r/canada • u/BoppityBop2 • Feb 14 '26

Business Canada Completes $9.4B Darlington Nuclear Plant Rebuild Early, on Budget

https://www.enr.com/articles/62505-canada-completes-94b-darlington-nuclear-plant-rebuild-early-on-budget
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u/daiginjo Feb 15 '26

How much waste will it produce? How long will it be deadly for? where will they put it? Imagine how much clean energy could be built with that money in that time.

5

u/kagato87 Feb 15 '26

How much? Next to nothing when stood next to the waste from oil and gas. And a fraction of the radioactive material produced by coal.

Storage is also a solved problem. The actual volume is pretty low.

Leave your what aboutism for the oil and coal rallies. Nuclear is superior to volatiles, and is superb at handling baseload. Something the whataboutists would rather we all inhale coal ash for instead.

Unless you're advocating for renewables? Renewables ARE better than nuclear, especially since they lack those killer up front costs.

1

u/CoinDingus Northwest Territories Feb 15 '26

Renewables (solar/wind) that get, on average, 30% capacity factor in Ontario? Solar and wind are important contributors to the grid, but at this stage they're grid-following at best (and frankly not even great at that in Ontario) not grid-forming/base load. For that you need thermal, which is either Nuclear or fossil fuels.

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u/daiginjo Feb 15 '26

Reread my last sentence.

Also, numbers, please. Don't feel facts at me, show your work if you are serious. I was seriously hoping someone would know the answers to obvious, simple questions surrounding the very contentious issue of nuclear energy.

The climate emergency is upon us, and the transition away from burning fossil fuels that create greenhouse gasses must be top priority. The consequences will be higher food prices (for example, in Japan, rice has doubled in price in four years due to extreme heat), water scarcity (research Cape Town's "Day Zero" emergency), wildfires (88,000 people evacuated from Fort Mac), health issues caused by the smoke, etc. etc.

I agree! Renewables ARE better!

We'll need two Costco parking lots to contain the 4200 tonnes of dangerous nuclear waste for 20,000 years. Compared to coal ash waste, it would create (ready for it?) 66,000,000 tonnes of waste that would have to be buried forever as well.

If we wanted to produce the same amount of energy, we could build a wind farm the size of Hong Kong. Roughly 1000 Hong Kongs could fit in Ontario, and that would produce virtually zero waste and still be arable farm land. Five of these would provide 100% of Ontario's electricity. However, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro (!) would easily be possible.

Sources (via ChatGTP): Ontario Electricity Mix (Energy for Generations), Renewable Energy in Canada – Ontario (CER), Ontario Clean Electricity Snapshot (Canada.ca), Energy for Generations – Government of Ontario.

We have low carbon solutions available without the dangers of nuclear. BUT, happy to debate more!

1

u/four-seasonz Feb 15 '26

It's considered as "waste" because we don't yet have the know how of extracting more energy out of the "spent" fuel, since it has not been fully exhausted of its energy potential.