this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's 1st mini nuclear power plant (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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There's been a lot of talk about SMR's over the years, it's nice to see one finally being built.

Even if it comes in over budget, getting the first one done will be a great learning experience and could lead to figuring out how to do future ones cheaper.

Assuming it's on time, completion in 2029, connected to grid in 2030.

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[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well that's exactly the popular misconception. The constant part of the baseload is the demand, not the supply. The total supply should always match that of course, but given the variable makeup of the supply, where renewable power sources are simply cheapest and at peak moments will supply the full demand, any other source will have to be variable as well to economically compete. Otherwise it's just making energy needlessly expensive.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Look at the demand and supply graphs for the 6 day period: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

The lowest demand is about 12K MW, that is the base load, the load never goes below that. Nuclear and hydro cover that 12K MW constantly, and even hydro is throttles up and down to cover the some of the load that varies throughout the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago

I know that nuclear and hydro can constantly cover it, the point is that when it's very sunny out countries with good solar adoption will already 100% cover it (if not more). The nuclear power at those times has to compete with cheaper solar power, which it loses on price. And because the grid can't handle more supply than demand, it requires shutting something off. The cheapest power is solar so you'd prefer to keep that on for economic reasons, but since nuclear is bad at scaling up and down you have to pick the more expensive option. This increases energy prices beyond what is really necessary.

This also becomes even less tenable as battery adoption increases.