#nuclear chp

[man-and-atom]

The Power Workers' Union (PWU) released a report today by Strategic Policy Economics entitled Electrification Pathways for Ontario to Reduce Emissions, showing that Ontario faces an electricity supply shortage and reliability risks in the next four to eight years and will not meet net zero objectives without building new low-emission, nuclear generation starting as soon as possible.

This should not be a surprise. Wishful thinking has dominated the electricity supply sector in recent years, not only in respect of where power is to come from, but also as regards the effects on demand (which is regularly described as “stagnant” despite significant consumption increases) of efforts to electrify transport and the heating of buildings.

We suggest a four-point plan to avoid the projected shortfall.

Do not force Pickering Block B (10 years newer than Block A) to close in 2025, according to a political deadline with no particular technical rationale

Proceed with the long-planned Darlington Block B, a duplicate of the existing 4×900 MW block, and potentially the often-discussed 4×800 MW Bruce Block C

Replace Pickering Block A (of which two units have been shut down for some years now) with a 4×1200 MW CANDU block of the type AECL already had firm designs for in the 1970s

Construct a pressurized-hot-water pipeline from Pickering to serve large campuses and other major heat loads in the Toronto area, as was seriously proposed about 1980 (and study the feasibility of a further line from Darlington)

If such a plan is not implemented, the use of fossil fuels for electric generation in Ontario is bound to rise sharply. The heat pipeline has a function in addition to reducing the overall demand for electricity in the heating sector : thermal accumulators (essentially, large insulated tanks of water) provide a simple way to time-shift heat demand away from power demand, improving the overall system performance. It should be recalled, because Toronto is also a good market for summer cooling, that “single-effect” absorption chillers for air conditioning are successfully being used in New York City (fed from the steam system there) to blunt summer demand peaks.

Note also that the much-discussed “small modular reactors” have no particular application to the current need : the Greater Toronto Area contains many millions of people, about 40% of the whole population of Canada. Such a concentration of people and industries is a perfect match for very large stations.

The report in question can be downloaded here.

We won’t speculate on why Yahoo News decided this belonged in the Sports section!

[man-and-atom]

City solar thermal project demolished, scrapped

MEDICINE HAT, AB - There was no shortage of fanfare during the opening of the Medicine Hat solar thermal proje...

We are not here to crow over the failure of a “renewable energy” project.

We are, however, at a loss to understand how this project ever was brought forward in the first place. The reasons why it would not work could have been worked out in an hour or two by a class of primary-school students, before a single dollar had been spent.

In fact Medicine Hat would be a brilliant location for a demonstration “small modular reactor” nuclear combined-heat-and-power project. As with, for instance, the Site C (British Columbia) and Muskrat Falls (Newfoundland and Labrador) hydro projects, it seems as though an “anything but nuclear” mindset prevails. No expenditure, no matter how large, on anything, no matter how unlikely to succeed, is to be rejected, as long as it justifies the claim that atomic energy is not required.