Paul Accione is an engineer and management consultant in Ontario who has worked in the nuclear and fossil fuel industries for over 48 years and has a wealth of knowledge about how nuclear power works, how nuclear waste is stored here in Canada, and the benefits nuclear power brings to an electricity grid.
We discuss how public opinion of nuclear energy has changed over time during his career, the current issues around renewables, and why it’s unlikely we can save the Pickering nuclear station here in Ontario, which means one of the cleanest grids in the world is about to get a lot dirtier.
TRANSCRIPT:
Laura (31s):
Hello everyone. And welcome to the Zero Waste Countdown podcast and radio show today. We’re speaking with Paul Acchione. He has over 48 years in the nuclear and fossil fuel energy industry. He is an engineer and a management consultant as well. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul (47s):
Thanks, Laura. How are you today?
Laura (50s):
I’m doing really well. Thank you. And I’m excited to learn more about Nuclear because this has been a bit of a focus lately of the show, because I think it could be the answer to a too some of our current issues that we’re facing around the world. So you’ve been involved with Nuclear for a very, very long time, which is awesome. So can you kind of paint a little bit of a picture of how the nuclear industry in Canada has changed over the last several decades?
Paul (1m 19s):
Yeah, sure. Nuclear power have started a little laughter the second world war, when a primarily the us government was pushing the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes rather than weapons purposes. And so from the 1950s on, there was a large nuclear power program developed a following on from the work that was done for the, a for the military and a, you know, society, society was looking for an emission free source of energy.
Paul (1m 54s):
And so it was quite an exciting time for those of us that worked, worked in the industry between a 1950 and 1980 a day as the plant’s came online. Ah, people were quite, quite happy to see the plants producing energy with a no, no emissions air quality improved.
Laura (2m 15s):
So back in the sixties, emissions were a big concern as well.
Paul (2m 22s):
Well in Ontario was industrializing and we didn’t have enough water or resources like in Quebec. So we were starting to build coal fire generating stations. Then in the seventies, the government got concerned about the Hi emissions from coal and started to build a natural gas fired plants, but they also were building nuclear by that time. And it wasn’t quite at the time. It wasn’t quite certain, whether Nuclear could deliver the, a reliability that a way that the fossil fuel plants were were delivering.
Paul (2m 58s):
And so the government kind of hedged their bets and they, and they have invested in both gas and nuclear, but then when Nuclear delivered much better than they expected than the government started a, a large Nuclear build program. But that was a program that program kind of finished finished in the 1980s. A because low growth started to reduce and nuclear power plant costs. We are starting to get higher as, as you know, around the 1979, we had the accident at three mile Island and that kind of cooled off the public’s interest in Nuclear.
Paul (3m 40s):
And because of the reduced a work that was being done in the nuclear industry across the world, it, it, it became increasingly difficult to build these plants on schedule and on budget, since you’re, you’re constantly having to retrain your suppliers, if there aren’t enough for them working on a continuous basis. So work got a little tense, a in terms of stressful, a, between the 1980s in the 2000 and 2010 period, so that it wasn’t as fun.
Paul (4m 14s):
It wasn’t as fun working in the nuclear industry and the ladder of a year in the more recent years. But in the early years, it was a great, a great time. We were developing new technology and having a lot of fun.
Laura (4m 24s):
So it has gotten more negative, I guess.
Paul (4m 28s):
Well, yeah, the three in my line was the first have a three big a reactor or accidents there. The other one was Chernobyl in the late eighties and a focus team. And more recently in 2011, the There the report’s from all three of the, of the investigations basically pinned it down to a poor safety culture at those three sites of inadequate attention to safety.
Laura (4m 54s):
Mmm. Yeah. So the three mile Island is, it was a Tennessee here in North Carolina through three mile Island, I think Tennessee
Paul (5m 0s):
Three minutes, Pennsylvania,
Laura (5m 2s):
The Pennsylvania, sorry. Yeah. Yes. So that was kind of a big one. That’s a little bit close to home, I guess, for a lot of us. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul (5m 10s):
And that makes a lot of damage, but very little radiation actually got outside the plant.
Laura (5m 15s):
Yeah. I think that all three disasters have possibly been overblown a little bit. Like I think that they were pretty bad, but there weren’t a lot of deaths or anything like that. And so I don’t think the fear of nuclear power is as warranted as a lot of people think it is, but we’re trying to kinda find out right. I’m and, and get experts you on the show to it, to tell us a little bit more about, and of course, so let’s talk about the Waste Bart a little bit, because that’s another issue, obviously, especially for us that care about the environment.
Laura (5m 51s):
So where does Ontario store its nuclear waste?
Paul (5m 54s):
Well, there are, there’s three categories of waste coming out, a nuclear plant, a low level, intermediate level and high level Waste the high level waste is primarily the, the used for fuel that comes out of the reactor. It’s, it’s quite quite a radioactive for a number of years. That one is stored at the site in concrete and steel lined a canisters. So, so until we have a permanent, a disposal, a site that’s a that’s approved by the public, the intermediate then a low level Waste is shipped in a, in the proper containers to the, a Bruce a site.
Paul (6m 33s):
Where do we have a, the Western a Nuclear a Waste organization is the, the Waste M sorry, Ontario, Ontario, a Ontario hydro runs a Waste a site that the Bruce Bruce site is separate from Bruce Power and a, and that site, the store’s the low and deep in your intermediate level waste.
Laura (6m 57s):
And then I think, I think people are maybe contemplating the idea of digging really deep and making some sort of plan that way.
Paul (7m 6s):
Yeah. That, well, that’s, that’s the current a reference plan here or here in, in Canada we have an adaptive phase management program with the nuclear waste management organization. That’s a federally inc organization that looks after that used fuel from all, all of the plants in, in Canada, the, that particular organization, ah, plans to a, get a deep geological repository approval and a store.
Paul (7m 38s):
The Waste a 4:00 AM a period of time where it can be retrieved. So that if technology for recycling fuel is developed, the funeral can be retrieved. But after about a hundred are 150 years, if that technology has not been developed are the public doesn’t want it developed, then the site we’ll be sealed permanently and a, and a, and the waist we’ll stay up in the, in a rock formation. That’s a ruin. Well, it’s it, it’s a pretty deep, but I think is about 600 meters below, below the surface.
Laura (8m 13s):
Well, yeah, that’s, that’s pretty deep. Like, I wonder if some old mind’s or something would work in the world,
Paul (8m 19s):
They would have used them. Yeah. They would have used the old mines if a, if the mines were a leak free, but unfortunately a lot of the mines are in Ontario, have the fishers in the rock. And so they’re not, they’re not solid. So their looking for a site, then Ontario where the rock is a is perfectly solid. So that when they, when they build the repository, they’re not, they’re not going to have any, a leakage paths out of the site.
Laura (8m 47s):
Yeah. That, that makes sense. I’ve been to the Brittania mine, which is between Vancouver and Whistler. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. They have really bad leaking problems into Howe Sound and they kind of have to be cleaning it up forever.
Paul (9m 3s):
A lot of, one of the one in mind
Laura (9m 6s):
Is that maybe wouldn’t have been the greatest idea then to use mine too. But I think people are worried about the Waste. Maybe they don’t understand the technology as much. So do you think you could explain it to us and like some really simple terms, just basically how a nuclear plant works?
Paul (9m 21s):
Yeah, sure. I’m a nuclear reactor as is simply a source have high temperature heat. The fusion that takes place produces heat. And we remove the heat with water at the peak at the present time. And so the heat is used to boil a water to make steam. The steam is then use to spin a steam turbine, which is connected to a generator that, that makes the electricity is it rotated. So it’s really quite, quite straightforward to, of course, in the detail, there there’s a lot more systems in the plant to protect the public against a radiation and a reactor accident so that the plant his is quite complicated.
Paul (10m 3s):
That’s why it’s expensive, but the process is actually quite straight forward. And a nuclear plants can not only produce the electricity, but it can also supply emission free heat. If we choose to use the steam or hot water directly from the plant and a for economic reasons, a thermal load. So we would, would have to be close to the nuclear plant cause you can’t ship a hot, hot water or steam very far from the plant. So, you know, back in the back, some people may not know about back in the 19, in the seventies and eighties, early nineties, we had one of the largest, a district heating systems at the Bruce site.
Paul (10m 45s):
The Bruce a reactors were supplying steam to the Bruce heavy water plants to make heavy water. And of course also to heat the buildings and provide them hot water on the plant site for the Bruce, the Bruce, a plant also supplied some emission free heat to a local agricultural Energy center, just South of the plant site. So it was quite an impressive site at the time. And we produced an awful lot of energy up there for those steam users that had zero emission, which is kind of nice.
Laura (11m 18s):
Yeah. That’s a neat thing to think about as well. You know, that you probably think that this is ridiculous, but I, I envisioned like a blue lagoon, like, you know, Iceland’s blue lagoon. If you could have these giant kind of outdoor pools for Canadians to go to go sit in some warm water when its a, we have to deal with winter, I’m always looking for, for a different,
Paul (11m 38s):
Yeah, well you can use the heat to warm up something, but you have two, you have to enclose at a bit of that. Otherwise it, it gets pretty steamy and the winter to,
Laura (11m 45s):
But it’s just going to all go away. Yeah. But you mentioned the, the gen four reactors when you emailed me and that it’s possible to recycle that Nuclear way. So our gen fours are very different than a typical nuclear reactor that we already have in Canada.
Paul (12m 6s):
Yeah. That the gen four reactors, a typically don’t use water for cooling. The, the existing reactor’s were developed a from the military program that was used to develop reactors for the submarines and a, and the aircraft carrier some military applications. And of course their sitting on an ocean. So they don’t have a problem with cooling water and there’s cooling water all around the reactor or the reactor was sitting, sitting low in the, in the boat. So if you ever have a problem, there’s plenty of water to keep the reactor.
Paul (12m 37s):
Cool. So it’s almost impossible not to have cooling water on a submarine or an aircraft carrier, but the problem is when you move that technology onto the land, you have to be very careful that you don’t lose cooling water to the reactor or otherwise the reactor will melt. That’s what happened in a, in Fukushima. It’s what happened in three mile Island, then also international actually a Terranova was in a more serious accident. And we had an unstable reactor And and operated the reactor or under a test program in an unstable region.
Paul (13m 10s):
And they lost control of the reactor. So it kind of blew up on the, but most, most reactors are not unstable. They are, but they do require cooling water. And if they lose the cooling water because of the high energy density, it’s very easy for them to melt without cooling water. The gen four reactors don’t use cooling water, they use a liquid metal list or a liquid salt’s or gas or to cool the reactors. So the gen gen four reactors, it was a, a, a different cooling technology.
Paul (13m 45s):
They have very different safety characteristics. And a typically if they get too hot, they shut themselves down. They don’t keep going until they melt. So the, the problem with a gen four technologies is a little bit more difficult to develop cooling a reactor with a liquid metals or, or molten salts or, or, or gas such as helium, ah, is, is a little bit more challenging in terms of the engineering and systems to make sure that everything is a is, is working well.
Paul (14m 23s):
And then of course you have to con you have to take that heat across to the other side where the turbine it is. And typically the turbines liked to operate on steam SOA. So you have to convert that at some point over at a steam somewhere else. And therefor you need a, a, an intermediate boiler or to take the heat from the primary side, which will be either molten metal or, or molten salts and, and produce steam on the secondary side. So it, it increases the complexity of the plan makes a little bit more expensive, and that’s why they were not developed a first, the, the water cooled reactors were developed first, but unfortunately water cooled reactors have certain safety and And and fuel characteristics that the public doesn’t like a water or water cooled reactors, as I said, could Melton and have an accident that way.
Paul (15m 15s):
And, and they, they also were not very efficient users’ of the actual uranium that’s in the reactor, or only a small fraction of the uranium is actually used before the fishing products contaminate the fuel. And then the fuel has to be replaced with fresh feel. So, so they don’t, they, they’re not very good utilizers of the fuel. And, and that means you are producing a lot more waste with a water reactor than you are with some of the gen four reactors that use a, these, these exotic coolants.
Paul (15m 48s):
They, they are more efficient at using fuel.
Laura (15m 53s):
Oh, okay. And so it’s not really that they’re recycling the waste. It’s just that they have found a way to, is that uranium they use in Jen for as well you’re in here.
Paul (16m 4s):
There’s two fuel’s that they’re looking at. One is uranium in the other one is, ah, is Thorin for him. Can in its inside a reactor 3m will convert to uranium to 33 M. So it, it, it will provide authority is not fissile. It’s a, it’s a fertile element. It can, it can be made fissile. A little of this is probably a terrible word facade material come out have come out of the Storium its its called the inner uranium to 33. Once it’s fits out, then you can have a, a vision take place.
Paul (16m 36s):
The, the uranium reactors run on YouTube 35 that’s that’s in the natural uranium. Naturally uranium has about 1.7% year, two 35 and for a heavy water and moderated reactor like the candor reactors here in Canada, you don’t need two, enrich it in the us. Design’s a, you need to enrich it because water, which is used to moderate the a neutron, slow them down so that they finish and well water or water absorbs some of the, the, the nutrients.
Paul (17m 10s):
And so you need to enrich the fuel to make it a little bit more active so that the, the loss of neutrons is overcome by the enrichment. So you S reactors or enriched a typically two about three, three and a half a percent. So that the way they operate with lightwater, Rudman heavy water. But the, the water, if the water reactors, unfortunately they don’t, they don’t consume the fuel as efficiently as the, as the exotic coolants in the gen four.
Paul (17m 39s):
But even, even the gen four reactors, at some point you, you you’ll get enough vision, product buildup that, that there’s not three activities to keep the reactor going. So you still need to take that fuel out of it we’ll have consumed much more the fuel instead of The, you know, the 1% in the calendar or the work the 3% in a year and a U S reactor, umm, it, it will have consumed much more typically 15, maybe, maybe 20% of the fuel, but you still need to remove the efficient products from that used fuels so that you can put it back into the reactor in Bern, the rest of it, you follow.
Paul (18m 25s):
So recycling, recycling will be theoretically, if you recycle a, a used fuel, you can burn all of it, which means you get a hundred percent of the energy out of the original mind uranium. Right now we’re only, we’re only using 1% of the mind uranium.
Laura (18m 42s):
So that would kind of mean less Waste right for the gen fours.
Paul (18m 48s):
Yeah. The gen fours with, with recycling would be a hundred times less Waste wow.
Laura (18m 54s):
So nice. That’s that’s good then. Yeah.
Paul (18m 57s):
The other thing to remember too, as a, some of the gen fours use technology’s that, that burn burn the act of nights. So if your, if you’re running uranium, umm some of the uranium absorbs neutrons in, it becomes plutonium neptunium and a number of other heavy elements. It’s those heavy elements that create the Hi radioactivity that lasts for a hundred thousand years. And why we’re talking about deep geological repositories.
Paul (19m 28s):
If you, if you can, if, if you can develop a, a fast neutron, the gen four reactors, one of the technology’s is being worked on the fast neutrons, a actually burn the actinides that are heavier than uranium. And so what comes out of have a uranium fueled fast reactor is a relatively low radio activity level. The fuel, the EWS fuel that comes out have a fast reactor. It comes down two natural uranium radioactivity levels about the 300 years or so you don’t have to wait for a hundred thousand years.
Paul (20m 6s):
It goes, it turns off a long list. Yeah. At burns, the long lived actinides the heavier then uranium isotopes in and it burns the, the, the fast neutrons all burned. Those are just as well as it burns the regular YouTube for 35. So it’s a diff like I say, its a different technology and a, and so that it addresses a number of issues that the public is concerned about with nuclear power
Laura (20m 32s):
Were very concerned about the Waste. Right. And, and it sounds like Jen for certainly will help with the waste issue. And then of course it’s good to know that the government, the Canadian government is looking for, you know, deep, deep, underground places to put it I’m and that is safely stored in, in the Bruce facility. But you know, Waste decide, do you think that a clean future is going to require Nuclear like, is this our, our best option going forward for a clean planet?
Paul (21m 3s):
Well, the, the, a lot of people are hoping that renewables, so we’ll do the job, but the renewables are intermittent or they are not a dependable, a, you know, yourself, you could have periods where there was no wind and no sun. And, and so to make, to make energy dependable from renewable, as you need a lot of storage storage at the moment is very expensive, especially if you want to store more than an hour or so. So the problem is that we don’t have a good clean source of energy.
Paul (21m 34s):
That’s dependable, that’s available when you flip the switch. And a, and the only one, the only two that we have are a hydroelectric and Nuclear, and we don’t have much hydroelectric and Ontario, we’ve used a good sights already. The poorest sites are up in North far North and its just too expensive to bring that power down to Southern Ontario. So I’m, we really don’t have much choice. So if you want, if you want clean energy and dependently, but, but to use Nuclear you can use the renewables wear.
Paul (22m 11s):
The load is not, ah, is not requiring dependable Energy for, for example, a renewables will work fine charging electric vehicles cause the vehicles have batteries built in as part of the vehicle. And so you can store that energy in the vehicle when the wind and the center available and you can drive the car a at other times, right? Yeah industry needs power of 24 hours a day. And to make it available 24 hours a day, it requires prohibitively expensive amounts of storage.
Paul (22m 43s):
So Nuclear is a in places like Ontario they don’t have the hydrolic resources Nuclear is that heavy? A lifter? A lot of, a lot of people don’t realize that because Nuclear has a, has such a high capacity factor, typically 85 to 90% of the time it’s running, that it actually reduces emissions for every kilowatt of capacity that you installed. Nuclear reduces emissions six times better than solar, a 2.6 times better than, than the wind.
Paul (23m 17s):
And 1.7 times better than the hydroelectric because of that high capacity factors. So if you want to reduce emissions in a hurry, then your, your best technology is Nuclear by far. And so yeah, I think, I think for the foreseeable future until storage, she gets very, very cheap. Andy efficient. I think we’re going to have to use Nuclear to take us to a certainly 20 or 20, 40 to 2050. I don’t, I don’t see storage coming down probably by a factor of 100 in costs in that time period.
Paul (23m 49s):
So, so we need, we need something to get us cleaned up until the storage gets a cheap enough to make renewable’s participating in, in a larger or a larger percentage of their or otherwise you’re not going to have reliable energy, which means you’re not going to be able to support your industrial, your industrial machine machinery’s and machinery and Ontario and you are not going to be able to support 24 seven operations like hospitals and traffic lights and stuff like that.
Laura (24m 21s):
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about as hospitals, especially, you know, with COVID we’re all thinking about our medical care a little bit more and it would be very disturbing if we had power outages of the hospitals. Right. I think that would be pretty scary even at your own house. It’s very uncomfortable when the power goes off for a few hours, you, you know, you can’t really run your water when, when the pressure tank rents out and, and you know, your heat is out, like everything is out and it’s, it, it can be quite, quite annoying. I think that number or were you where you said solar panels are like six times kind of worse than, than the Nuclear?
Laura (24m 55s):
I think that was for emissions. Was that for you
Paul (24m 58s):
Through, for a mission. So for every kilowatt, let’s say you want to install a kilowatt of solar, a kilowatt of nuclear we’ll we will reduce emission six times of more than solar because solar and Ontario, it was only a 50% capacity factor. And then it doesn’t run at Knight. Yeah. It doesn’t run one, its nuclear run’s all the time. So all the time is running, it’s just taking an emissions right out in the environment. Right.
Laura (25m 20s):
But does that probably include emissions from like making solar panels? Cause we’ve talked about this before, were there, you know, that you have two, you have to mine for the materials. So they’re difficult to build the solar panels. They also have a waste factor. So if they get damaged or when they’re done, we’re probably not going to repair them. We’re probably just going to landfill them.
Paul (25m 38s):
Well, it would be, it would be better if we made the solar panels in Ontario or the electricity is clean, but unfortunately solar panels or made in China where they use cool to make them. So that’s kind of a silly situation where you’re, you’re using dirty electricity to make solar panels in China rather than clean electricity in Quebec and Ontario to make solar panels. Well, you know, labor’s cheaper in China. Yeah. The labor is cheaper than China. So the dollar wins and that’s the problem with our system economically is that the dollar determines everything rather than the environmental requirements.
Paul (26m 12s):
We don’t have carbon pricing uniformally across the world. If we did, the, the panels would be made in Ontario and Quebec, if you have a high, high carbon tax on people who use use electricity and it takes a lot of electricity, as you say, to make solar panels. And so, so yeah, we do, we do some, some really silly things in the world because of the us dollar and for the price, the price of stuff. And that’s just, unfortunately the way it is, I’m actually not a big fan of the carbon
Laura (26m 44s):
Tax because I feel like it throws workers under the bus and in my area, there’s a lot of people that need trucks, you know, two to do the plumbing and construction and trades and air conditioning. And you know, there’s, there’s all these things. And like, I feel like they’re disproportionately affected by the carbon tax. Whereas if you have a lot of money, you can either live close to your work in a downtown place with a million dollar condo and walk or bike or, you know, it doesn’t matter if it goes up very much, you know?
Laura (27m 16s):
So I kind of worry about,
Paul (27m 19s):
Yeah, I was offering a market solution, but that there is another solution that we use here in Ontario before carbon pricing. And that was, we set regulations. We said, no use of coal for making electricity period full stop. And that immediately takes Cole out of the business. And we also said, we are going to use the gas plants for back up and four for a peak load. We are not going to use it for a base load. And Ontario so we made a decision in Ontario through regulations, not through carbon taxes, but through regulations that hydroelectric and Nuclear would be used for base load electricity and, and renewables can be used for, for peak load.
Paul (27m 57s):
And they would be backed up by a natural gas. And so in Ontario we have a grid that’s 95% emission free right now. And you know, 60 over 60% of the energy comes from Nuclear 25% comes from hydroelectric. So 88 over 85% of our energy comes from nuclear and hydro electric So Ontario is one of the futuristic things in the world that is actually achieved the IPC. We see a 80% reduction in emissions, 35 years ahead of 2040.
Paul (28m 27s):
And they did it by increasing their nuclear capacity to the last 10, 15 years or so. So for base load for base load demand, hydroelectric and Nuclear are the only way to go. Renewables are fine for peak because you can use natural gas to back them up and the gas doesn’t, it doesn’t emit if its not running when the, when the renewables are working, but when the renewables they’re not working the gases there to give you the dependability, right? The last thing we want is people are running out, buying these, these small generators in using him to make electricity when, when the power goes up, because those things Emitt a lot more emissions, then a central generating station, you know what a natural gas generating station is pretty efficient and relatively clean compared to these little machines, you buy it at home Depot or, or Canadian tire and stick, stick them in your, you know, in, in, in, in your garage and then use them for emergencies.
Paul (29m 25s):
Those, those are pretty dirty machines.
Laura (29m 28s):
Yeah. And they’re very expensive. And whenever I’ve used a generator, I always like have trouble with it. Cause you don’t use it for years and years. And then all of a sudden you need it and you’re trying to start it and get it working.
Paul (29m 39s):
Laura you were supposed to test that a couple of times a,
Laura (29m 43s):
Well actually I don’t have one, but when I, when I’ve been in, you know, events and stuff, but yet, but yeah, I agree with that, that its, it would be nice if we could just rely on a clean grid instead of scrambling, because I think the last thing we want is to have these power editors, like what was happening in California. I think that they can be very dangerous for people who are on things as support there, you know, a breathing machine or, or a dialysis or something like people who are dependent with their lives or depending on
3 (30m 12s):
Yeah. California did something really silly a few years ago. I dunno if you know that history and what caused the blackout in California when you want to talk about it.
Laura (30m 23s):
Sure. Yeah. I think my understanding as they weren’t maintaining there, there are lines. And so they had two much like debris and they weren’t maintaining their or their forest. So that was too much like stuff laying around. And so the, the neglected lines, it had become a fire danger during peak time. Is that it? Is that what you were thinking or
3 (30m 45s):
No, that’s one of the problems where they weren’t, they weren’t doing proper forest management than the fire’s that caused him to isolate people when there is a hazard or a hazard that a, they don’t, they don’t wanna start fires from sparking line. So that’s one problem, the other, the other. But I thought you were talking about the blackout that the rotating blackouts that had happened a couple about a month ago. What, what happened in California a couple of months ago as they ran out of capacity because they, they, they lost the, they lost some, some renewable generation and they didn’t have the backup to backup the renewable generation.
3 (31m 21s):
Ah, what, what, what happens several years ago was that they shut it down a couple of nuclear plants and then replaced it with renewables. Well, you can’t replace a nuclear plant. That’s a dependable with renewables that are not dependable. You have to provide a backup source with renewables. They didn’t want to spend the money on more gas plants to back up the renewables. So what they did is they contracted for Power from their neighbors, but they did not contract for reliable power from their neighbors, that what we call the non interoperable power, they contracted for interruptible power, the, the cheap stuff that you can buy any time on, on the grid for next to nothing, typically under a penny, a kilowatt hour, but they can cut it off if they don’t have it that day because its interoperable, its not dependable.
Laura (32m 13s):
Is that like when did, when did solar wind and solar?
3 (32m 16s):
Well, it could, it could be, it could be anything. They could be anything, but then if they need it, they need give it to right. So you’ve got this contract running for several years where your using interruptible power and you’re using it all the time. And after a while you think it’s dependable, its not dependable if, if there’s a problem. So what happened in California they had a heatwave that affected them in several States them. So the other States pulled the plug on them. They wouldn’t give them the power because they needed it for themselves.
3 (32m 47s):
So California they didn’t have dependable generation or dependable supply contracts with these utilities. And so they pulled the plug on. California says, well look we needed for ourselves. We’ve got to heat wave. We can give it to you. So California didn’t build it back up for their renewables. They didn’t contract for re dependable power from their neighbor’s. They opted to go with intermittent power. And then when the heat wave hit, then intermittent power disappeared. They ran out of capacity and they had to cut people off.
3 (33m 18s):
So they ended up with some rotating blackouts cause they were, they ran out a of, of, of capacity to support the renewables. So if you’re going on, if you’re going to go to renewables, that’s fine. But make sure you put in either the backup generation, natural gas or the storage to make sure that when the renewables are not there, that you can still deliver the loop. You follow them.
Laura (33m 42s):
Yeah, absolutely. I think they’re going to close a Diablo Canyon as well. That was on the block
3 (33m 48s):
As much. That’s right. They’re talking about shutting those two units down and when they do that, I hope they’ve learned their lesson from shutting down in Santa and Ofir or a no for you, you don’t shut down a nuke and replace it renewables only you have to provide dependable source to replace a dependable source.
Laura (34m 6s):
Yeah, yeah. Hopefully
3 (34m 8s):
The way they learn their lesson, the hard way. Well, they actually, if utility didn’t pay for the, the people that got cut off paid for it, cause they had lost years as a result right now.
Laura (34m 17s):
Yeah. It’s the people Yeah the, after a suffer from that and you know, we’ve got one scheduled to close, I think it’s 2020 for Pickering here in Ontario. They are talking about closing that down. And so, you know, I’ve been kinda like thinking, well, how can we save Pickering but it sounds like we’re not going to save Pickering. Is, is that right? Can you tell us a little bit about what’s happening with that shutdown?
3 (34m 39s):
Yeah, the pitch, the Pickering plant was the first, a large scale, a nuclear plant that we designed in the sixties. Pickering a, and then in the seventies we designed Pickering beat essentially repeating Pickering a Pickering eight. It was not designed to be easily refurbished there’s there’s lots of equipment in the plant, primarily incite and the nuclear stuff is all inside containment. So you have to work inside containment. It’s a very expensive plant to refurbish.
3 (35m 10s):
So what, what, what happened is they, they did a, a couple of refurbishments about a 10, 12 years ago. And the, they found out that is, it is very expensive to refurbish a Pickering design. So they, they made a decision that it was an economic to refurbish the, the plant another time for the Pickering eight units. And, and, and they weren’t willing to even the first time
Paul (35m 38s):
On the B unit. So Pickering, we’ll be shut down on and I’m and when it is, we have to replace it with something. So we, we have some choices we could replace Pickering with Nuclear, but at the moment we have excess generation in the Ontario system, we have a fair bit of natural gas generation. That’s sitting around waiting for renewables, not the produce. So those plants don’t get used very much, typically less than about 20% of the time. And those plants are running. Umm, so in fact, I think it’s less than that now.
Paul (36m 11s):
So those plants are just sitting around doing nothing. The government has decided that in the interest of lowering electricity costs, they’re not gonna replace Pickering with the new nuclear plant. They are going to replace a Pickering with natural gas plans. Now the, the, the good news is that it’s going to keep the electricity prices lower. The bad news is emissions are going to go up almost the three times. So we’re, we’re, we’re gonna replace a, a, a clean source of energy with a somewhat dirty source of energy gas.
Paul (36m 43s):
Yes. You miss about 400 grams of CO2 and a little bit of particulate and NOx. Whereas coal is about two and a half times worse. So it’s a good thing. We’re not bringing the coal back, but, but like the gas plants are, are not, are not that clean. So unfortunately by, by leaning on our existing guests capacity, but to save a little money and we’re gonna, we’re gonna raise our emissions are quite substantially over the next 10 years or so hopefully at some are at some point that these new gen four reactors will come along at a price that the utilities are happy with and they’ll start to replace the natural gas plants.
Paul (37m 25s):
Yes.
Laura (37m 26s):
I think it’s sad though. A little bit that we’re losing Pickering I just kind of see nuclear AZ, this thing from, like you said, posts post world war II at this time where I think technology and development was really exciting. And now we’re like not as excited like Elon Musk, I think is a good example of someone who’s really excited and developing and going forward and pushing technology. And then there seems to be this environmental movement that really stifles I’m a lot of developments.
Laura (37m 58s):
And I dunno, it just seems a little bit sad when if we keep pushing our, our technological developments, that we can do things that are cleaner, like Nuclear is, has cleaned up, are grid so much. And now we have, I dunno if we had the cleanest grid in the world, but we certainly have a very clean grid relative to the rest of the world. And Ontario a, so it will be kinda sad that our emissions are about to go way up and a few years.
Paul (38m 25s):
Yeah. Yeah. Well Ontario has one of the cleanest mixed next generation grids, a mirror, hydroelectric grids are cleaned out, but making the next generation grits, we are a little mix, have a different technology. Ontario is one of the cleanest because we manage, we manage the supply mix more intelligently than other people. If we put in renewables, we don’t use renewables to displace dependable, to displace dependable generation. So, so we’ve done it more intelligently than other people, but, but yeah, I would, it would be nice if we could get some, a new technology developed and Nuclear, that will allow the Nuclear to get rid of some of this legacy, these legacy problems that were there because of the old, a water cooled reactor technology from the military days.
Paul (39m 14s):
But we know there’s a, there’s some promising, promising things happening down the road. That Canada is a, is going to be testing some, a gen four reactors in the near future at the, a national lab at chalk river. And one on one of, one of the designs, one of the gen four designs is actually being developed by a company that bill Gates is sponsoring all of the billionaire’s or are starting to play with a small modular reactors because a, they see the benefit of the gen four technology.
Paul (39m 45s):
And it’s not that expensive four, a four a billionaire, the, the big reactors, or even to expensive for a billion there. But the, the, the small modular reactors come in and about a 10th of the cost. So, so it’s a, it’s a price that even a billionaire who can afford,
Laura (40m 4s):
Are you saying like if a billionaire wanted to have his own private one or like, just so that he could invest in and build it himself without having a whole bunch of,
Paul (40m 14s):
Well, no, you do it. He wants to develop a reactor that he can sell around the world
Laura (40m 19s):
To see what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there’s a bit of talk of it.
Paul (40m 23s):
The company
Laura (40m 25s):
Shamus a Reagan tweeted about, I dunno if it was gen four are not, I think it was because he said something about like smaller module. Yes. Nuclear reactors. Yeah. So, well, and that’s so he is referring to gen four.
Paul (40m 39s):
Yeah. There Tara Power is developing actually I think two to different, a gen four designs M and a he’s he’s lined up a few other rich investors and a, and the government is chipping in some money. So I hope hopefully they’ll, there’ll be successful. I don’t think bill in generally invests without, without doing so a in a serious way. So, you know, if, if he’s successful, he’ll make a lot of money. He may be the first human being that becomes a trillionaire can be successful.
Laura (41m 11s):
So what are the costs like with a nuclear plant is, so you said the government is interested in sort of putting money toward this. It seems like compared to like building a turbine or a building solar panels, I would assume that building a nuclear reactor is just like extremely expensive compared to all other forms of energy production. Is that true? Yeah,
Paul (41m 34s):
It is. For two reasons, a because you’re dealing with a technology that has very high energy density, you don’t, you don’t want to do something that causes that energy to be released in an uncontrolled way, or you’ll do a lot of damage, right? So, so the regulatory requirements are much more difficult. And the analytical support for the design of the reactors is very expensive. There is a huge amount of money spent on a computer simulation analysis laboratory testing to make sure that everything that goes into the plant is not only of a high quality, but also the, the engineering is a as, as good as we can make it.
Paul (42m 18s):
And so the though the plant, the plant is much more expensive because of the high quality assurance, a required a and the high safety assurance that’s required of a nuclear plant, but once you’ve built it, it has a very low fueling cost because the fuel is So energy dense. You, you don’t need much fuel to run a reactor for a whole year. You know, a, a very, very small fraction compared to compared to a fossil Plante.
Paul (42m 48s):
So it has a relatively low fuel cost and a, and it doesn’t emit any atmospheric emission. So, so if you are trying to reduce emissions, the technology you want to lean on, at least for your base load demand, the dependable 24 hour a day demand. Because once you build an expensive plant, you’ve gotta run it flat out if you want to get your money back. Right. And it creates a lot of it.
Laura (43m 15s):
Yeah. Which which sometimes you have to turn it down. If we have all of this wind and solar on the grid, right. Your often, yeah.
Paul (43m 21s):
Well, no, no, no, no. You don’t need to do that. You could do during the period where you have too much energy, you could make hydrogen, we need hydrogen to a upgrade our, our oil and we needed a hydrogen to a, you know, you couldn’t, you could use hydrogen to make fertilizers and, and plastics and whatever you don’t, you don’t need necessarily to throw it away. You don’t need any way.
Laura (43m 44s):
There’s a lot of talk about splitting hydrogen for fuel, right?
Paul (43m 49s):
Yeah. You use the surplus electricity when its available to make Energen, and you can even inject hydrogen into that natural gas line and to reduce the carbon intensity of a natural gas, they they’ve done experiments in a Europe and in the United States, they can handle 5% hydrogen with no change at all to the equipment. You can get up to 20, 25% hydrogen with some adjustment to the burners, the natural gas burners. And if you wanna go 100% hydrogen, then you’d have to change the actual burners themselves.
Paul (44m 21s):
You know, you’d have to use different burner technology. Cause hydrogen has a different to a flame flame, a dynamic then than natural gas. But a yeah, so the hydrogen can be used to operate a heavy, heavy equipment, for example, where batteries are not going to make it. These are big, big a, you know, off-road off road vehicles. You are not going to be able to charge them, charge them up fast enough to keep them working around the clock. Some of these big, a big, a heavy duty off road vehicles, but, but hydrogen, hydrogen, you had for you, you could fill them up, like you do a diesel tank, you know, I just bring it over and just fill it up.
Paul (45m 4s):
So yeah. Hydrogen has a place. In fact, a, a Albert had just made it an announcement the other day that, that they wanna, they wanna move to a hydrogen economy. So hopefully they will be successful. You have surplus Energy that we could use to make hydrogen.
4 (45m 20s):
We have a lot. Yeah. We have a lot of surplus Energy we just did an episode on that. How much, how much we have, which actually I wanted to ask you about kind of the, the switch, which isn’t really a switch at all. But so we did this episode on surplus energy. So when the wind is blowing, the sun is shining. We have a lot of energy, so we sell it to other provinces and States that neighbor us in Ontario. So, and then a lot of it gets dumped.
Paul (45m 47s):
Yeah. It’s too much to sell. So we dumped the rest. Yes.
4 (45m 49s):
Yeah, yeah. So we have definitely surplus here in Ontario. And so I just have this envision of somebody like controlling the switches. Oh, let’s turn down in the Nuclear here and, you know, put the wind on the grid or something, but that’s not really how it works. Can you explain a little bit how we are able to control the different sources?
Paul (46m 9s):
Sure, sure. So, so what originally happened is that government bought this relatively expensive solar and wind and gave those particular companies first rights to the grid, which meant that we’re not allowed to turn them down. And so for a while there, a lot of people didn’t realize for a while there, the operators were shutting down. Nuclear the Ontario society of professional engineers found out about it and said, are you guys mad? You’re shutting down in Newport, a nuclear plant so that you can get a little wind on the grid.
Paul (46m 41s):
Then when there’s there is no, the next day, the nuclear plant can’t come back for three days. Now you are burning natural gas to replace the wind. So I said, you’re raising the emissions and you’re increasing the cost of fuel because your running the natural gas, instead of Nuclear, the government didn’t realize that they have done that. And after they found out and a, and the operator’s confirmed what the engineers are telling them, they change the rules. Now here in Ontario when we have to much electricity, we try to export it.
Paul (47m 14s):
If we can’t export at all, then we start to shut them down in, in, in what I called the most favorable order. The first to go down, when you have too much electricity, of course, it’s natural gas. So it it’s, it’s offline when you don’t need it. And
3 (47m 30s):
That’s good because your not emitting any, any a mission’s the, the next to go down in his hydroelectric. And the reason hydro electric goes down first, as they pay very high production tacks to the government. So if they’re not producing, they don’t have to pay the tax So. So the system as well, actually the owners, the owners of the hydro plants are happy not to play or pay the tax when there is too much power. So they are happy to shut down when there’s too much power. Then after that, they shut down wind and solar when there’s too much And.
3 (48m 1s):
And finally, if there’s still too much, then they’ll shut down a nuclear plant. But the, well, actually I should say they, the Bruce Plante is able to reduce power about 30, 35%. So the, the Bruce reactors are powered down first. And if they have to go further than they are able to power down, then they’ll shut down a nuclear plant. But that’s the last thing that we do because we don’t wanna lose the plant for three days, because then the next day, if the wind and the solar disappear, if the plan can’t come back, then your firing on natural gas, which is terrible.
3 (48m 36s):
So, so those rules were changed in 2013 and M and they did some fine tuning to the rules in 2016. So now Ontario, which actually has a way, what I call a, a, a, an optimum strategy for dealing with surplus electricity. But what I would like to do personally, is to see that excess electricity not turned down, but used for displacing fossil fuels that we’re using for making hot and fighter all day long or spacing for making hydrogen to produce hydrogen with the electrolysis, rather than using a natural gas to make hydrogen.
3 (49m 15s):
Cause right now in Ontario, we make a lot of hydrogen in Sarnia and using natural gas. And we split the molecule and we take the hydrogen and throw the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Every, every kilogram of hydrogen produces 12 kilograms of CO2. So its a dirty process. I like to see the a, the surplus electricity use to make that hydrogen so that we can upgrade our oil or other, other things that we use hydrogen for like cooling generators, big generators use hydrogen cooling.
3 (49m 46s):
We can use clean, clean hydrogen instead of dirty hydrogen. But it’s gonna take a little while because the government hasn’t changed the pricing policy right now. They charged way, way too much for surplus electricity. There, there are in Ontario here in Ontario that you have to pay or at least 8 cents a kilowatt hour for surplus electricity. But if you’re in New York, Quebec or Michigan, you can buy it for a penny. That’s not fair. And its our own, its our own silliness in terms of how we set our retail prices.
3 (50m 18s):
The, the government is not willing to sell surplus electricity to Ontario residents at the same price that they’re selling it to New York, Michigan and go back. It’s it it’s in my view as disgraceful butt, until they make the decision to change the way they price a retail electricity. When it surplus that that’s going to be dumped, nobody’s going to pay 8 cents a kilowatt hour for surplus electricity, you to make hydrogen, it’s just not economic. So
4 (50m 47s):
A a sucker’s at home we have to pay It we’re all paying it off at home is too bad.
3 (50m 53s):
W I was willing to put in a dual fuel water heater if, if they gave me the price plan, but they haven’t given me the price plan yet. So one of these days, if they come around and, and change the pricing of pricing system, then I’ll be happy to upgrade my water heater.
4 (51m 9s):
And that’s what the Ontario society professional engineers is working on right now is trying to, to change these prices, to make it more fair for Ontario. So that’s a good thing. And I think are you part of that association as well? I think you are.
3 (51m 25s):
Yeah. I’m a member and aye. Aye, aye. One time it was there a precedent for a year. Yeah. We we’ve been working on energy policy for about 10 years and, and they, and I should, I should mention that the government has, has incorporated a number of our recommendations, but the big ones like changing the way electricity is priced is a tough, is a tough sell because in the past, whenever they changed the electricity prices, somebody got fired. So they’re all, they’re all terrified that there going to make a mistake and a they’ll get fired. So, ah, so I think, I think, ah, we have a bad history of playing with the electricity prices and a dumb way or in some poor guy to getting fired, usually the politicians.
3 (52m 6s):
So, so they’re tired. They are terrified of touching the electricity prices. There’s some things that are, you know, perfectly reasonable. Like why throw this stuff away? You can, you could sell it to people in Ontario for a penny and let them use it too. Something useful, like, like making a hot water or, or, or making a hydrogen or, or displacing fossil fuels. I don’t mind displacing my natural gas for heating. If, if the surplus electricity is available, I’m happy to put the, the electric heaters on when, when there are surplus electricity at night at night, we have lots of surplus electricity.
3 (52m 39s):
Let me use the electric heaters at night. I’ll use the gas furnace during the day you fall.
4 (52m 43s):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it’d be nice if we could just have access to it a little bit at home, for sure. And a, it would save us all a lot of money because that’s a big complaints that we here in Ontario is they say that, you know, the wind government ruined the, the energy grid or something, but I’m not really sure why people say that because it seems like we really cleaned it up, which is a good thing. It’s just that prices are very expensive. And I think that’s the big,
3 (53m 11s):
Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the, the fundamental mistake they made was when they brought in renewables, they didn’t realize that renewables can not carry the base load. And after the renewables came on and started causing problems, like, like forcing Nuclear off the grid, that was crazy. But over, over a period of time, they corrected some of the, the big mistakes they made. But unfortunately, once you’ve signed these contracts, you are stuck for 20 years. And so the price has baked in.
3 (53m 42s):
So the price went up, even though we’re, we’re operating the system more intelligently today, the, the price was baked into the contract’s and, and, and the contracts had been signed. They put on way too much wind and solar because we didn’t have the store. Ontario Ontario, doesn’t have a lot of storage on the grid. Quebec has one year of storage on the grid. They can store water for a year. Yeah. They have a good cause they operate on hydroelectric all year round.
3 (54m 12s):
So they have to have massive amounts of storage in Ontario. We decided not to flood all the river basins because a lot of native, a or B Aboriginal of people had their homes in those, in those river basins. So we didn’t want to flood all of Ontario. So we, we use run to the river plants, primarily just take the water as it came. We didn’t try to store a lot of it. Now that’s good for, for environmental and for community purposes for the aboriginals, but it means you have no storage capability for renewables.
3 (54m 44s):
So you need storage. If you’re going to put renewables on the grid and we didn’t have the storage, the government decided to put the renewables on without buying the storage. Cause when they found out the price of the storage, they said, this is crazy. We’re not going to put storage on, well, if you don’t put the story, John, you’re going to waste it because it’s come. It comes when you answer it, use it. So, so if you don’t have the storage, I don’t put it on it, but they went ahead and put it on. Cause they want it to create green jobs are not realizing that if you don’t use it, that’s money, that’s going to go down the drain.
3 (55m 15s):
Anyway. It’s so what we ended up in, in the end was a, a more intelligent operation have the system that we have, but that means that most, not most, but a good chunk of the, have the wind and solar that was paid for, with, with high contract prices is being wasted, which is unfortunate. But that’s what happens when you don’t talk to the engineers before you redesign the electrical system. Yeah.
4 (55m 41s):
And maybe push it through too quickly or something because it’s, it’s, it’s quite sad for me to see that, you know, windmills and solar panels, aren’t really doing what we thought they were going to do. When we were younger, we have good hopes. I think of a world that was powered by wind and solar. And now that we see that they don’t really work very well. I kind of say like, if you’re going to put up a solar panel or winter bine in Ontario, you are basically just wasting it because it’s just going to go to a surplus. Probably do I, do you think that that’s true? Or am I being like,
3 (56m 12s):
Yeah, no, no. If we have the new pricing regime, which the engineers are trying to get the government to put in place, then all of the surplus wind and all the surplus solar we’ll be used productively either to make hydrogen or to make hot water or to make space seating. So if we change the retail pricing than all of that energy, we’ll be used. Now, the problem is that surplus electricity in North America is sold at about a penny. And we’re paying a lot more than a penny for those contracts.
3 (56m 43s):
So most of the money will still be wasted, but at least we’re not wasting the Energy right now we’re wasting both the money and the Energy, which is crazy.
4 (56m 52s):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s so sad to see these things happen. When, when I think things were good intentions, but I also worry about our government going to give like our federal government going to give out more contracts to green energy. And I hope they don’t go more wind and solar, but all the provinces are different. A, you know, Alberta still used a lot of coal, so who knows. We’ll see, we’ll see what happens to the next few years, I guess.
3 (57m 16s):
Yeah. The engineer’s role at the Ontario engineers wrote a report it’s called the Ontario is Energy dilemma. If you Google it you’ll get a report. An in it are the lessons learned from the experiment we did here in Ontario and putting the renewables into a grid that didn’t have enough storage to accommodate it
4 (57m 34s):
Was that the document that proposes the price changes for a surplus. Cause I read that document.
3 (57m 40s):
That’s a more recent one trying to change the pricing. So we don’t waste it. We original one. Well, sorry. There was an original document that we were trying to convince the government, not to put in as much wind and solar. This is the engineers and what’s called on the wind and the electrical grid. So if you Google wind in the electrical grid, you’ll get the original 2012 report that basically told the, at that time liberal government, please don’t put so much wind and solar on the grid because we have no storage to use.
3 (58m 10s):
It can be ignored us, obviously. And of course then, yeah. And then several years later, when they started to see the problems and they sat down with us and we made all these changes to how the, how the surplus we’ll be handled because we were stuck with the surplus. So how, how should we handle it? So we don’t shut the nukes and make the situation even worse. Well, so that got, that got cleaned up. But unfortunately the contracts were signed a in the 20 year a clock hasn’t run out on those contracts yet.
3 (58m 43s):
So, so if you are going to put it in renewables, you’ve got to do one of two things. You’ve either got to put in the storage to make it work properly and pay for it. Or you’ve got to find some load that’s flexible so that if there’s no wind, the load is gone. If they’re is when the load is on. And one of the one that’s coming along now, there’s not that many because we didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t buy to many electric cars, but the electric cars are a perfect, flexible load that can use wind and solar, a intermittent generation because the car 90% of the time, the car is just sitting.
3 (59m 21s):
Nothing, whether its plugged in at work or plugged in at home or it can grab the wind and the solar when it’s available and charge the battery. And then when you need the cards fully charged. So the, the, the, the marriage of electric vehicles with wind and solar is a perfect marriage made in heaven. The problem is right now, we don’t have the smart, the smart controllers to tell the, the car, Hey, there’s wind today. Go ahead and charge. Or there’s no wind to, they don’t charge you follow up. Yeah, it was, there was an ad for that.
3 (59m 53s):
Yeah. Well, there we’ll be. There we’ll be. I think several, several countries are looking at improving smart, smart charging a apps and a, at some point will have a nap that that can, can tell you when there is, or there is not a surplus, wind and solar, and then you’ll charge your car at that particular time to let the car to charge its always plugged in so that it let it charge one, the wind and the solar available. And then you’re not wasting your not wasting the, the stuff and a, and you can maximize it’s value two to the environment.
4 (1h 0m 27s):
So do you think that it’s best in your opinion, to just go to natural gas and Ontario like, we’re going two in 2020 for when Pickering shutdown or do you think it’s best to build another reactor?
3 (1h 0m 42s):
Well, between between friends, the electricity prices there Ontario, or are, are much higher than they should be. A and I think people right now are a price, a price conscious are price sensitive. So I would say for the short term, because we’re way below the, the emission levels for almost every other country in the world, except maybe for France. So we’re such good boy Scouts that, that we can afford basically to do a little more emitting, to keep our electricity prices low.
3 (1h 1m 13s):
While we develop the gen four reactors. Then when the gen four reactors or ready to come out in volume, which has about 2030, then we can start bringing the gen four reactors to replace that old Pickering incapacity that would have been shut down for several years and gradually phased back, back down on the gas, we’ll still need the gas for a backup in case of the disaster, because a, there isn’t a, a, a better, a reserve generation than natural gas.
3 (1h 1m 45s):
If you don’t run it because there’s no problem, it doesn’t emit anything. And if its there is a disaster on the grid, like a tornado or a winter storm that breaks the transmission line and we can’t get the power moving around to where it needs to go. Natural gas is a perfect generation source that can come in during an emergency, protect the public from a safety point of view, they get their electricity. And then when the disaster is over, they back off and the new comes back on and you follow
4 (1h 2m 15s):
It is a lot, it’s a lot cleaner than coal. And a I’ve heard that the startup, this of a gas power plant can be a lot, like you said, Nuclear it takes about three days to get back to the full capacity potential. But with gas plants, does it take a long time to rev up the plant again to do that?
3 (1h 2m 31s):
Well, yeah, if its called, it takes anywhere from about four to eight hours, but the taught you can come up in 30 minutes. Oh well that’s a very fast then. Yeah. So, so if a, if you’ve shut it down and pooled it up because you don’t think he’ll need it for a few weeks, then there’s a disaster, an ice storm than you need. You need to give it about eight hours to warm up. Because if you go, if you start up to fast, you can break equipment.
4 (1h 2m 59s):
So the guest’s is going to be a lot cheaper. But what about with a carbon tax? Is that going to be putting the natural gas prices up to Nuclear prices?
3 (1h 3m 9s):
Well, it depends on the carbon tax. I know I’m look I’m, I’m ambivalent about whether we should use regulations. Like we did an Ontario or whether we should use a market system, like the carbon pricing, there are a carbon pricing. If you don’t have something to protect low income people, it could be pretty painful. It people that don’t make a lot of money. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s important. It’s important that when you decide whether you do it through regulation or you do it through a market mechanism like carbon pricing or cap and trade that you recognize who’s going to get hurt and then provide some relief for those people.
3 (1h 3m 43s):
Otherwise you’re going to get mutiny in the streets. Right? So its important for politicians to understand the damage they do. When they roll out a policy. If you’re going to do it with regulations, you won’t have the carbon price problem, but you’ll have other problems. Like if, if, if you use regulations like we did to wipe out call, that was fine. But then you, you, you have to replace it with something. You, you can’t just take the coal plants off and not replace it with something.
3 (1h 4m 14s):
So they went out and, and they spent a lot of money on a more Nuclear more gas, more renewables, which is fine. But then you’ve got to be careful to the mix and they pick the wrong mics. They picked up too much intermittent without the storage. And the result was they had a lot of waste and prices went up. So now people are losing their jobs because manufacturing is leaving the province. Yeah. So bad. Yeah. So, so you’ve gotta, there’s a lot of moving parts in our economy. So when, when you roll out a policy, you have to understand where all the moving parts are so that you can, you can compensate for the negative impact or you can protect people from the negative impact, but you can’t just blindly rollout a policy in hope for the best.
3 (1h 4m 59s):
And then when the roof caves in, you say, well, geez, it’s too complicated. That’s not that complicated. If you do your analysis before you roll it out.
4 (1h 5m 8s):
Okay. So last question then I not at all, I’ll let you go hear, cause I’ve kept you for a long time, but if anyone’s listening, ah, there’s a lot of young people that listen to the show they are possibly interested in a career in Nuclear. So do you have any advice for anyone wanting to get into Nuclear or get involved?
3 (1h 5m 26s):
Yeah. I mean, I, I think nuclear power is here to stay. It will take a little while to get booming again. Like it, it wasn’t the sixties and seventies, but there are tons of different kinds of jobs and Nuclear and if your passion is energy and, and, and you, and you like Nuclear, Energy in particular, when I say follow your passion, you’ll you’ll or even if, if, if Nuclear doesn’t take off, but at some point what you learn in, in, in, in following a Nuclear a career in studying for a nuclear career, you can transfer to other energy supply.
3 (1h 6m 2s):
And a, and if Nuclear does take off, the good news is its got all kinds of different kinds of jobs for just about everybody, a in a nuclear plant, the job, the job list at a nuclear plant is this is like the job list for a big, a big city. It’s, you know, there’s engineers and managers, scientists, technicians, trades, people. There is medical staff. There is information technology, staff, finance, staff, human relations, public relations office, and industrial support staff.
3 (1h 6m 36s):
And we even have food services staff because some people have to eat. There is 500 people that a nuclear plant. And so they gotta be fed. So there’s tons of jobs in the Nuclear a business. That’s one of the benefits of building a nuclear plant is you’ve got guaranteed jobs for 60 years, two or three generations of jobs. So, so I’m, I’m a big fan of Nuclear as long as I said, as long as you, you, you have a good safety culture in the organizations that build and operate the plants and that, that you, you take care of the radioactive waste intelligently and, and, and make sure that they’re sequestered and, and, and, and stored properly.
3 (1h 7m 16s):
And then they’re, isn’t there, isn’t a problem. You can enjoy the ample, dependable energy that comes out of Nuclear with the, the, the, the, the hazards of the, the risk that people worry about.
4 (1h 7m 29s):
Awesome. Well, this has been really cool and I’ve learned a lot once again, so I love learning about this stuff, because I don’t want to say I’m for, or against something, unless I know all of the background behind it. Right. So I have learned in the last little while that Nuclear, I think is very important and that it is a good answer too, a clean grid. But as you say, there are a lot of other things to consider. So not just safety and Waste, but things like job’s and things like costs to people and people losing their jobs.
4 (1h 8m 1s):
You know, if it gets way too expensive, there’s a lot of things that go on with it. So this has been a great conversation. So thank you very much. Paul
3 (1h 8m 10s):
Thanks. So Laura for inviting me. You have a nice day.
4 (1h 8m 13s):
Awesome. That was Paul. He has
5 (1h 8m 16s):
Over 48 years in the nuclear and fossil fuel energy industry here in Ontario. Change.
0 (1h 8m 22s):
It stops. Now this is the Zero Waste Countdown Podcast.
Zero Waste Countdown Show 