Controversy surrounds proposals to develop a nuclear power station near Massena NY. Such concern likely results from incidents that occurred at Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl. Such incidents are like the crash of a passenger airliner where following investigations into such a crash, safety recommendations are issued to manufacturers and operators of passenger airliners. Subsequently and compared to other modes of travel, commercial passenger aviation involving large aircraft has the highest safety rating.
While the development of a nuclear power station involves considerable capital cost, America spent $1.7-trillion on developing wind and solar power installations since early 2020. The same expenditure would have built up to 40-new nuclear power stations capable of delivering 3-times the power output, over a usable life expectancy of 80-years. Nuclear power outlasts solar and wind turbine by a factor of 4 to 5-fold, enhancing its long-term cost competitiveness. When wind speed is too fast, most wind turbines are locked down to prevent self-destruction resulting from over speeding.
When wind speed is too slow, wind farms are near idle while nuclear power stations remain operational, reliably supplying power to the grid. While spent nuclear fuel rods contain about 97% of energy potential, funding from the Gates Foundation has facilitated new research to re-use spent nuclear fuel rods as fuel, to extract a high proportion of the remaining energy content to generate electric power. Re-using old nuclear fuel rods as raw material to produce power alleviates many concerns about storing future spent nuclear material.
Destructive thermal stresses that plagued earlier generation power stations, resulted from repeatedly heating and cooling critical nuclear components. Achieving peak reliability and avoiding breakdowns requires continuous steady operation at steady power output. Such operation maintains constant temperature on all critical nuclear components, including constant pressure in the steam lines. Ontario achieves that result by paying outside utilities located in the USA, to take delivery of their excess overnight winter time power output.
Ontario has proven that reliable nuclear power generation depends on access to mega-scale energy storage capacity, such as pumped hydroelectric operations at Ludington in Michigan. Massena offers potential to develop pumped underground hydroelectric storage downstream of the power dam. To the south and southeast of Barnhardt Island, there is potential to excavate large water storage caverns in the bedrock located 2,000-feet below the surface of the St. Lawrence River. Hydraulic turbines are capable of pumping water upward to over 2,000-feet elevation.
The Moses-Sunders power dam operates using 100-feet difference in vertical height across the dam. Turbines capable of operating over vertical height of 2,000-feet require around 5% of the water volume to generate the same output as the power dam, over 2-cycles of 3 to 4-hours daily to cover morning and afternoon peak demand periods. Customers for pumped underground energy storage would include the proposed nuclear power station at Massena, Ontario nuclear power generation during winter months and wind power installations across Ontario and New York State.