Bruce Power: New Nuclear Generation Capacity

[lenaitch]

You're right, Wesleyville never went online due to the 1979 Energy Crisis.

A decade or more of construction for the DGR sounds about right. They are planning on going 650-800 metres below surface and will have to dig out all of their storage tunnels as well. Lots of material will need to be dug out and hauled away, and their isolation barriers will need to be installed too.

Actually, when I think about it more, a decent company should be able to sink a shaft that deep in stable hard rock in about a year. Things like horizontal drifts, caverns, etc. would obviously add time. No clue about the necessary built-in infrastructure, but a decade seems a tad excessive. Mining companies would go broke with that timeline.

Then again, this will essentially be a government mine so . . .

 

[rbt]

... The new Bruce C plant will only provide 4,800 MW, so these three facilities are probably going to be quite significant. It will be very difficult to achieve this goal with any other type of power source. ...

I really like, as a concept, TerraPower's new reactor design moving toward construction in Wyoming. Basically, it's a nuclear peaker plant; the coolant is stored in insulated tanks rather than moving directly to steam generation so the steam and generation can be delayed to a later time. In short, the 300MW (equivalent) Nuclear reactor runs 24/7 but the actual electrical generation can be 1.2GW for a 6 hour period.

Loads of obstacles to prove out though. It's a huge amount of molten salt to store for a long period of time. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll be proven functional until the early 2030's.

 

[Haljackey]

I really like, as a concept, TerraPower's new reactor design moving toward construction in Wyoming. Basically, it's a nuclear peaker plant; the coolant is stored in insulated tanks rather than moving directly to steam generation so the steam and generation can be delayed to a later time. In short, the 300MW (equivalent) Nuclear reactor runs 24/7 but the actual electrical generation can be 1.2GW for a 6 hour period.

Loads of obstacles to prove out though. It's a huge amount of molten salt to store for a long period of time. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll be proven functional until the early 2030's.

China is building thorium and molten salt reactors right now. Their rise of significant nuclear power investment has sent off alarm bells in the US that they're losing / lost their edge in this technology, and both Republicans and Democrats seem to on board to significantly invest in nuclear power for the foreseeable future. Glad to see Canada (Ontario) following suit as well.

Nuclear interest takes ~10-15 years to become viable once again after disasters in the media sway public opinion away from them. Three Mile Island delayed many projects that got going again around the time of Chernobyl, then there was another lull after Fukushima. Let's hope for no new disaster for quite a while, eh?

 

[ericmacm]

China is building thorium and molten salt reactors right now. Their rise of significant nuclear power investment has sent off alarm bells in the US that they're losing / lost their edge in this technology, and both Republicans and Democrats seem to on board to significantly invest in nuclear power for the foreseeable future. Glad to see Canada (Ontario) following suit as well.

Nuclear interest takes ~10-15 years to become viable once again after disasters in the media sway public opinion away from them. Three Mile Island delayed many projects that got going again around the time of Chernobyl, then there was another lull after Fukushima. Let's hope for no new disaster for quite a while, eh?

China also recently tested a pebble-bed reactor at commercial scale. In this case, traditional fuel rods are replaced with graphite fuel balls that contain uranium inside, and are fed into a hopper. The graphite acts as the moderator here. They are cooled using helium gas, which is shot up through the bottom of the hopper and circulated to heat water to spin a turbine.

This design is apparently passively safe and is amongst the safest reactor designs. In a meltdown scenario, the reactor is setup to passively and automatically slow down the reaction when the temperature gets too hot. However, there are some concerns regarding its safety - for one, the use of graphite is a valid criticism due to its flammability. While graphite is not flammable under an inert gas environment, it will burn in the presence of air, which could happen if the reactor were breached. There are also suspicions that the fuel pebbles will degrade over time and create dust due to friction, which could result in graphite building up in the cooling circuit, as well as gas getting into the pebbles through chips/cracks and possibly rupturing them under high temperatures. We will have to see how the test reactors hold up over the years.

I agree that we have sat out on the nuclear front for too long. It is, in my opinion, the best way to generate power, primarily due to the large amount of power you can generate using a relatively small amount of land.

 

[lenaitch]

So much of Canada's former leadership position in the development era for technologies such as nuclear power, communications satellites, etc. harken back to when public spending had vision beyond the next election.

 

[KevinT]

we have sat out on the nuclear front for too long. It is, in my opinion, the best way to generate power, primarily due to the large amount of power you can generate using a relatively small amount of land.

There's something to be said for maintaining base load power, but nuclear doesn't throttle worth a damn and can't respond to spikes, or do anything but shut down entirely for troughs. Then once you've shut a reactor down, you have to wait for the half-lives of the funky transient elements to expire before you can start it up again, so there's definitely such a thing as too much. I'd love to see another 4 CANDU units at Nanticoke, but that would be it. Energy storage; be it pumping water uphill, compressing LOTS of air into an old mine shaft, or yes, batteries; is what we really should be building out the most. Wind and solar work amazingly well when paired with sufficient storage. A higher voltage grid would be nice too, to increase the distances power can be moved with manageable resistive losses in the wiring. Ontario has a 500 kV backbone, but it really should be megavolt. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere...

 

[crs1026]

^ i have lost sight of the variables, but base load is very different in an age of electric vehicles and rechargeables. In many ways we are storing energy but doing so locally as opposed to at source. In particular overnight demand is different.
So while I agree nuclear is not helpful to peak demand (although there are new versions under development that combine nuclear with storage), it’s not unwise to add to the base especially with some legacy units reaching end of life.
Ontario did attempt a new nuclear procurement back in 2008-2009, but it was shelved due to sticker shock when the bids arrived. I wonder whether the current government is really doing the hard numbers yet…. Or hoping for private capital ?
A multiple site procurement will be darn expensive, especially on top of the cost of digging that 401 tunnel…. i hope the government is doing a better job of counting pennies on the energy file than they are on transportation.

- Paul

 

[dowlingm]

It's a shame that Nanticoke nuclear didn't start construction when the coal plant was killed - we could have been a lot further ahead now. It is fair to say some of the growth in things like data centers could not be anticipated, and of course there was ideological opposition. Being able to send power to Ohio over HVDC is something we should look at too, I think, since this might clean some of the air coming back in our direction in the GTA.

The critical issue is how Ontario can stage construction of the reactors so that the phasing of them keeps a skilled workforce employed, rather than doing nothing for several years and having them disperse, only to try and reassemble it at a crunch period, and that applies to components and control systems as well as the reactor vessels and buildings.

 

[afransen]

There's something to be said for maintaining base load power, but nuclear doesn't throttle worth a damn and can't respond to spikes, or do anything but shut down entirely for troughs. Then once you've shut a reactor down, you have to wait for the half-lives of the funky transient elements to expire before you can start it up again, so there's definitely such a thing as too much. I'd love to see another 4 CANDU units at Nanticoke, but that would be it. Energy storage; be it pumping water uphill, compressing LOTS of air into an old mine shaft, or yes, batteries; is what we really should be building out the most. Wind and solar work amazingly well when paired with sufficient storage. A higher voltage grid would be nice too, to increase the distances power can be moved with manageable resistive losses in the wiring. Ontario has a 500 kV backbone, but it really should be megavolt. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere...

Nuclear plus batteries could work quite well, though. The challenge batteries + renewables have is that you might have sequential days of low off-peak power production, which is not a problem with nuclear. The real problem with nuclear is that it is very expensive. If we can deliver nuclear capacity cost effectively, I think it would get a lot of support. As far as grid-scale batteries, they are just getting started. We will be seeing GW battery installations popping up all over the place. The other benefit is that they can be sited in urban areas and use off-peak transmission capacity to provide peak capacity in cities.

 

[lenaitch]

I don't follow the issues that closely either but suspect that, given the lengthy lead times, some of the planned nuclear capacity is intended to replace existing capacity that will eventually be decommissioned.

As best as I can tell, megavolt transmission is only currently being used in China. I don't know but suspect that if it were to be implemented in NA, standards would likely require greater clearances, separation, etc. than current corridors (which already exist). The current NA solution for long distance transmission is High Voltage Direct Current. I couldn't find a definitive source defining the point at which it becomes more economical than AC but a couple of sites mentioned 600km. Since Ontario is part of a synchronous interconnect, we don't need to connect directly to an export customer within the the interconnect so long as there is capacity 'twixt here and there, and I wouldn't expect Ontario to start building infrastructure outside of the province. Regardless of transmission technology, our infrastructure would stop at the border.

 

[urbancog]

All three of the proposed new generation station sites have existing connections to Hydro One's transmission network.

• OPG Wesleyville in Port Hope (former oil-fired plant), connected to the 500kV network
• OPG Nanticoke in Haldimand County (former coal-fired plant), connected to the 500kV network
• OPG Lambton in St. Clair Township (former coal-fired plant), connected to the 230kV network

Lambton is also adjacent to a connection across the St. Clair River into the Michigan network. It's possible that we'll see additional circuits added to these networks to facilitate more energy transfer to urban areas, like the 2 500kV circuits that were added to between Bruce and Milton to accommodate expansion there.

 

[innsertnamehere]

yes. The most important thing is that the hydro corridors are in place. It's a lot cheaper and faster to upgrade an existing corridor than it is to build a new greenfield corridor.

 

[mburrrrr]

Maybe they have finished all the environmental assessments and starting construction in 2025.
9:00 a.m. announcement tomorrow on something.

Ontario Newsroom

news.ontario.ca

 

[jcam]

It's a shame that Nanticoke nuclear didn't start construction when the coal plant was killed - we could have been a lot further ahead now. It is fair to say some of the growth in things like data centers could not be anticipated, and of course there was ideological opposition. Being able to send power to Ohio over HVDC is something we should look at too, I think, since this might clean some of the air coming back in our direction in the GTA.

The critical issue is how Ontario can stage construction of the reactors so that the phasing of them keeps a skilled workforce employed, rather than doing nothing for several years and having them disperse, only to try and reassemble it at a crunch period, and that applies to components and control systems as well as the reactor vessels and buildings.

This was managed with an almost gentlemen's agreement that offset the Darlington and Bruce refurbishments, so that they wouldn't be poaching each others' talent.

 

[mburrrrr]

Maybe they have finished all the environmental assessments and starting construction in 2025.
9:00 a.m. announcement tomorrow on something.

Ontario Newsroom

news.ontario.ca

The Ontario government is expanding the largest competitive energy procurement in the province’s history by 50 per cent to meet soaring energy demand. The government has increased the target for the procurement from 5,000 megawatts (MW) to up to 7,500 MW to ensure Ontario has the reliable and affordable electricity it needs to power the building of new homes, businesses and communities.

Official release

No questions from reporters after the speech about nothing. You would think they could have just published this information without the live press update. Maybe no reporters there. All laid off?