Formes

Does solving the problem have an immediate political benefit? I actually don't think it does.

Does letting the community argue about the issue have immediate political benefit? Well - it certainly will sweep other issues (read: scandals) under the rug.

So I'm going to say, the community 100% will be brought into it, the location will end up being unselected, and the issue will be kicked down the curb for the next time the government needs an issue to debate about and to distract people with.

When you have a firm, that is ran by accountants - odds are, you have a firm that is great at squeezing on line items, but lacks the long term vision to see how that squeeze will lead to deficits and higher cost in the long term.

The fastest way to plummet a successful company, is to take the Industry experts out of the position (I mean people who worked their way up through the industry, and learned management along the way by experts btw), and replace them with an MBA/ Accountant who got hired into their upper management position without really working in the industry prior to.

And I pretty much guarantee you, this is what happened.

Not all old designs were bad. And one has to understand that the USSR, UK, France, and the US all had a shared objective (by the way, these are the primary nations designing and creating nuclear reactors back in the 50's and 60's). And the goal? Plutonium for Nuclear Bombs. You can imagine how this changes design Parameters.

So now lets talk about the CANDU Reactor, designed in 1955 (or there abouts).

It's an oddity of the day - Designed for energy generation for civilian use, without the desire to actively produce Plutonium. Functionally speaking, complete fission of the material with the least degree of enrichment possible for efficient opperation was the design goal. And what you get is well, this.

Beyond this, because it is a Heavy Water Reactor (CANDU standing for Canada Deuterium Uranium), it's moderator is well, heavy water - which is interesting as two things: If it boils off, the neutron regulator (which is slowing down neutrons to encourage fission in the core) boils off. And Boiling water takes away a LOT of heat. Beyond this, heated water will naturally circulate so even if active pumps pushing the water through the system fail, natural circulation can occur until corrective action is taken.

Yes, there are newer designs that are probably safer. But don't just say "old designs bad" without understanding the design constraints created by the circumstances to which they were created. Look at also, all of the designs of the era. There is a reason pretty much everyone can name Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima. And anyone with half a length of common sense would avoid putting a nuclear reactor on Japan - a place that has an active Valcano, is prone to tsunami's, and sits at the intersecting point of three tectonic plates... It's kind of a bad place for it. Not impossible to do safely, but when you use a reactor design that is basically set up for the production of plutonium by the very design constraints and such of the day: It's not surprising.

And then we can talk about SMR's.

Do you have any idea how much energy is used in the form of combustibles to heat homes, and power vehicles? It's absolutely massive. Beyond this - the energy density of Petrol is something like 25-45x that of batteries - meaning for the same weight of fuel as a battery, you can go MUCH further, even factoring in the lower efficiency of an ICE engine (20-30%) vs. Electric (something like 90%). However, Electric Vehicles also have higher ware and tare on roads, tires, breaks, bridges, etc. And that means a higher TCO (Total cost of Operation) outside of the vehicle itself.

You might say "Improve Public Transport" And I'm all for it - but that requires doubling the average population density in urban centres to START to be practical. And achieving that is a decades long (like closer to half a century, if not longer) undertaking that has a huge environmental cost do to the tare down of existing buildings.

What all this means: To replace combustibles, we don't just need a tripling of Nuclear - we need to increase it by an order of magnitude (10x it for clarity), 2 orders of magnitude increase of wind (100x), and we should aim for three orders of magnitude for solar (1000x). If you do that, AND improve average home insulation value, then we can start to get somewhere reasonable.

To be clear: We can do it.

1. Solar Roof Incentives for generally sunny cities (ex. Calgary)
2. Off Shore Wind
3. Dual Use Installations - So Parking Lots with Solar Covers for instance. Bonus points for onsight energy storage to buffer generation for charging cars.
4. SMR's for remote area's (think far northern area's where diesel generators are the norm, as it reduces the need to ship fuel)

You will note that Hydro isn't listed here - and for good reason: The environmental destruction, and long term upkeep is extremely impactful on the environment.

All of this, by the way, is something like a trillion dollar investment. And what is the Canadian Governments investment plan? 4-5 billion by 2035? If the Canadian Government wants to get serious - they need to start making the entire government beaurocracy far more lean, far more mean, and take the savings and throw it into everything that reduces power use, as well as renewable generation.

And finally: Start jacking up the minimum wage, start increasing labor protections, and the entire why? So that people can afford to invest into these things for themselves on a wide scale.

Well, ya. The Liberals are on the way out, so they can put into place policies and such that force future spending on things people want, that will have to get cancelled do to budgetary constraints. And if the future parties do plow forward with it, you can shit can on it and rally the people that don't want it into a frenzy, and sweep all of this up under a rug somewhere by the time you get to the next election.

Welcome to Flip Flop First Past the Post Politics when you have a defacto two party system.

The problem is many fronted.

1. Free trade: When you are competing with lower cost of production regions, with dirt cheap shipping do to the way you can basically register a ship any where with a port - you have a competition problem. In other words: Free trade benefited those with money - and acted to displace manufacturing jobs. Thing is - there are far fewer designers that you need.

2. Money Printing as a Stop Gap to Dissuade dissidence against Long Shot Downs: Reality is the lockdown scenario that kept service possitions from being filled and used, could have been far shorter with a far harder lock down early on to allow time to implement precautions. This would have lead to 1-2 months of lowered economic activity, instead of say a year of it.

3. No solid organized plan to account for inflation: Had a policy of increasing minimum wage WITH inflation do to the printing of money been implemented, we would have actually been alright. Yes money would have been devalued, but the buying power of the average Canadian would have kept up with inflation avoiding the problems we are seeing.

4. Extended time of low interest rates: This leads to high debt ratio's, which - if and when interest rates need to go up, tightens belts, and results in layoffs and so on. This in turn pinches the economy and can very easily kick off a spiral of lowered spending that degrades the economy with lower demand. The end result is a very difficult to control spiral downard that only starts several months OR LONGER after the offending change that is the trigger of it do to the lag time. What this means, is even if corrective action is taken - it's too late.

Of course - admitting a recession, would mean admitting the government did not just fail in one spot, but in basically everything. And we all know how well modern day politicians accept blame.