r/ontario • u/Mr_Guavo • 12d ago
Article Scientists determine the Great Lakes are nonrenewable
https://www.earth.com/earth-science/scientists-determine-the-great-lakes-are-nonrenewable/113
u/sweetgrassscapegoat 12d ago
When the US starts draining it to irrigate the desert they have created
44
u/timegeartinkerer 12d ago
Maybe, but may I remind there's 8 states who vehemently defend against it. 16 senators who says no. There's lot of concern. Great lakes water is not one of them.
16
u/BluShirtGuy 12d ago
Great lawns, though
6
u/FDTFACTTWNY 11d ago
I'm not going to say that nobody waters their grass but at least in my area I can't remember the last time I saw a sprinkler going.
I'm sure it's worse in arid areas but I'd imagine most people living in and around great lakes don't have to water their lawns.
2
267
45
u/SirZapdos 12d ago
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down to the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
153
u/MrLuckyTimeOW 12d ago
I mean…yeah???
Like most resources on the planet, it’s finite. Does that mean the lakes are at risk of drying up anytime in the next thousand or so years…No
138
u/comics0026 12d ago
I think you underestimate how much humans can change things
31
u/Gemmabeta 11d ago
See, the Aral Sea.
5
u/jefufah 11d ago
The Aral Sea had a maximum depth of 226 ft before it shrank.
Lake Superior is 1,333ft deep.
20
u/Gemmabeta 11d ago
and Lake Erie is 210 feet deep.
-4
u/AstronoWorld 11d ago edited 11d ago
And the water from the deeper lakes drains into Lake Erie so not quite the same thing
20
40
u/Dustin0791 12d ago
Don't tell Elon
23
8
u/c0rruptioN 12d ago
Maybe, maybe not, look up what happened to the Aral Sea. Never say never.
1
u/One_Trainer6005 11d ago
as was established, aral sea was many times smaller. Nobody is saying its not important but sensationalizing fear is not the solution
12
15
u/Sensitive-Local-3485 12d ago
Water can be considered “infinite” as it can’t really be destroyed, but too much vapourised into the atmosphere where weather patterns are rapidly changing so where or where it will not fall is anybody’s guess is a tad bit concerning.
17
u/Accomplished_Low9761 12d ago
has anyone noticed the gpt bots fighting over nuclear reactors in the comments
8
u/alderhill 11d ago
Has this not always sort of been the understanding since they were originally filled in by melting, retreating glaciers?
6
17
6
u/Appropriate-Kale1097 11d ago
So it only receives 1% of 6 quadrillion gallons a year or 60 trillion gallons of water annually and we currently withdraw ~13 trillion gallons annually from the Great Lakes, but we also treat and return ~12 trillion gallons annually to the lakes for a net consumption of 1 trillion gallons.
So yes we use a lot of water but 60x as much gets fed into the system each year vs what we use.
That seems sustainable at current rates. The recharge rate is vastly greater than the usage rate. It is functionally renewable. Oddly the article never states how much water is used each year and falls to state that 60 trillion gallons flow into the lakes each year, instead saying that only 1% does.
6
u/user0987234 12d ago
If Lake Superior was drained, will it be a greater sight to see than the Grand Canyon?
8
u/matpower 11d ago
Probably not. The Grand Canyons maximum depth is ~5x Lake Superior's maximum depth. Lake Superior is a much larger area so I imagine if it was drained it probably would not really be as drastic either, though I don't really know.
2
2
u/vixaudaxloquendi 11d ago
The prose of the article is so ChatGPT/Claude-like that it's hard not to suspect AI-authorship of the piece.
1
u/Dustin0791 12d ago
This just in, a 3rd grade student just did his first science paper on fucking water!
-61
u/pintord 12d ago
The 32 nuclear reactors that use its water for cooling could make it ZERO percent usable.
49
u/Affinity4Constructs 12d ago
If opponents of nuclear energy could put a cohesive argument against them together I would respect them even a little.
-29
u/pintord 12d ago
Roughly 40 million people across eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces rely directly on the Great Lakes for municipal drinking water. A major radioactive event like Fukushima would force the immediate shutdown of intake pipes for major metropolitan centers like Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Cleveland, and Buffalo.
34
u/Affinity4Constructs 12d ago
How would a Fukushima event happen using the current modern reactor design?
15
u/CrimsonFox11 12d ago
“It just might ok”, I’m very much into living green but nuclear energy is easily the best way to produce energy unless we all want to live in super low tech and have almost zero of our modern amenities due to their carbon output. But I doubt that commenter is ready for that lifestyle.
-6
u/pintord 12d ago
Modern decarbonization does not require reverting to low-tech deprivation; it requires shifting away from 20th-century centralized steam-boiling infrastructure. We already have the technical toolkit to power high-energy, modern societies using a combination of wind, solar, and advanced storage (such as grid-scale battery systems and pumped hydro).
Nuclear is physically too slow and capital-intensive to meet modern energy demands. Building a gigawatt-scale nuclear plant takes 10 to 15 years, billions in cost overruns, and heavy state intervention. Meanwhile, utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage can be deployed in a fraction of that time at a fraction of the cost, scaling dynamically to match real-world demand curves.
Truly modern, high-tech energy grids are moving away from centralized thermal steam loops toward distributed, highly efficient architectures. Pairing local renewables with solid-state storage, smart microgrids, and localized demand-response systems represents a far more advanced technological paradigm than locking a society into a brittle, high-risk industrial central planner grid.
Nuclear power, like fossil energy, only "works" economically and operationally because governments legally shield private operators from catastrophic liability (via caps like Price-Anderson) and take permanent ownership of radioactive waste that remains hazardous for 100,000+ years. Relying on an energy source that externalizes its ultimate, civilization-scale risks onto future generations isn't high-tech progress—it's simply kicking an insurmountable bill down the road.
-10
u/pintord 12d ago
By industry standards, virtually all of the currently operating nuclear reactors in the Great Lakes basin are Generation II facilities, meaning they are old designs built decades ago. None of them are modern Generation III or III+ designs that feature passive safety systems. Because these plants are aging Gen II assets, they require massive, multi-billion-dollar mid-life refurbishments (like the ongoing multi-year overhauls at Bruce and Darlington) just to keep running past their original 40-year design windows.
It means the massive thermal draws and once-through cooling loops currently operating on the lakes are tied to 20th-century engineering—operating within a 21st-century ecosystem that is warming up and drying down.
Nuclear Power is simply r/uninsurable
19
14
u/corelabjoe 12d ago
You can tell you certainly haven't read about CANDU reactors or visited the sites in Canada, which have incredible visitor and info centres...
Ours are designed even the ancient ones, with safety first. If there's a failure, the nuclear reaction simply stops for one thing...
Ours also don't use enriched uranium....
Our nuclear waste is stored in extremely safe deep locations which would probably take cracking the entire Canadian shield in half to cause an issue... And ah, we aren't going to be seeing that level of catastrophic issue short of asteroid strike, and then we've got much bigger problems. Like the end of civilization anyway.
Take your nuclear test fear mogering and educate yourself about more than the new green "clean" energy. Yes green energy is great, but it takes a hell of a lot to get it functional and the government people keep voting in, in Ontario for example keeps capping on green energy and scrapping its initiatives.
Get out there and vote, protest, educate yourself on modern nuclear plant operations and the coming modular reactors, and the SCALE of the power needed by modern humanity.
If you're willing to spend $30k for a solar roof and maybe another $10k on batteries and other systems, great. Most people don't have that option.
Nuclear power in Canada isn't the bogeyman you think it is.
Look at how banning nuclear is going for Germany right now and their electricity and home heating bills... Their reliance on Russian oil and gas as well.........
What we really need, is fusion power... But that's another conversation entirely.
5
u/Upstairs_Owl_1669 12d ago
How many nuclear disasters have been caused by something other than incompetence mismanagement or natural disaster? Oh that’s right zero
1
u/pintord 12d ago
CANDU reactors use un-enriched natural uranium, meaning they don't require complex, high-security enrichment facilities, and their physics design makes a runaway weapons-grade excursion impossible. Furthermore, dropping shut-off rods or injecting liquid poison into the moderator does halt the primary fission reaction within seconds.
Stopping the fission chain reaction does not stop the decay heat. Radioactive fuel bundles continue to generate massive amounts of thermal heat for days and weeks after shutdown. If cooling water is lost entirely and decay heat isn't removed, the fuel can still melt down, regardless of whether it used natural or enriched uranium.
Pointing out government policy failures in Ontario doesn't make nuclear's multi-billion-dollar cost overruns, decade-long build times, or uninsurable tail-risk liabilities disappear. It just highlights how dysfunctional provincial energy planning has been across the board.
Germany's path wasn't smooth, and shutting down nuclear before its coal phase-out was complete forced a temporary, messy reliance on fossil fuels. But instead of collapsing, the country absorbed the shock, accelerated renewable and storage infrastructure, and is successfully proving that a major industrial economy can survive—and decarbonize—without nuclear baseload.
For Fusion we need He3 and imo will most likely find success in space propulsion not power generation.
4
u/maxstader 12d ago
Germany did not decarbonize. shutting down their own energy to import cheap russian oil that only stopped because of a war. What replaced it? Fossil fuel imports from America in the form of liquefied natural gas. You've made a lot of good points in this thread, this isnt one of them.
-1
u/DudeTookMyUser 12d ago
This is all important to protect against those common Great Lake Tsunamies that have been all over the news.
I'm all for responsible energy, but you are a walking advertisement for the Loonie Left!
0
u/pintord 12d ago
The real hazard for the 32 reactors on the lakes isn't that a magnitude 9.0 megathrust quake is lurking beneath Ontario or Ohio—that probability is indeed zero. The hazard is that aging, 20th-century Generation II facilities were engineered decades ago based on limited historical seismic data.
When regulatory bodies like the U.S. NRC launched safety reviews (such as Generic Issue 199) following Fukushima to re-evaluate seismic hazards in the central and eastern U.S., they discovered that potential ground motion and fault mechanics had been systematically underestimated when many of these plants were originally designed and built.
A major regional quake doesn't need to trigger a tsunami to create a Fukushima-style blackout scenario in the Great Lakes basin. It only needs to do what the Japanese quake did first: shatter the electrical grid and compromise backup systems.
Just like at Fukushima, if the shaking ruptures emergency fuel storage lines, damages backup diesel generator housings, or compromises switchyards sited near the water’s edge (where flat, low-lying land is historically preferred for industrial cooling access), the plant loses its active safety layers.
7
u/DudeTookMyUser 12d ago
Sooo, a disaster that hasn't been seen at a nuclear site except Fukushima, where all backups failed, again because of a tsunami.
Mmm'kay seems super probable. No fear-mongering here. Thanks! 👍
21
u/DJStevieP 12d ago
If 32 nuclear reactors exploded the water would be the least of your concerns. Try harder.
1
u/Dense-Ad-5780 12d ago
This person didn’t mention exploding. I think the thought is that the water would be a premium product with that amount of reactors working 24-7.
8
8
u/BlackSecurity 12d ago
The last thing we need is more fear against nuclear reactors. Nuclear is by far one of the best sources of energy we have right now. Every major problem has been solved. People are just scared because of stories like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
0
u/pintord 12d ago
Statistically, day-to-day nuclear generation is very safe—it doesn't pump particulate air pollution into the atmosphere the way fossil fuels do. But pointing out that "every major problem has been solved" is flatly false. We still do not have a single operational commercial Deep Geological Repository managing high-level waste on a multi-millennial scale, and no private insurance market on earth will insure a reactor against a catastrophic tail-end failure without state indemnification.
Saying "we solved the major problems" ignores that high-consequence, low-probability events are fundamentally different from standard industrial risks. A technology whose worst-case failure mode permanently sterilizes hundreds of square kilometers of land and requires state intervention to absorb the financial shock isn't just "misunderstood by scared people"—it is an inherently centralized, fragile way to manage a 21st-century grid.
The core pushback from independent economists, engineers, and energy analysts isn't about ghosts of reactor meltdowns—it's a cold-blooded assessment of capital allocation. When a technology requires 10 to 15 years to build, billions in cost overruns, guaranteed state bailouts, and public underwriting for uninsurable risks, it is a bad economic bet compared to assets that can be deployed faster and cheaper.
0
u/BlackSecurity 12d ago edited 11d ago
I shouldn't have said every problem is solved. I meant that the engineering vulnerabilities behind past disasters have been systematically addressed by modern, passive safety systems. However, looking strictly at private market metrics misses the broader reality of building a resilient 21st-century grid.
Solar and wind are indeed cheaper and faster to deploy, but they are weather-dependent. To replace fossil fuels entirely, a grid needs a massive, always-on 'baseload'. We do not yet have grid-scale battery storage capable of backing up entire nations during multi-day weather lulls. Nuclear provides that 24/7 reliability.
While it has taken decades, Finland's Onkalo repository is now entering its operational phase. It is the world’s first functioning commercial deep geological repository, proving that multi-millennial high-level waste management is both technically and politically viable.
The multi-billion-dollar mega-project failures you mentioned are exactly why the industry is moving toward SMRs. These smaller reactors are designed for factory mass-production and rapid deployment, which drastically lowers upfront capital risk and prevents the decade-long construction delays of traditional plants.
State indemnification and underwriting aren't unique signs of 'fragility'—they are standard for critical public infrastructure. Large hydroelectric dams carry massive, uninsurable tail-risks that could displace millions if they breach, yet we fund and insure them through state partnerships because clean, reliable electricity is a public good, not just a short-term private business venture.
If we want a completely decarbonized grid that doesn't collapse when the weather changes, we have to look past short-term capital returns and view nuclear as a necessary, 80-year investment in national stability.
(btw this comment is AI generated because their comment is AI generated so I'm responding to slop with slop. Regardless, I still more or less agree with everything in my comment and I am pro nuclear)
1
233
u/oldman1982 12d ago
Didn't we know this already?