They’re not wrong.
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This one went by very, very quietly in the press.
Back when OPG was Ontario Hydro (all hail 
Mother Hydro) they apparently struggled to keep the province wide grid entirely happy with huge generation stations. I can only guess that these problems have been solved if they are planning 4.8GW more generation at the Bruce.
This almost belongs on the “Odd Stuff” thread. The whole point of SMR’s is to get power closer to the user, not plonked down beside our newest, largest 4-unit station.
The whole exercise adds up to about the gap in power demand that we’ll see by the end of the decade, much of which is due to Ontario 
Premier Doug Ford cancelling contracts for renewable generation at the start of his tenure.
(Full disclosure: we were a nuclear family. I like wind + solar + glass battery personally. Nuclear power generation as done by has been exceptionally safe, and my name is signed inside the vacuum building at one of the sites 
but even I’m not particularly convinced by this move.)
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Is that because of the old old problem that you can’t “swing” nuclear reactors? i.e. slow ramp times, unable to respond to sudden changes in the grid? All the eggs in one slow basket, as it were?
If that’s the case, can batteries be used as a “shock absorber”?
Ideological (or cronyism-based) opposition to renewable power surely is one of the more dangerous varieties of stupid in the world today.
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No, IIRC it was more to do with the flows of power as they gained experience with having huge stations on line. Natgas is taking up the slack when fast response is needed, with some planned grid-scale battery power.
It is difficult to look at anything Doug Ford does and take it at face value.
I was about to make a remark about the economics of CANDU but I realized that nowhere in the announcement does is name the type of reactor. That they are planning 4.8GW suggests either CANDU ACR-1000 or Westinghouse AP-1000 
to go with the AP300 SMR’s. Interesting. The Globe and Mail was doing its corporate cheerleading duty and pumping up the benefits of CANDU on behalf of SNC-Lavelin last month.
The Green Party leader, Mike Schreiner pretty much summed it up (although he’s a bit off base with hydro, we don’t really have any significant potential for more). I mean, Alberta is beating Ontario in deploying renewable power FFS. 
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Out of curiosity, what would that remark be? I only know CANDU as “unusual” and “allegedly safer than most”. Not sure how much that second point is marketing. Since they’re unusual, I assume the economics are not great, but I really have no idea.
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(I can’t find the paper I was thinking of when I posted that… I will follow up after EOD.)
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Although at the moment SMRs are pretty far from practical implementation, I’d say. It’s a good idea to invest in, but they’re not going to come fast enough to decarbonize us.
I fully believe that whatever bad thing happened was a Ford’s fault. 
I’m feeling generous though, so I’ll offer that it’s possible more renewable wasn’t practical. Current grid design can only handle about 20% wind and solar because of how flaky they are and grid storage is still in its infancy. Most developed nations are already at or close to the maximum wind and solar they can handle. I don’t know if that’s the case for Canada yet, but we’re in good shape carbon-wise thanks to already being 80% hydro so the power grid is not the most important goal in our decarbonization anyway.
Nuclear has always been base load and nobody needs it to be otherwise. Peak load has always been covered by gas and coal which are easy to spin up and down. Solar and wind are good at peak load also, but really really bad at base load which is why it’s so important to build nuclear to replace the fossil fuel base load. No matter what eco-enthusiasts would like to believe, we cannot use wind and solar for base load, unless some revolution in grid storage happens tomorrow. I know people don’t like nuclear, but it’s all we’ve got. The choices right now are between “nuclear base load ASAP” and “we all die on a fireball earth as we cruise past 2.5°C warming”.
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While the existence of the Football has been known since the 1960s, reliable details about its contents have been relatively scarce. During the Cold War, and possibly later, they included proclamations and executive orders known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) for use in a national emergency. Edward A. McDermott, who led the federal Office of Emergency Planning in the 1960s, said the purpose of the documents was “to clothe the President with formal emergency powers,” although he said some were of “doubtful legality,” perhaps because they included the suspension of habeas corpus, a declaration of martial law, and the authorization of mass arrests and arbitrary detentions.
One interesting episode that Manchester describes in a footnote is how, in early 1961, President Kennedy’s security staff offered a satchel and a military aide to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who turned down the arrangement for reasons still unknown. While future revelations may help clarify Johnson’s reasons for declining the offer, Manchester’s discussion with Maxwell Taylor confirmed that high level military leaders were concerned that he had not received a briefing about the “contents” of the Football before he became President in Dallas on November 22, 1963.[3] Years later, after he left office, Johnson suggested that he found the presence of the military aide and the Football to be stressful.[4]
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Yeah, that was the angle I was wondering about - is the base load market saturated in Ontario? Do they need peakers more? Or was it a transmission bottleneck? Or something I didn’t think of (which seems most likely) in response to
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Almost OT but I saw this in my AM read:
It would seem the “PEADs” are still there.
Taylor fears Trump could use secret powers known by national security officials as “the doomsday book” to manipulate elections and satisfy his authoritarian impulses.
He says: “The aides that guarded that book were concerned about the president reading it, or Maga allies around him getting ahold of it, because especially towards the end of the administration, they witnessed the president’s proclivity to abuse his authorities for political purposes, and especially as he started to signal that the 2020 election might be stolen or he could be cheated, those same people were concerned about Trump realising he had even more extraordinary powers than he knew and that he might potentially use those to cement a coup.”
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Good question, and I don’t know. I assume the decision to expand Bruce was made by power engineers so they had a good reason for it. But also maybe that’s too much to assume these days, especially in Ford’s Ontario. 
Maybe Doug is drinking buddies with the nuclear power company guy.
It also may have nothing to do with Ontario. There has been expansion of hydro in BC not because BC needs it, but to sell it to the Americans. A lot of our power is shipped south over lines into Washington and Idaho now. It’s a good strategy because someday BC will need it, and then we already have it.
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Can’t blame him for that…
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Googling “Duncan Hawthorne” and “Doug Ford” doesn’t turn up anything. That suggests Mr. Hawthorne, at the very least, is being a little more low key around politicians than he was with Ford’s Liberal Party predecessors.
Hawthorne’s local reputation around the Bruce is good, he’s seen as efficient and no-nonsense.
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… a lot of the Trump administration seemed to consist of Trump telling people to do things and people ignoring him, all the way to the end when he told his driver to go to the Capitol building and the driver wouldn’t do it
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