Last time it was attempted to build new full size reactors was in 2009. The plan got abandoned when the estimated cost was $26billion.

There hasn’t been a new nuclear power plant built in North America in easily the last 20 years that isn’t 10x over budget. Anything that isn’t an SMR or something that uses liquid fuel is dead technology that will never be built again.

or hear me out: SMRs have usefulness in places like Saskatchewan, Atlantic Provinces, smaller cities and northern population centers where hydro/solar/wind isn’t viable for year round supply.

Not everywhere needs a large scale nuclear reactor. Plus Canada is rich in uranium reserves.

Renewables should be the main source and the grid should have a solid nuclear base for continuous supply if/when environmental conditions/events interrupt renewable supplies.

You might be missing the point. Approvals in order:

Design plans, Site compatibility and impact, Construction and decommission plans, Operating license, License renewals

Could be off, it had been a few years. Speaking of, each of those takes several.

Edit: sync did not preserve my enters so commas instead...

No, not “any step.” If they can do it cheaply and reliably that’s great but it’s never happened. Wasting time and billions of dollars for nothing is not a step in the right direction.

If we rely on nuclear plants to replace fossil fuels hundreds of millions of people will die from extreme weather events and loss of arable land. Yes progress is good, but if this is just more of the same it’s not progress, it’s just a waste of time and resources the could go into actually replacing fossil fuels.

If nobody is willing to put up the money to wait decades to profit for normal nuclear, why would they do it for new, potentially more expensive nuclear?

Even if it doesn’t take a decade and it costs less (fat chance it costs less, the article literally says the designers think it will costs up to 50% more to generate electricity) the infrastructure to mass produce them won’t be ready for decades, well past every tipping point for 1.5 and 2 degrees average temperature increase.

Honestly, when people are advocating for nuclear it really makes me think they have zero understanding of the timeframe and urgency involved in needing to replace fossil fuels

To be net zero by 2050 fossil fuel plants need to be shut down and relaxed by 2050.

The average build time for a nuclear plant is just shy of a decade.

The fastest built time ever was just under four years.

There isn’t enough nuclear production capacity to build enough parts to replace nuclear plants that will be decommissioned by 2032, let alone to increase the net generation of nuclear power globally.

I don’t deny that with 20-30 years of expansion we could start replacing power generation needs with nuclear at 5% or more a year.

Do you understand that the basic mathematics behind nuclear plants means that they can’t be a meaningful part of replacing fossil fuels before 2050. Getting to 15-20 % electricity generated by nuclear would be a great help and provide good baseload power in case storage technologies aren’t advanced/produced enough to meet up with 100% renewables. But to reach that point requires hundreds and hundreds of times the funding, manufacturing capacity for components, and specialised construction teams than currently exist. In comparison renewables are on track to have over a TW of power generation built every year in solar panels alone, for a fraction the cost and in better than record nuclear time every single time, while also being fully recyclable now. Hundreds of gigawatts hours of pumped hydro locations are being planned and built for less than the cost of Nuclear even when combined with the cost of renewable generation. Hundreds of gigawatts of batteries are planned to be built and installed by 2030 in LiOn let alone newly developed iron batteries that are cheaper to build, require less rare component, and are more suitable to build large stationary batteries out of than lithium. Nuclear just isn’t going to happen, and doesn’t really need to

That's a challenge for future generations...

Nope. Nuclear is hella expensive and ultra unreliable. Economiocally unviable at any scale.

The sales people from the nuclear reactor companies (and their shills on Reddit) talk up how very cheap nuclear is, but the reality really is they are prohibitively expensive to build, certify run and maintain, and this results in very expensive power compared to renewables.

The suite of available renewables (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro) paired with STORAGE (all kinds and plenty exists, there are several exisiting and under construction where I live) is the future of our energy requirements, full stop.

If Europe is realising one thing now it's that Nuclear is incredibly unreliable. More than half of Frances nuclear plants are currently not operational due to corrosion and maintenance issues.

Nuclear is just steam age technology with extra steps and will die a death from natural causes (economic mainly) in the next decade.

The reason it’s better is lower cost and zero need for any Chinese rare earths or technologies. Super easy to build. And yes nuke is 24x7 but between batteries and other forms of storage we can easily create ways to handle the over night issue.

Also this isn't even considering that the overbudget and long build times only apply to western reactors. Korea and China builds them pretty fast (avg 5-6 years) without cost overruns and in the past Japan built their fleet with an average of 4 years and sometimes even under budget. It can definitely be cheap as scale of economies do apply to them when you regularly build them along with having an active supply chain and experience for them due to them being built regularly.

Also for the safety issue the newer gen4 designs are passively safe where a meltdown is physically impossible as it can self regulate cooling without any human interaction. SMRs also are designed like these since they're small enough that dealing with the decay heat isn't as hard compared to large reactors.