Some folks, who need not be mentioned, praise and glorify anything and everything “green”, naturally ignoring any and all criticism. Wind mills are perfect - its free energy.

Spinning of wind turbines has no effect on CO2 levels. Ofcourse there are no radioactive byproducts. In all the PR, they are blended with backround trees as if they were organic. And, they are white and prestine like angels.

But they are not “perfect”. They are manmade. Their production does require hydrocarbons. Their component (steel/concrete) material costs per MW are amongst the highest - higher than coal, gas, nuclear etc. Many farmers and tourist areas dont want them - either due to wooshing or because a visual distraction. They require maintanance, as does transmission infrastructure, so although there is no fuel, there IS an operating cost.

And they are only as useful as the wind patterns. And the biggest fallacy is that they work in any wind - whereas they only operate between a min (breezy) and max speed (not in storms).

But perhaps the bigger lie is that wind power isn’t given a chance - despite tens of thousands built. Nobody wants to acknowledge the cost of (CO2 producting) replacement power. And the rebuke of some future energy storage system is like waiting 50 years for fussion.

And if an “environmentalist” nods in approval of nuclear, but on the condition of waste storage, perhaps reply:

“Have you set up a decomissioning fund to tear down those towers and recycle those blades and motors when they’re worn out?”
Because nuclear industry has.

Maybe there’s hope yet, at least as far as the federal government is concerned. Ideologically, they would give Lovins as much time as they would give David Suzuki or anybody from the Pembina Institute—i.e., none, which is as much as they deserve.

crf, you are right. There is a paucity of energy related material prepared by distinguished organizations. There is however tons of material prepared by groups like Greenpeace, Suzuki, and Pembina.

On the whole, I thought the report was useful. It asked the right questions: it just didn’t go about answering them the right way. So the report is not “not even wrong”. It is at least criticisable and could be improved upon.

I get the impression that in Canada things like this report are emblematic of the material we have to move forward an intelligent energy/industrial policy. Scary: but that problem is not CIGI’s fault: it is the fault of decades of indifference by Canadian provincial and federal governments, and no focus on the issue from either private industry or academics.

Am I wrong that there is a paucity of policy-relevant material on energy being prepared by distinguished organisations? (I am just a layperson, I could well be wrong. Enlighten me.)

I am amazed to see this claim in a supposedly objective report. Nuclear offsets the emissions from the only other non-hydro baseload sources, gas and coal, to the tune of millions of tonnes per year. Renewable sources require massive backup from gas-fired generators (which come with 550 grams of CO2 for every kWh they generate). How the heck can they have superior carbon economics??

Moreover, the report points to successful conservation and efficiency efforts by pointing to the examples of California and Ontario (!!). Ontario’s baseload demand dropped in 2009 because of the convergence of (1) a deep recession, which hurt major power users like the nickel producers in Sudbury; and especially (2) a mild spring and summer! The author then goes on to assume (page 17) that Moore’s Law automatically applies to wind and solar generation; therefore their costs will fall.

Very disappointing to see these kinds of sloppy and unsubstantiated assertions in a supposedly credible report.

I heard an American nuclear industry guy say that a government doesn’t have to be anti-nuclear to kill a new build project. It just has to not support it. When the “experts” say things like the above, is it any surprise the federal and provincial governments feel no pressure to proceed with the Darlington project? This is the kind of thinking that produced the Samsung wind deal.

The issue of renewables’ place in a modern grid is absolutely central to the debate over how to proceed with investments in power generation. Renewables don’t just require problematic transmission redesigns, price subsidies, and pride of place on the grid. They also require parallel fleets of gas-fired generators. That is neither cheaper nor environmentally more benign than a combination of nuclear and coal.

I hope you are wrong: I hope policy makers do not take this report seriously. But you are probably right, they will take it seriously. And that is unfortunate.

How close is the APR to the AP 1000? Is its UAE generation cost similar to that which Westinghouse submitted in Ontario for the AP 1000?

But I can’t see a Korean deal working in Ontario if it is based on the APR.

I have another comment re; the ABWR; if the design in principle is typical of existing BWRs the operating costs would be higher than other alternatives (due to higher absorbed dose, translating to higher number of staff and maintenance budget).

First, compared to enormous pockets, resources and expertise of Areva, GE, Hitachi and Westinghouse (and Russia & Korea), I seriously doubt AECL can compete. The federal government essentially put AECL on chopping block.

India’s PHWR is based on early CANDU. From what I recall, India has yet to design let alone operate a reactor as large and reliable as CANDU6 or CANDU9.

Finally about ABWR - it doesn’t have bells and whistles but 4 trouble-free operating reactors are proof of its good mature design:
# Notably, the typical ABWR containment has numerous hardened layers between the interior of the primary containment and the outer shield wall, and is cubical in shape. One major enhancement is that the reactor has a standard safe shutdown earthquake acceleration of .2 G (slightly less than 2 m/s2); further, it is designed to withstand a tornado of Old Fujita Scale 6, with > 320 mph wind). Seismic hardening is possible in earthquake-prone areas and has been done at the Lungmen facility in Taiwan which has been hardened up .3 G (slightly less than 3 m/s2) in any direction.
# The ABWR is designed for a lifetime of at least 60 years, though operation beyond that 60 year point will certainly be possible unless safety limits within the expensive to replace reactor pressure vessel is reached. The comparatively simple design of the ABWR also means that no expensive steam generators need to be replaced, either, decreasing total cost of operation.

I think the basic apprehension in author’s (and a lot of other people as well) mind is – whether these people, I mean AREVA, GEH or WEC etc., have forgotten the art of designing a reactor. It is quite fashionable in India as well, talking about what a Nuclear Power Plant can do or cannot do. Any body and everybody, irrespective of whether he possesses a basic knowledge on process design, comments, argues, remarks, nags, passes his observations (??) and even clarifies and interprets Nuclear system definitions and terminologies even to the horror of a person like me who is not an expert, but has a fair knowledge on the subject.

To conclude, I can only say, please let these people, who has spent their lives on this business, do their job. There are enough hawks like regulators sitting in each and every country wherever they go and build a plant. They WILL take care of these problems. If the author is so apprehensive about these reactors, he can advise his country to approach the Indians. They are continuously building the PHWRs, similar to their own design successfully. I heard, they are more advanced than CANDUs.

Lack of stable funding hobbles research facilities.

It’s not about aecl, but it shows the mindset that has resulted in the light source, and Neptune, and (though the article doesn’t mention it) Canada’s telescope projects being built without clear long term means of financing. Along with the lack of an open process for weighing the scientific and strategic merits to decide what large projects are built in the first place, and sticking by that decision for the long term, science disciplines where we might excel can quickly become underdeveloped and neglected. Canada and whole world loses. And it largely happens in silence.

The same mindset I’m sure has also led to AECL’s long term goals: science and commercial, being underdeveloped and neglected. In AECL’s case, this has obviously gone on for decades, in silence. And the politicians (they are so negligent) and the public only became aware of it during a crisis.

Where’s the next science catastrophe going to come from? NRC? DFO? One thing urgently needed is for the government to force those organisations to provide the means of peer reviewing all aspects of their science programs by the community. Those organisations’ science programs are controlled largely by perhaps well-meaning, but scientifically unsophisticated and scientifically unaccountable bureaucrats whose overarching concern is to work within Ottawa’s fiscal schedule. They can’t know whether those science programs are well run, or relevant.

Reactors specialized for a specific purpose, dependent on a single product for economic viability, would have to have a rock solid business case. If the economics don’t work, and the reactors are too specialized to be useful for anything else, then there is no recourse but to cut your losses, so long as you have another alternative for supply.

I disagree with you, however, that the Maples could not have been operated with a positive coefficient of reactivity, at least for a while.

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’ ” - Isaac Asimov

As a scientific endeavour, discovering the reason for the positive coefficient would have been worthwhile. Several organizations examined the available data and agreed the coefficient should have been negative. I can see three possible reasons:

1. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. The data was wrong. Not much to be learned if this was the case, other than to better record the design information.

2. The reactor wasn’t built to specifications. Similar to #1.

3. There is a shortcoming in reactor modelling codes, that these particular reactors managed to demonstrate.

#3 might be a long shot, but it seems it would have been worth the effort to nail down to cause.