In BC approximately 18% of our total energy is provided by clean electricity and 61% of our total energy is provided by fossil fuels (most of the rest is industrial energy supplied by burning biomass). The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions has calculated that if we are to wean ourselves off fossil fuels BC will need to expand its generating capacity from 15.6 gigawatts (GW) now to 37 GW of capacity by 2055 (or by approximately 20 Site C equivalents).

I am a strong believer in the “all-of-the-above” school for non-carbon energy alternatives. In BC we have a lot of available hydro that can be supplemented by geothermal and wind to help address our long-term electricity needs. As for solar, thanks to our low solar insolation, utility-grade solar simply isn’t the right approach for BC except for the extreme southeast, and limited parts of the Okanagan. The term you should think about is “regionally-appropriate renewables“.

Once you leave BC finding regionally-appropriate renewables gets even harder. I have detailed Alberta’s renewable energy conundrum and the same challenges apply in Saskatchewan and throughout much of the US. There is simply not enough geothermal and/or hydro to supplement wind and solar. In those places nuclear is an important option to solidify their future energy systems.

Nuclear, however, has had a public relations problem in much of the world. A combination of bad planning, over-regulation and anti-nuclear activism has poisoned the well. This has made it extremely hard to hold sensible discussions about nuclear energy.

I can’t do a lot to deal with the challenging history of mismanagement and over-regulation associated with nuclear in the US, but I can help continue the effort to debunk what I feel is the egregious misinformation advanced by anti-nuclear activists in Canada and the US (an example of what I consider problematic, taken from Twitter and anonymized for my protection, is presented below):

The list above provides a target-rich environment that I simply cannot address in one post. So I will do it over several posts.

The first of the tropes I want to address is one I have heard a lot these recent weeks. The suggestion that replacing fossil fuel energy with nuclear shouldn’t happen because building nuclear takes too long. This argument is both factually wrong and makes no logical sense.

First with the facts. Anyone vaguely familiar with this topic can discuss how the French and Swedes and transformed their energy systems in a single generation using nuclear. The activists will take the French and Swedish examples and instead point to the US experience. Admittedly, recent US reactors have been slow to build, but that is because the Americans have failed to take advantage of standardization instead building a series of one-of-a-kind facilities, which obviously cost more.

In direct contrast to the American experience, the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans have shown that once you find a reactor-type that meets your needs you can start developing the trained workforce and specialized production lines necessary to allow subsequent reactors to be built relatively quickly.

In the last 20 years, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months. Japan built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996 taking on average only 46 months to build. The Chinese, meanwhile, have taken it to another level. If you want to see how standardization really pays off, look at this table I pilfered off twitter (h/t to John Randall) that uses data from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It shows that the median time to build a reactor in China is now down to 2080 days (less than 6 years) with recent plants taking just over 4 years. In much of the US you couldn’t complete the approval process for a wind farm in that timeline. So the claim that nuclear cannot be built quickly is demonstrably wrong.

Now I wouldn’t be a good Canadian if I didn’t throw in a “notwithstanding” in my blog once in a while…so here we go.

Notwithstanding that the claim “nuclear takes too long to build” is categorically false, it is also an illogical and wrongheaded argument in the first place.

Let’s use a worst-case scenario: that the approval process took a decade and the construction another decade. Would that be “too slow” to help address our energy needs? Of course not, our energy systems are going to need constant updating and replacement.

Even in my worst-case scenario if nuclear takes 20 years to build, it will still then be available for 50-70 years thereafter and can cover retiring renewables. I say 50-70 years, but frankly, it is hard to say how long a nuclear plant can operate because so many of them just keep chugging along. In the US 20 reactors, representing more than a fifth of the nation’s fleet, are planning or intending to operate up to 80 years. More are expected to apply in the future as they get closer to the end of their operating licenses.

Building energy capacity is not one-and-done it is an ongoing process. Imagine I built 3000 MW of wind turbines in 2021 and started on my ultra-slow 1000 MW reactor. When those 3000 MW of turbines were approaching their end-of-life that 1000 MW nuclear reactor would be there to replace them and could then operate through 2-4 turbine life cycles providing capacity factors 2-3 times higher than the wind projects they replaced.

Here is a simple analogy for those who still don’t get it. Every year our society spends huge sums of money to train new surgeons. Training a surgeon takes, on average, 14 years from the start of university to the end of their residency. Yet I don’t hear anyone arguing that since we currently have surgeons in our hospitals we shouldn’t go through the time and effort of training any new surgeons. No one makes that argument because we all know there will be an ongoing need for new surgeons and there will be a regular turn-over of old surgeons. Every year a number will retire and a number of new surgeons will replace them. The same is true of our energy systems.

To conclude, when I hear an activist make the argument “building nuclear takes too long” I attribute that response to either confusion or ignorance (my better angels preclude me from considering darker motivations). The simple truth is that building enough renewables to replace fossil fuels will take decades and each turbine/solar panel needs to be replaced every 20-25 yrs. Given our ongoing needs there is simply no logic to the claim that we shouldn’t build nuclear plants because they “take too long to build”.