That's true, and I think the article's mention of "small modular reactors" would help with that or that investment might already be in consideration of this transmission problem.
I recalled reading about the Westinghouse eVinci – a portable reactor that fits onto a truck.
A lot of new nuclear power plants can be built on the site of the coal/gas power station they are replacing and can utilize the existing power transmission infrastructure.
I don't understand why we don't also get serious about solar and wind. Canada has so much land and so much coast, setting up huge renewable infrastructure would be pretty great. Up in northern parts of Canada they can easily get 2,500-3,000 hours of sunlight a year. They'd have to use some solar panel cleaning robots[1] for the winter to deal with the snow, but I'd imagine there are some technical solutions and if not, pave the way!!
Hours of sunlight per year is really a misleading metric. For solar to be effective, you need consistent, direct sun. Disregarding the massive consistency problem, even in the summer Northern Canada will have a much low angle of incidence for the sun. You tilt the panels significantly to compensate, but the overall energy hitting the panels is still much lower.
Today I learned! Way way way lower than I expected. That said, according to this[1] the yields would be slightly worse than the major soar farms in Texas? But I guess Texas doesn't have to contend with the winter, although I was under the impression solar becomes considerably more efficient in the colder temperature ranges?
Texas seems to be 1500-1800, whereas Northern Canada (including all of Ontario and Quebec) seems to generally be 900-1200. So 20-50% worse, no? No clue about the cold factor, but the maps are lifetime kW per nominal kW panel, so presumably that’s factored in.
>I don't understand why we don't also get serious about solar and wind.
Because we already have reliable renewable power in the form of hydroelectric generation in the vast majority of the country. And, of the 30% of electricity that isn't generated from dams, half of that is from nuclear.
At this point it would be trivial to replace the few thermal plants in the Prairies with nuclear technology that actually works in the winter; solar doesn't, because the sun's only present in the sky for a maximum of 6 hours 6 months of the year in the vast majority of the country. And that's 6 hours of sun right on the US border; it gets even worse as the latitude gets higher to the point where the sun just barely rises in the northern wastes.
This might be news to anyone not living in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, but Canada isn't actually a part of the US, so solutions that might work in their sunnier Southwest regions are completely pointless here. Of course, the boom in natural gas has yet to be fully exploited here in terms of much cleaner gas turbines replacing coal generation; it's almost certainly going to cause more damage to climate to go with solar power at an unacceptably low duty cycle, electric cars that won't work in the cold, and inefficient electric heating, but that doesn't matter to the "muh net zero" people who just want to make life worse for everyone.
I guess because at least for sun, some days are considerably shorter in winter and a reliable backup with batteries would cost too much, especially when considering both batteries and solar should be replaced in a 20-40 yrs (just my guess). Also, since solar produces less energy in the winter, govt will be forced buying energy at higher/winter price to compensate. Offsore wind on the other hand looks promising for Canada, since they have access to 2 oceans, a lot of space to build there. Nuclear is also nice - reliable energy resource, they have fuel for it and since Canada has access to a lot of water, this can be really promising
