pulled out, and the FPA simply walked in and said hello, no fighting necessary, let alone shelling. But the locals still remember them.
General Władysław Sikorski and Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
hopefully dont ask the empty hair if there is a business case for them
Sweden very close to mining Uranium (not building a reactor) just waiting for
moratorium to be lifted, which looks promising.
The economy of scale.. Do these things ever get out of the red.. Accounting tricks, retrofit. all in.. I don’t think they do.. The first energy boondoggle, slathered in cold war propaganda..
A national pride industry that writes its own checks.. Fine, in major population centers that have the ability to burn cash.. I also believe the smaller reactors are not for cost savings.. All your eggs in one basket is never good.. Spreading a headache around isn’t either..
They sell the damned things and claim they will last 30 years and turn a profit after 20.. Then they need a major retrofit rebuild after 10 years.. That gets hung up and amedined up after 15 years.. Then they decide to build a new one right beside the old one.. A industry that regulates itself writes its own checks.. Think OPEC, but its NUCPEC.. Oh, boy..
I’ve seen more impressive economies of scale in the fishing industry.
Drill, baby, drill!
Mining for uranium is no joke though. Very pricey. So is nuclear energy end to end. The age of cheap energy is ending for the West.
For the BRICS people? Not so much.
“So is nuclear energy end to end.”
Try actually understanding something about nuclear energy before stating nonsense. Perhaps you can explain why Ontario gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power. France gets 80%. Belgium 60%. Also explain why the most expensive electricity in the world comes in places with no nuclear power such as Australia, California, Germany.
SMRs are already under construction in Ontario.
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1002543/ontario-breaks-ground-on-world-leading-small-modular-reactor
I know that. It’s the prototype for all these Polish and Saskatchewan reactors. But you can bet the manuals are being written in Polish, too. That was something of a joke, if you missed it.
And Spain will close its 7 nuclear reactors by 2035
Never trust politicians making statements about what will happen more than a decade in the future.
If a socialist tells you they’re going to close the nuclear reactors, perhaps you should take them seriously.
If a socialist tells you it’s daytime, look out the window. Socialists lie about everything. The socialists in Sweden are backpeddling like mad over their 40 year old commitment to get rid of nuclear power. Now they claim they need more.
Let me correct that for you, cgh
Never trust politicians
Entirely reasonable correction. You will agree, I expect, that there are degrees here. Socialist are all unspeakable turds.
cgh
I agree with you that socialists are turds.
I saw the headline, never had time to look into it. What’s up with that?
Brian
Sorry, I forgot the link.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/spain-confirms-nuclear-power-phase-out-extends-renewable-projects-deadlines-2023-12-27/
Spain plans to close its reactors, replacing them with renewables.
What’s up? It’s socialist politics in Spain. Spain’s reactors were ordered by the Franco government. Spain had no source of coal or gas and had no domestic fuel source for electricity. As the last holdovers of Franco’s regime, nuclear power has a lot of built-in hostility because it symbolizes the nightmare of Franco’s government.
You certainly can’t dam every river and every river isn’t worth a dam.
Interesting that OPG is building them – they’ve got a lot of dams and nuclear already.
And lousy with windymills, maybe they realize that those things aren’t going to last and replacing them will be a costly waste?
Then there is the mass immigration population increase along with the mental defectives trying and effecting defeat of natural gas use.
And the battery transportation units.
Far too many people take energy for granted.
Saskatchewan should not dither.
Buddy, you are dead on accurate. Ontario used up the last of its large scale hydraulic capacity in WW2. It had to build nuclear because Ontario had no coal, and getting it supplied was impossible on the scale needed.
Immigration has a cost. Ontario gets about 150,000 immigrants/year. As average citizens, each one of them uses about 6 MWh of electricity each year. So, Ontario has to find an extra 900,000 MWh of electricity for the province each year. That alone is about one large nuclear reactor’s worth of electricity every five years or so.
And this is assuming NO net zero nonsense. This is just expected natural load growth. As for this statement:
“Saskatchewan should not dither.”
Yes, repeat that over and over, because it’s absolutely true. If Saskatchewan wants new industrial development it will need new additional power sources. Same thing goes in Alberta, which is why Alberta is part of the four-province compact to build new nuclear power in Canada.
Use EVs as battery back-up for the grid.
Saskatchewan uranium, eh? I’m sure Justin will say there’s no business case for it. Count on it.
No, like the Germans, he’ll say that there is too great a risk of a tsunami in Saskatchewan to build reactors, We don’t want a repeat of Fukushima do we?
Actually this is one of the biggest embarrassments for Stephen Guilbeault. A professional antinuclear campaigner, he had to eat poo when the Trudeau cabinet included nuclear as a clean energy technology for energy project financing and support. Justatwit may be an idiot, but some of his handlers don’t need to use fingers and toes to count to 10. They know that there’s no Net Zero without nuclear power, and lots of it.
(I wish I had been a fly on the wall when Garden Gnome Barbie was explaining the facts of life to Stevie Gumboots in some cabinet meeting.)
Can Canada finally become a world leader in something, and not blow it a la Nortel and Blackberry.
my info is nortel made the mishtake sharing tech details with Mr Xi’s cohorts whereupon true to form they stole everything,
blackberry, their problems arose from marketing dozens of models all at once or such.
Canaduh. the retarded giant.
Truer than you know, WL. China stole the technical details of the Slowpoke reactor in the 1970s and proceeded to proliferate them in half a dozen countries. The wikipedia article on Slowpoke is not too bad but it’s completely silent about China.
Yes. Canada was the first nation with the capability to build a nuclear reactor after 1945 after the United States and Britain.
Canada was the first nation to pioneer a nuclear power generation technology after the United States and Britain.
Canada was the nation to invent the medical use of radioisotopes for cancer treatment.
Canada was the first nation to build a nuclear research reactor after the United States.
Canada was the first nation with the capability to build nuclear weapons and voluntarily refused to do so. (This last one may seem spectacularly stupid, but blame the long dead, mad William Lyon McKenzie King for this bit of rancid stupidity.)
the security issue.
howzabout a variation of this: design a container for the mini reactor that is 2 feet thick weighing 40 tonnes and the reactor sits attached inside it with usual connections for cooling air/water/whatever going in and the electricity to come out.
the container is built around the reactor interlocking pcs taking better part of a day to disassemble sufficiently to open the reactor and steal the uranium.
some sort of very awkward inconvenient device that could be reused ad infinitum.
even equipped with a disposable lead liner to deal with accumulated radiation.
lm not the guy with the nuke doctorate so do not attempt to pick apart the suggestion based on technicalities.
p.s. l use this tactic myself, l have a security box in my house 2 layers 3/4″ plywood reinforced and massive heavy padlock. th whole thing boltd to the basement floor and lag bolts into the wall studs. worked so far, not that lm storing bomb fuel or such.
Actually you are pretty close to what will happen with some of these things. Some of the very tiny nuclear reactors will not actually need to be on the surface. Depending on fuel type, they may not need refueling for up to a decade. Some of Canada’s research reactors now only need new fuel about once every 10 years.
They can be underground including accessing them and electrical connections. This offers both security and passive shielding should either of these be needed. Inconvenience and difficulty are two of the most important tools in security of any kind, nuclear or otherwise.