Unable to effectively operate its lone existing nuclear reactor, New Brunswick is betting on advanced options.
The International Panel found that sodium-cooled reactors proved expensive to build, complex to operate, prone to malfunctions, and difficult and expensive to repair. Sodium reacts violently with water and burns if exposed to air. Major sodium fires have occurred in previous reactors, often leading to lengthy shutdowns.
If NB Power needs outside assistance with a conventional reactor it has owned and operated for more than 40 years, one might question the wisdom of building two more featuring untested designs. Mr. Holland’s replacement as energy minister, Hugh Flemming, must now decide how comfortable he is with the province’s SMR ambitions.
Perhaps the most fundamental risk to New Brunswick’s SMR push is that the province can’t afford it.
MATTHEW MCCLEARN, JULY 2, 2024 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-new-brunswick-nuclear-reactor-technology-arc-clean-moltex-energy/
Mike Holland was among Canada’s leading evangelists for small modular nuclear reactors. During his tenure as New Brunswick’s energy minister, from 2018 to when he stepped down on June 20, he vigorously supported plans by the province’s Crown utility, NB Power, to construct two different small reactor designs from startup companies: U.S.-based ARC Clean Technology and Britain’s Moltex Energy. This represents Canada’s most ambitious – and perhaps riskiest – foray into bleeding-edge nuclear technology.
In an interview shortly before he resigned to pursue an opportunity in the private sector, Mr. Holland recalled how SMRs arrived on his agenda soon after he assumed office. He began exploring what advanced reactors could mean for decarbonizing the province’s electricity sector and growing its economy, and concluded New Brunswick could become a hub for nuclear design and manufacturing, and export reactors around the world.
“I saw the opportunity for New Brunswick to not just participate, but be a leader in this,” he said. “I am someone that loves to be on the cutting edge.”
His enthusiasm and risk tolerance proved a boon for ARC and Moltex, two tiny startups that have neither licensed nor constructed a commercial reactor. Under Mr. Holland’s leadership, New Brunswick became an incubator and helped the companies attract government funds to continue their work.
But NB Power is already struggling with persistent problems at its lone existing reactor at Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. It has been negotiating a partnership with Ontario Power Generation that could see the latter assume partial ownership and help fix the ailing plant.
If NB Power needs outside assistance with a conventional reactor it has owned and operated for more than 40 years, one might question the wisdom of building two more featuring untested designs. Mr. Holland’s replacement as energy minister, Hugh Flemming, must now decide how comfortable he is with the province’s SMR ambitions.
Unconventional thinking
Nearly all of the more than 400 nuclear reactors operating today use water to cool their highly radioactive cores. Water also acts as a “moderator,” slowing down the high-energy neutrons produced by nuclear fission. Though water-cooled reactors have dominated for decades, they cost huge sums to build and produce waste that remains hazardous for countless human lifetimes. They’re vulnerable to severe (albeit rare) accidents that can render surrounding areas uninhabitable.
Virtually every SMR is marketed as addressing these and other shortcomings – and most have ditched water as coolant and moderator.
According to documents released by New Brunswick’s energy ministry through the province’s freedom of information legislation to researcher Susan O’Donnell, and provided to The Globe and Mail, in 2017 NB Power reviewed dozens of SMRs it read about in nuclear industry publications. It came up with a short list of five, which it later narrowed to ARC and Moltex, and enticed both companies to set up headquarters in Saint John.
ARC and Moltex are pursuing what the industry calls “fast” neutron reactors, so named because they lack a moderator. The ARC-100 reactor would be cooled using liquid sodium metal and consume enriched uranium metal fuel. Moltex’s Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner (SSR-W), meanwhile, would use molten salt fuel placed in fuel assemblies similar to those in conventional reactors.
The SSR-W would require its own fuel reprocessing plant called WATSS (short for Waste to Stable Salt), which would convert Point Lepreau’s spent fuel into new fuel. For NB Power, that’s a major attraction: As of last summer, Point Lepreau had more than 170,000 Candu spent fuel bundles. Moltex says that’s enough to power its reactor for 60 years.
In May, 2019, NB Power sent a letter to Mr. Holland and Premier Blaine Higgs urging them to support fast reactors. The utility told its government masters that there was enough room at Point Lepreau for both reactors and that they could be up and running by 2030.
“These two technologies have different market applications and there is no downside to letting both of them work through the process,” the letter stated.
New Brunswick’s latest energy plan suggests electricity consumption will nearly double in the next few decades. NB Power’s challenge is to satisfy that demand while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions; Lori Clark, its chief executive, has cast SMRs as playing an important role in the utility’s efforts to reach net zero by 2035.
What New Brunswick covets most, however, is a shot of economic adrenalin.
Even optimists expect that SMR demonstration units will be too expensive to be economically attractive. Multiple units must be built to exploit economies of scale and reduce costs.
NB Power is counting on that. According to documents released under the federal Access to Information Act, the utility expects the first ARC-100 would be followed by 11 more units by mid-century. By then, up to 24 would be built in Canada, and the same number in other countries. And the first SSR-W would lead to 11 more built across Canada and two dozen more in the United States, Britain and Eastern Europe. If that happened, they’d be among the most successful models in history.
NB Power thought more than half of the components would be manufactured in New Brunswick. It also enthused about royalty payments on reactor sales, “potentially worth billions of dollars.”
Technical risks
But to realize any of that, New Brunswick’s SMR program must overcome technical challenges that have plagued the nuclear industry from its earliest days.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has warned policy makers about the pitfalls of betting on “advanced” reactor designs, which he has studied over many years. “Developing new designs that are clearly superior to light water reactors overall is a formidable challenge, as improvements in one respect can create or exacerbate problems in another,” he wrote in a 2021 report.
Fast reactors, which originated in the earliest years of the nuclear age, bear this out. The U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Japan and India all pursued so-called “fast breeder” reactors that could produce more plutonium fuel than they consumed. A report that examined the history of those reactors, produced in 2010 by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of arms control and non-proliferation experts, found member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development collectively invested about US$50-billion researching breeder reactors. Outside the OECD, Russia and India also spent heavily.
They didn’t have much to show for it. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are only two fast reactors currently generating electricity – both in Russia. The International Panel found that sodium-cooled reactors proved expensive to build, complex to operate, prone to malfunctions, and difficult and expensive to repair. Sodium reacts violently with water and burns if exposed to air. Major sodium fires have occurred in previous reactors, often leading to lengthy shutdowns.
As for molten salt reactors, there have only been two experimental exemplars, the most recent of which operated in the 1960s. Mr. Lyman’s 2021 report said molten salts were highly corrosive to many materials typically used in reactor construction. Moreover, “liquid nuclear fuels introduce numerous additional safety, environmental and proliferation risks.” Molten salt reactors likely couldn’t be built before the 2040s at the earliest, he concluded.
In addition to confronting such technical challenges, New Brunswick’s strategy also presupposes that reprocessing of spent fuel will be permitted and affordable. But a report published last year by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, the industry-controlled organization tasked with disposing of Canada’s reactor waste, was skeptical on both counts.
NB Power is also counting on circumstances that are beyond its control. According to a letter signed by former CEO Keith Cronkhite in 2020 and released under the Access to Information Act, New Brunswick’s plan hinges on Ontario and other provinces building multiple BWRX-300s. (The letter was sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.) If they do not, “SMR companies based in New Brunswick will not be able to attract private investment necessary to ever deploy a new reactor,” Mr. Cronkhite’s letter predicted.
The SMR plan is already falling behind schedule. At a rate hearing in June before the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board, Brad Coady, vice-president of strategic partnerships and business development, said NB Power believes it is no longer possible to have SMRs operating by 2030; the earliest date for the first unit has been pushed back to 2032 or 2033.
Delays will have consequences, because NB Power needs options to replace its coal-fired generation while at the same time satisfying growing demand for electricity. The utility, he said, has been studying alternative scenarios “if we don’t have them in time.”
Paying for it
Perhaps the most fundamental risk to New Brunswick’s SMR push is that the province can’t afford it.
Last year, ARC and Moltex each estimated that developing their reactors would cost around $500-million per company. NB Power is Canada’s most heavily indebted utility, and its budgets must be approved by the province’s Energy and Utilities Board. It has limited ability to pay for crucial early steps such as studies necessary to establish what the environmental consequences of the SMRs might be. In published reports, NB Power has acknowledged that its research and development efforts might have to be sacrificed to meet debt-reduction targets.
David Coon, leader of New Brunswick’s Green Party, said NB Power faces huge capital spending to retire its Belledune coal-fired generating plant and refurbish its Mactaquac hydroelectric dam and transmission lines.
“That is why they’re really not putting much into this,” he said. “Their approach has been, well, if we get a new nuclear plant out of this that that doesn’t really cost us much of anything, then bonus!”
ARC and Moltex also don’t have the money. In late June, ARC parted ways with CEO William Labbe and laid off an undisclosed number of staff – a move some observers said was likely due to a shortage of funds. Mr. Chronkite’s 2020 letter warned that the two SMR developers were small startups that couldn’t afford to do work using their own resources, and were at immediate risk of insolvency.
“Without federal support this year to the SMR developers in New Brunswick, one or both companies are expected to close their offices in the next year,” Mr. Cronkhite’s letter stated.
Indeed, New Brunswick officials have counted on continuing and generous support from Canadian taxpayers. In his letter, Mr. Cronkhite called on the federal government to provide $70.5-million that year to ARC and Moltex – and more than $100-million the following year – to “keep the SMR development option in New Brunswick viable.” In 2022, the two companies would need another $91-million.
Ottawa obliged, but only partly. It gave Moltex $50.5-million in 2021. The federal government also provided ARC $7-million last year. The lobbying efforts continue: When NB Power board vice-chair Andrew MacGillivray received his mandate letter in May, 2023, it instructed him to “support efforts to acquire federal funding” for the SMRs.
New Brunswick’s own history suggests the risks inherent in counting on boundless federal support.
Andrew Secord, an economics professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, has studied decision-making in the 1970s that led to the construction of the original Point Lepreau reactor. In a 2020 paper, he detailed how Point Lepreau arose in part from an export-led strategy under which multiple large reactors would be built and their electricity exported to New England. NB Power (then known as the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission, or NBEPC) first focused on building interconnections with New England and then pivoted to building reactors.
This strategy failed by 1972, but by that point NBEPC was unwilling to change course. Over the next three years, it assumed ever greater risks as potential partners failed to materialize.
“NBEPC managers continued along the nuclear path, exhibiting higher risk behaviour in the process,” Mr. Secord wrote. “As NBEPC executives spent more time and resources on the nuclear option, their personal attachment and the associated institutional commitment increased.”
Mr. Coon said New Brunswick’s SMR plan so far has cost the provincial and federal governments only around $100-million. But it could start costing taxpayers and ratepayers “much more money” if things progress further.
“It seems like we haven’t learned our lesson in New Brunswick,” he said.
Do the research and end the nuclear hype in New Brunswick
by Susan O’Donnell, June 29, 2024, https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/06/29/do-the-research-and-end-the-nuclear-hype-in-new-brunswick/
New Brunswick’s ARC nuclear project is in trouble. This situation highlights the lack of critical knowledge about nuclear reactor designs within NB Power and the New Brunswick government.
The ARC project goal is to design and build a nuclear reactor cooled with liquid sodium metal at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy. NB Power also plans a second reactor at the site, the Moltex reactor design cooled with molten salt.
The proposed nuclear reactor designs lack commercial viability
If NB Power and the provincial government reviewed available research, they would learn that both sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors have never operated successfully on a commercial electricity grid.
An expert report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated that inherent problems with sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors means new builds will have difficulty reaching commercial viability by the year 2050, far later than the federal 2035 deadline for utilities to transition to a net-zero electricity grid.
For sodium-cooled reactors like the ARC design, tens of billions of dollars have been spent over decades trying to make them work in a commercial setting, by companies in other countries with considerable experience building nuclear reactors. The failures are well-documented.
Liquid sodium metal is reactive and burns when exposed to air or water. The first commercial sodium-cooled reactor in the U.S. had a partial meltdown and was quickly scrapped.
In other countries, sodium fires and unpredictable performances led to sodium-cooled reactors being abandoned in France (the Superphénix), Japan (the Monju breeder), Germany (the Kalkar plant), and Scotland (the Dounreay reactor).
All these shut-down sodium-cooled reactors cost far more to decommission than they did to build, partly due to the expense of removing the sodium from the reactors’ radioactive waste material so it could be safely disposed without causing underground explosions due to sodium-water reactions, as happened for Scotland’s Dounreay reactor.
The proposed reactor designs lack financing
The ARC sodium-cooled design is in its preliminary stage. Bill Labbe, the ARC CEO who suddenly left the company recently, said in 2023 that $500 million is needed to develop the ARC reactor design, and a further $600 million in power purchase agreements to move the project forward. The money raised to date for the ARC project is only a tiny fraction of that.
Since 2018 the provincial government has handed $25 million to ARC and $10 million to Moltex, as ‘seed’ funding to attract private investment. The federal government gave Moltex $50.5 million in 2021 and ARC $7 million in 2023.
However, six years of trying to entice private investors to the ARC and Moltex projects has not yielded results. Globally, private investment in the energy sector is going into renewable – not nuclear – energy.
Misplaced government hype
Despite the ARC company’s financial difficulties, according to news reports both NB Power and the New Brunswick government continue to support the ARC project.
Since the two start-up companies arrived in Canada and landed in Saint John in 2018, the government’s hype around the ARC and Moltex projects at times has been intense, surprisingly so, given that neither company has ever built a nuclear reactor.
In the past, Energy Minister Mike Holland has been the biggest booster of the ARC and Moltex “advanced” reactor designs.
However, in a curious coincidence, Holland quit the cabinet and gave up his MLA seat just days before the troubles at the ARC company hit the news, after previously announcing he would not stand in the upcoming election.
New Brunswick’s money-losing Point Lepreau nuclear plant
NB Power wants to build the ARC reactor near its existing Point Lepreau nuclear reactor, a consistent money loser for the utility.
According to the NB Auditor General, about three-quarters of NB Power’s $5 billion debt is from cost over-runs on the original CANDU reactor build 40 years ago and the re-build more than a dozen years ago.
At the recent Energy and Utility Board hearings, it was clear that the ongoing poor performance of the Lepreau plant is contributing to the utility’s financial difficulties and its request for an unprecedented rate hike.
Nuclear: the most expensive option for generating electricity
New Brunswick’s abysmal prior experience with nuclear reactors raises an obvious question: why is the province intent on trying to develop experimental nuclear reactors as part of its energy transition plans?
Nuclear power is a more expensive way to generate electricity than renewable energy with storage. Nuclear plants take much longer to build than solar or wind farms. These facts are well-known.
Even the right-wing magazine The Economist recognizes the global trend toward renewables and away from nuclear energy, stating in its most recent issue that: “the next ten-fold increase (in solar energy) will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less than the time it typically takes to build one of them.”
New Brunswick: clinging to an outdated vision of electricity production
The challenge for New Brunswick is that our public utility NB Power is stuck, along with Ontario Power Generation, in the Jurassic era, feeding their nuclear dinosaurs while the rest of the utility world is getting on with their renewables and storage rollouts.
Across the globe, countries are focused on technological revolutions in energy efficiency and productivity, building smart grids with demand management and response and distributed renewable energy and storage resources. These offer lower-cost, lower-risk, faster and more flexible pathways for decarbonized electricity grids without large centralized nuclear systems.
Building more nuclear reactors and increasing power rates is not compatible with what many commentators in the province want in our shared economic, social and cultural future. It’s time for New Brunswick to end the nuclear hype.
Susan O’Donnell is the principal investigator with teammates of the CEDAR project, St. Thomas University in Fredericton.
Complete BS from the IAEA about the non-existent “global consensus” on nuclear power.
The latest (today) International Atomic Energy Agency newsletter includes this BS info about a fantasy “global consensus” on nuclear power.
The World Bank and other MDBs currently do not contribute financing to nuclear power new build projects, although some MDBs have provided lending for upgrades to existing nuclear power reactors or their decommissioning. Mr Grossi said that financing nuclear power would better align MDBs with the “new global consensus” forged at last year at COP28 in Dubai, where the world called for accelerating the deployment of nuclear power along with other zero emission energy technologies to achieve deep and rapid decarbonization.
Dozens of countries have also signed on to a pledge made at COP28 to work towards tripling global nuclear power capacity to achieve net zero by 2050. The pledge also called on the World Bank, regional development banks and international financial institutions to include nuclear in their lending. That call was echoed by scores of countries at the first-ever Nuclear Energy Summit organized by the IAEA and Government of Belgium in March.
**
The statement supporting nuclear power was made at a private media event at COP 28 and was not part of the official COP proceedings. Canada’s nuclear industry booster NRCan has it on its website but it is not on the site of Environment Canada, which is responsible for COP declarations.
There is no “global consensus” on nuclear energy. Here’s the full IAEA statement:
How I read this: the nuclear industry is desperate. If you read the full item above, you will see a desperate plea for the World Bank and others that do not currently fund nuclear projects to begin doing it. What’s not here is why the private sector is not funding nuclear projects but rather putting their money into solar and wind development, which is that nuclear is a terrible investment and renewables are a good investment.
CEO, staff suddenly depart New Brunswick reactor developer ARC Clean Technology
“reactor developers would not normally terminate staff after hitting a regulatory milestone.
“If they were going to move forward, basically, they would be hiring people,”
MATTHEW MCCLEARN 26 June 24, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ceo-staff-depart-new-brunswick-reactor-developer-arc-clean-technology/
ARC Clean Technology Canada, a developer of small modular reactors in New Brunswick, has revealed the sudden departure of its Canadian chief executive, raising questions about its future.
Alongside Tuesday’s announcement of CEO William Labbe’s exit, other ARC employees also received layoff notices, according to a report from the Telegraph Journal, a Saint John, N.B., newspaper. The company did not respond to questions from The Globe about those reported departures, or how many staffers remain with the company.
In a statement, ARC spokesperson Sandra Donnelly said the company had nearly completed a phase of a pre-licensing process with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and was “realigning personnel and resources to strengthen our strategic partnerships and rationalize operations to best prepare for the next phase of our deployment.”
Ms. Donnelly said ARC Canada will be led by Bob Braun, chief operating officer of its Washington-based parent ARC Clean Technology Inc., and two vice presidents, Lance Clarke and Jill Doucet.
The company’s staff changes follow the resignation of New Brunswick energy minister Mike Holland, announced June 20. Mr. Holland had been an advocate for the province’s SMR program, but had previously announced he would not stand for re-election.
ARC set up offices in Saint John several years ago, as part of an initiative to build SMRs at the province’s only nuclear power plant, Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. The plant’s owner, NB Power, has promoted plans for demonstration units of two different reactors built there by 2030. The second reactor would be designed by another startup, Moltex Energy, which would include a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
ARC is one of several vendors jockeying to sell SMRs to Canadian utilities. All existing commercial power reactors in Canada – including the existing one at Point Lepreau – are of the homegrown Candu design. (The newest, at Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, was completed in the early 1990s.)
The company is in the early stages of designing a reactor known as the ARC-100, a next-generation reactor that would use sodium as coolant – a striking departure from Candus and nearly all other commercial power reactors used today, which are water-cooled. The ARC-100 is also marketed as having the ability to consume reprocessed spent fuel, something that has not been done historically in Canada.
As ARC rationalizes its work force, some of its better-established competitors are staffing up. U.S.-based GE-Hitachi and Ontario Power Generation are preparing a site at Darlington for potential construction of a BWRX-300 small modular reactor. Westinghouse, which is marketing several reactors including its AP-1000 large reactor and eVinci microreactor, announced a new 13,000-square-foot office in Kitchener, Ont., this month along with plans to hire 100 engineers to staff it by next year.
Last year, Mr. Labbe said developing the ARC-100 would cost around $500-million. But so far, the company has raised only a small fraction of that. In 2022, it announced it had raised $30-million from the provincial government and the private sector. In October, the federal government awarded it another $7-million. Its partner, NB Power, has not contributed any funding.
ARC submitted an application to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in 2023 for a license to prepare a site at Point Lepreau for its demonstration unit. At an industry conference in April, Mr. Labbe said ARC was also preparing to apply for a license to construct the reactor, which it planned to issue within the next year.
“We’ve been at this for about seven years,” he told the audience. “And we really have another six, seven years until we get that commercial deployment.”
Mr. Labbe became ARC Canada’s CEO in May, 2021. His predecessor, Norm Sawyer, is now president of ION Nuclear Consulting Ltd., an adviser to investors, energy companies and First Nations. Mr. Sawyer said that, while he had no inside information on the company, reactor developers would not normally terminate staff after hitting a regulatory milestone.
“If they were going to move forward, basically, they would be hiring people,” he said.
“If you’re on hold and you’re thinking that you’re going to move forward in a short time period, you maintain your staffing levels.”
Susan O’Donnell, a researcher at St. Thomas University who studies energy technologies, said that, while ARC has managed to attract some private funding, it has remained almost wholly dependent on government money. She added that the federal government is unlikely to provide the billions of dollars required to build new reactors at Point Lepreau.
“I just don’t see how this is going to work, where the money’s going to come from,” she said. “And I think this is why we’re seeing this with ARC today.
“They can’t afford to have that number of staff.”
As recently as November, NB Power chief executive officer Lori Clark had said SMRs were “a key part” of the utility’s plans to phase out coal by 2030. On Tuesday, NB Power said it will continue to provide technical expertise to ARC and Moltex, and that it regards SMRs as a “potential option” to achieve net zero emissions electricity production by 2035.
“We continue to work toward the goal of having an SMR on the grid by the early 2030s,” spokesperson Dominique Couture wrote in an e-mail.
With a report from Emma Graney
Tensions with First Nations threaten to delay nuclear waste facility
MATTHEW MCCLEARN, 16 June 24 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-tensions-with-first-nations-threaten-to-delay-nuclear-waste-facility/#:~:text=Prof.%20Leiss%20said%20even%20if,this%20issue%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said.
The eight-reactor Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, ranks among the world’s largest nuclear power plants. With four more in the early planning stages, it might become larger still. But for the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON), behind its engineering grandeur lies a painful history – which it has described as one “of exclusion.”
Its people were not consulted before the plant’s construction during the 1970s and 80s, which resulted in quantities of radioactive waste stored within what they regard as their traditional territory. Nor did they see many of the economic benefits that flowed to neighbours.
These unresolved tensions threaten to derail – or at least significantly delay – efforts to find a permanent solution for Canada’s nuclear waste, which dates back to the 1970s. As of June, 2023, Canada had accumulated approximately 3.3 million used fuel bundles that were stored temporarily at operating or retired nuclear power plants in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. But there’s nowhere to send them for permanent disposal – a potential stumbling block as the nuclear industry seeks public acceptance for a proposed major expansion.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), an industry-controlled organization to which the federal government delegated responsibility for nuclear waste management, wants to select a site this year for a proposed, $26-billion underground nuclear waste disposal facility, known as a deep geological repository. The two remaining candidates are the Municipality of South Bruce (about 45 kilometres southeast of Bruce station, and also within SON’s traditional territory) and a site more than 40 kilometres from Ignace, a town of 1,200 northwest of Thunder Bay.
One of the NWMO’s guiding principles is that the repository’s host “must be informed and willing to accept the project.” Ignace’s council will decide that through a resolution; it has agreed to notify the NWMO of its decision by July 30. (It hired a consultant, With Chela Inc., to engage with residents and maintains its decision will be based on public input.) In South Bruce, citizens will vote in a by-election in late October. Both signed hosting agreements with the NWMO this year, under which South Bruce would receive $418-million over nearly a century and a half; Ignace would get $170-million.
Yet all that might well prove a sideshow. The NWMO also seeks consent from Indigenous peoples: Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, in the case of Ignace. SON, which is composed of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation, will decide regarding the South Bruce site. NWMO spokesperson Fred Kuntz said the organization is negotiating hosting agreements with both First Nations.
Success is far from assured.
SON’s grievances with the nuclear industry date back to the 1960s, when Ontario Hydro (the predecessor of Ontario Power Generation) began constructing Canada’s first commercial nuclear power plant. For SON, the commissioning of the Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station marked the beginning of “the nuclear industrialization” of its territory. Douglas Point was followed by the much-larger Bruce station, built immediately next door.
SON ruefully watched its neighbours benefit as tax revenues rolled into local municipalities, while its members were largely shut out. In 2013 SON secured an undertaking from Ontario Power Generation that the utility wouldn’t establish an intermediate-level waste repository (proposed for construction at Bruce station) on its territory without its consent.
That undertaking had far-reaching consequences. It led to a 2020 plebiscite in which SON’s membership overwhelmingly rejected that repository. And it set an important precedent: In 2016, the NWMO granted SON the same ability to veto the South Bruce repository. SON plans to hold a referendum of its members, once it has received all the information it seeks from the NWMO.
“I’d say we’re at least halfway halfway home to having our questions satisfied,” said Gregory Nadjiwon, chief of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, one of SON’s two member nations.
But reaching an agreement this year – or at all – could prove challenging. The NWMO has accepted responsibility for disposing of all Canadian spent fuel, whether from the Point Lepreau station in New Brunswick, or from long-defunct research reactors at Chalk River, or even wastes from reactors yet to be constructed. SON’s leadership, though, is focused on the wastes in its own territory.
“If the [repository] is going to be in the SON territory, why should we be accepting waste that comes from Pickering, Darlington, Chalk River or Point Lepreau?” Chief Nadjiwon said.
“I mean, that’s ludicrous.”
As part of any agreement with NWMO, SON’s leadership seeks resolution to its long-standing concerns, such as the fact that wastes have been stored in its territory for decades without compensation.
“When I go in my truck to a garage in Toronto, I’m charged a cost” to park it, he said. “It’s no different than when you park waste in an Indigenous territory or homeland. We expect an agreement for the cost of doing business.”
William Leiss, an emeritus professor at Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies, worked as a paid consultant for the NWMO between 2002 and 2011. He wrote a book, Deep Disposal, about the site selection process; the book is scheduled for publication in September. Prof. Leiss said SON’s opposition is so firm that it’s hard to fathom why South Bruce is still in the running.
“Its negatives are so pronounced that one wonders if it is being kept alive solely as a negotiating card so that Ignace does not regard itself as the only viable option,” he wrote.
“It has all the markings of an elaborate charade.”
But Prof. Leiss said the Ignace site is a long shot, too.
The Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation has roughly 1,000 members, 200 of which live on a reserve 20 kilometres from the Ignace area site. Its chief, Clayton Wetelainen, said the community has been negotiating a hosting agreement with the NWMO for roughly eight months.
The community has had far less interaction with the nuclear industry than SON has, so its historical baggage is perhaps lighter. Whereas the Ignace and South Bruce agreements would prevent future councils from backing out of the project, Wabigoon Lake’s leadership does not regard the agreement it’s negotiating as irrevocable – in part because there’s insufficient information available on many aspects of the project.
“The current vote that we’re talking about is just to go down to one site,” Chief Wetelainen said.
“This has to go through regulatory approvals, and our own approval, when we get more information about the detailed site.”
Some, he added, have misconstrued the vote as final and binding, “but that’s not the case.”
Prof. Leiss said even if Wabigoon Lake voted in favour of the project, other First Nations throughout the region might launch lawsuits to block the project. “There’s intense fighting among the First Nations in the Treaty 3 area over this issue,” he said.
Chief Wetelainen said his goal is to set a date in the fall for his 1,000 members to vote. Some community members began informing themselves about the project a decade ago, but others are only now beginning to ask the same questions. Getting all members up to speed is proving a challenge, he said – and as with SON, his community does not regard itself as bound by the NWMO’s timetable.
This position is admired by some of the repository’s non-Indigenous opponents. Bill Noll is vice-president of Protect Our Waterways, an opposition group in South Bruce. He said municipal officials have followed the NWMO’s timeline “blindly,” whereas SON is on its own schedule.
“They have a veto capability for the project, which is really an important dimension,” Mr. Noll said.
Prof. Leiss said Ontario is the only logical province for the repository – that’s where the bulk of Canada’s nuclear waste is already stored temporarily. But it’s home to 133 First Nations, whose often-overlapping traditional territories span nearly the entire province. It’s “entirely possible” that no First Nation will agree to accept a repository, he said.
But there’s another wrinkle: The NWMO’s willingness principle is not a legal requirement. OPG’s earlier proposed repository received regulatory approval of its environmental assessment without one. The NWMO’s promise to First Nations, he said, is “not worth the paper it’s written on.”
Prof. Leiss said the NWMO from the outset should have focused on First Nations, which he regards as the repository’s true hosts.
He wrote: “A sardonic take on this siting strategy might go something like this: entice a municipality with a dream of economic riches beyond its wildest imaginings, give it a phone book and tell it to place some calls to the nearest Indigenous communities, and then hope for the best.”
Two small communities are competing to receive Canada’s inventory of nuclear waste. They can’t be sure what they’ll get
“They’re basically surrendering any kind of fundamental right of public dissent on the part of the mayor and town council,”
“We’re talking about binding future generations.”
The Globe and Mail, MATTHEW MCCLEARN, JUNE 10, 2024
Two Ontario municipalities are vying to become hosts for an underground disposal facility for Canada’s nuclear waste. Both must formally announce in the coming months whether they’ll accept the facility – but they cannot know exactly what wastes they’d be agreeing to receive.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) designed its $26-billion facility, known as a deep geological repository, to receive spent fuel from Candu reactors located in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. This year, it plans to choose between the last two sites still in the running: the Municipality of South Bruce, Ont., located more than 120 kilometres north of London; or near Ignace, Ont., a town of 1,200 more than 200 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.
But since the project was conceived, two of NWMO’s three members (Ontario Power Generation and New Brunswick Power) proposed to build new reactors that would burn different fuels and produce novel wastes. The organization guarantees reactor developers that it will dispose of these wastes, even though their nature might not be understood for decades. And in the past few months, both candidate municipalities signed agreements that spell out how the project could be modified to receive such wastes, while limiting their ability to refuse.
These provisions help reduce uncertainty for the nuclear industry. A roadmap produced last year by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a U.S. lobby group, noted that because most small modular reactors (SMRs)being developed would burn different fuels from those of existing reactors, “technology neutral” criteria for accepting spent fuel into repositories was needed as soon as this year in both Canada and the United States.
But the provisions could make it harder to find willing hosts.
Ignace will decide through a council resolution whether it will accept the repository by July 30. South Bruce will hold a by-election in late October.
Consent from First Nations is also required. NWMO spokesperson Fred Kuntz said the organization is negotiating hosting agreements with both Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation for the Ignace project and Saugeen Ojibway Nation for the one in South Bruce. Both are in a position to effectively halt the project, and both have indicated they are not open to accepting SMR wastes at this time.
Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at York University, said the NWMO’s decision to accept responsibility for non-Candu wastes means the host communities can’t know the nature of some of the waste they’ll receive, nor the quantity.
“They really are being asked for a blank cheque.”
Canada’s waste inventory includes 3.3 million Candu fuel bundles as of last year, and grows by about 90,000 annually. Each is about the size of a firelog and weighs slightly less than 20 kilograms. They’re highly radioactive upon removal from a reactor, and must be stored in pools of water for about a decade before they can be moved to storage containers. Utilities have considerable experience handling the bundles, and the industry has developed copper-clad containers to place them in, which in turn would be encased in bentonite clay in underground chambers.
The municipalities also agreed to accept fuel owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., a Crown corporation that operated several research reactors. There are dozens of types of wastes from these reactors, in far smaller amounts.
The hosting agreements detail what the NWMO is offering in return. South Bruce says it’s expecting $418-million over nearly a century and a half. Ignace anticipates $170-million. Jake Pastore, a spokesperson for Ignace, said its lower amount in part reflects the fact that the repository’s site is more than 30 kilometres west of the town, whereas the South Bruce site is on farmland within its boundaries and subject to local taxes.
And the agreements clarify what the repository won’t be receiving: Both agreements explicitly prohibit storing liquid nuclear waste. Waste originating from another country is similarly verboten.
Beyond these provisions, however, the agreements afford the industry considerable flexibility.
Ignace has agreed that the repository could accept spent fuel from SMRs and other non-Candu sources, provided a licence application has been filed with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The commission is considering three SMR-related applications.
The agreement also lays out a process by which the repository’s scope can be changed to accept other forms of spent fuel. Mr. Pastore said the NWMO would have to complete an “intense” regulatory review before introducing non-approved wastes. The organization has provided assurances, he added, that it would not bring such wastes unless there was “full agreement on moving forward.”
Both agreements contain dispute-resolution mechanisms, but the municipalities have agreed to support the NWMO in any regulatory process, including proposals to modify the project’s scope. Ignace has agreed not to support any resident or other municipality that opposes a regulatory approval sought by the organization.
“They’re basically surrendering any kind of fundamental right of public dissent on the part of the mayor and town council,” said Gordon Edwards, a consultant who runs a non-profit organization called the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
“We’re talking about binding future generations.”
South Bruce’s agreement is less permissive than Ignace’s. It doesn’t make direct references to accepting SMR wastes. And it stipulates that before making a regulatory application to modify the repository’s scope, the NWMO must notify the municipality at least three years in advance. ……………………………………………………..
The types of waste produced in Canada could change significantly if the nuclear industry’s plans come to fruition.
Candus consume natural uranium with minuscule concentrations of the more fissile uranium-235. But most reactors in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere use “enriched” fuel containing higher quantities of U-235. Virtually all SMRs would use enriched fuels. And some would use exotic fuels for which there is limited international experience.
For example, New Brunswick Power proposes to build an ARC-100 reactor at its Point Lepreau plant, which would use a metallic uranium alloy fuel. The vendor, ARC Clean Technologies, said its reactor will need to be refuelled only every 20 years, and wastes from the proposed facility “will be fully characterized” and placed in appropriately sized and approved on-site storage containers while awaiting final disposal.
New Brunswick Power also seeks to build a molten salt reactor called the Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner. A 2021 study of reactor technologies by the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that all molten salt reactors it reviewed lacked “a well-formulated plan for management and disposal” of spent fuel.
“There’s so many different SMR designs, and I don’t think we can predict, in 2024, if many or any of them are ever going to go into production,” said Brennain Lloyd, a project co-ordinator with the environmental group Northwatch, which opposes the Ignace repository.
“But there’s potential that we could have a number of different designs, and all of them might behave differently. That’s a dog’s breakfast of additional risk.”………………………………………………………………………………
The Saugeen Ojibway Nation,from whom the industry seeks consent, has objected in writing to receiving SMR waste in its territory, adding that this “fundamental change in circumstances” means its discussions with the NWMO must be “reset.” It said its concerns about these wastes have not been addressed, and it’s not satisfied with the information it provided. “The ground is shifting beneath us, and the original project description no longer reflects the reality,” it declared in a regulatory submission in November.
In an interview, Chief Gregory Nadjiwon of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation – one of the two member nations of Saugeen Ojibway Nation – said his organization is looking for resolution to wastes that have long been in its territory at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. It’s disinclined to receive wastes from other Candu stations outside its territory, let alone from SMRs.
“If you have a complex issue that hasn’t been resolved, why would you add another layer to it?”
………………………………………………………………. More controversial still is the possibility that the repository might accept wastes from reprocessing – which means applying physical and chemical processes to spent fuel to recover fissionable products, which could be used for new reactor fuel.
……………………………………… Mr. Edwards said that when a Candu fuel bundle is demolished for reprocessing, all of the radioactive materials contained within are released into a solid or liquid form. “You no longer have these nicely packaged fuel bun
Mr. Edwards said that reprocessing is the dirtiest segment of nuclear fuel chains. Sites where it has taken place, such as Hanford, Wash., in the U.S., Sellafield in Britain, and La Hague in France, are heavily contaminated and could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up. The two candidate municipalities should have obtained legally binding vetoes against receiving reprocessing wastes, he said.
“Otherwise, they’re being led by the nose, assuming that one thing is going to happen when instead, something very different may end up happening – something that’s much more threatening to the community.”dles, you have something that’s much more complex and more difficult to manage.”
Documents released by New Brunswick Power under the province’s freedom of information legislation, and supplied to The Globe and Mail by nuclear issues researcher and activist Susan O’Donnell, show the corporation regarded long-term storage of reprocessing wastes as critical for attracting investors for its next-generation reactor projects. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-two-small-communities-are-competing-to-receive-canadas-inventory-of/—
Chief Akagi requests public hearing to review any new governance arrangement for the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor on Peskotomuhkati homeland
Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Article 29 of UNDRIP requires states to take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials takes place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. The CNSC’s decision to grant NB Power a 10-year license renewal does not reflect this commitment.
by Abby Bartlett, June 10, 2024 homeland https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/06/10/chief-akagi-requests-public-hearing-to-review-any-new-governance-arrangement-for-the-point-lepreau-nuclear-reactor-on-peskotomuhkati-homeland/
On May 15, New Brunswick’s Energy Development Minister Mike Holland tabled the first reading of a bill to change the Electricity Act. The change would allow NB Power to enter a partnership with Ontario Power Generation (OPG).
In a letter to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) on May 29, Peskotomuhkati Chief Hugh Akagi outlined his initial concerns with the proposed agreement between NB Power and OPG, which reportedly includes a partial ownership stake in the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station.
The letter is from the Passamoquoddy Recognition Group (PRGI) which represents the Peskotomuhkati Nation in Canada and the interests of rightsholders and the Peskotomuhkati ecosystem, including the Point Lepreau Nuclear Station and areas surrounding up to 90 km away.
Any new owners of the Lepreau CANDU nuclear reactor will have rights and responsibilities that PRGI wants clarified. In May 2022, Chief Akagi spoke at a public hearing held by the CNSC in Saint John to discuss NB Power’s request for a 25-year renewal of the license to operate the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor.
At the hearing, PRGI asked the CNSC to reduce the license to three years, stating that the average length of licensing is only 2.44 years. In the end, the CNSC granted a 10-year licence. Given that PRGI has already felt the impact of the proposed change in licence holders, they are rightfully concerned about the possible repercussions that will come from the new proposed changes.
In December 2023, New Brunswick published its new energy strategy, outlining plans to declare that the Point Lepreau reactor will undergo licence “renewals every 10 years.” This statement assumes that the 10-year license length will be the conclusion of future discussions that have not happened yet.
Back in June 2022, Chief Akagi stated that a 10-year license renewal meant that Canada was not meeting its own legal and related obligations to the Nation. “The new licence gives NB Power the ability to create and store 10 more years of fresh and dangerous high-level waste on our territory. This is not acceptable,” Chief Akagi said at the time.
Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Article 29 of UNDRIP requires states to take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials takes place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. The CNSC’s decision to grant NB Power a 10-year license renewal does not reflect this commitment.
Regarding any new governance arrangement for the Point Lepreau reactor, PRGI has many questions outlined in its letter to the CNSC.
PRGI wonders how a new joint ownership entity will fulfill its Indigenous consultation obligations. Will PRGI have any say about these arrangements? How will a joint ownership arrangement for the existing CANDU reactor impact any new reactors on the Point Lepreau site? What will OPG’s responsibilities be for the existing and any further nuclear waste produced by the Point Lepreau plant under a co-ownership arrangement?
NB Power is fraught with 3.6 billion dollars of nuclear debt due to the original building cost of the Lepreau nuclear generating station, the later refurbishment of the reactor, and the poor performance over the course of its operation.
This potential agreement would mean shedding the Lepreau nuclear reactor off to a new entity, which would be co-owned with OPG and NB Power in an agreement that could force New Brunswick customers to pay for expensive nuclear power for decades.
The letter by Chief Akagi ends with two requests. First is the need for the CNSC to commit to holding in-person hearings for the future request to change ownership of the Lepreau nuclear reactor to ensure that the Peskotomuhkati Nation can intervene in its traditional way rather than only through written intervention.
The second request asks the CNSC to remind the New Brunswick Government that a future 10-year license for the Lepreau reactor is not up to the provincial government. Instead, it will be a matter of review and decision made by the CNSC, which will involve public intervenors, including PRGI.
As Chief Akagi outlines, NB Power is required to make an application to the CNSC to authorize the transfer of licence, and under section 40 of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, they are also required to hold a hearing. The Peskotomuhkati Nation does not want this proposed change to become another injustice that they must bear. The CNSC needs to ensure that Peskotomuhkati people’s voices are heard, understood, and respected in the process.
Abby Bartlett is a research assistant on the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University.
Corporate lobbying heats up around governments’ nuclear power plans despite concerns from anti-nuclear advocates
“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them. You have, for example, nuclear industry people that get jobs in the government. It’s a revolving door.”
Critics say nuclear too costly and slow to build while supporters back it as a climate solution
Investigative Journalism Foundation, KATE SCHNEIDER, 6 JUNE, 24
“…………………………….. Fears of nuclear meltdowns have long stymied the expansion of nuclear power across Canada. However, with Canada newly committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, the past few years have spurred a new wave of support for nuclear power development.
Yet, some opposition MPs and analysts worry that the recent embrace of nuclear power by governments in Canada has been a result of lobbying by an influential industry more intent on turning a profit than hitting climate targets.
“We’ve got a very, very powerful nuclear special-interest lobby, and we don’t have politically powerful lobbies for energy efficiency or wind or solar,” said Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and a former Toronto Hydro commissioner. “As a result, our political leaders are making bad decisions.”
Last July, the Ontario government announced the largest expansion of nuclear power in Canada in decades. It intends to add a 4,800-megawatt extension to the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, one of the biggest nuclear power plants in the world.
The site is located on Lake Huron in the northern Ontario municipality of Kincardine — just over 200 km northwest of Toronto — and, while owned by the provincial government, is operated by private company Bruce Power.
Last week, Bruce Power registered a new lobbyist in the province to discuss the “successful refurbishment of Ontario’s nuclear fleet” as well as what it sees as overly onerous regulations, offering to help the government “identify areas for red tape reduction in several sectors.”
The lobbyist, Daniel Levitan, is currently employed by government relations firm Rubicon Strategy. Like several other nuclear industry lobbyists identified by the IJF, Levitan previously worked for the government. He worked for 10 years in external relations for Hydro One, Ontario’s largest electricity distribution utility, starting in 2013. Before that, he was a director of communications and senior policy adviser for several Ontario government departments.
Neither Bruce Power nor Daniel Levitan responded to requests for comment.
Competition for the contract for new nuclear reactors at the Bruce site has also spurred on a lobbying battle between AtkinsRéalis (formerly known as SNC-Lavalin) and Westinghouse, as reported by The Logic last month.
AtkinsRéalis employs both Jean Chrétien, the former Liberal prime minister, and Mike Harris, the former Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, as the co-chairs for their public relations campaign.
The biggest surge in lobbying, however, has perhaps been around funding for small modular reactors (SMRs)……………..
In February last year, Natural Resources Canada launched a funding program offering $29.6 million to encourage the development of SMRs.
Companies working on the technology are eager to take advantage of federal funds. Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), a Seattle-based nuclear technology company, lobbied the government on eight different occasions last year seeking money for “Canada’s first small modular nuclear reactor.”
BWXT Canada Ltd., a nuclear reactor manufacturer, is also registered to lobby at the federal level, hoping to “examine new funding opportunities for nuclear energy and its operations in Canada.”BWXT Canada has lobbied key ministers and government officials this year, including Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of energy and natural resources; Mairead Lavery, president and CEO of Export Development Canada; Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of public services and procurement; and Ben Chin, one of the prime minister’s top advisers.
BWXT Canada announced in April that it was investing $80 million to expand its Cambridge, Ont. headquarters, increasing its manufacturing capacity to meet the growing demand for nuclear technologies, including SMRs.
BWXT said, “We are interested in updating all levels of government about our operations in Canada, our expansion project at our Cambridge facility and how we are supporting Ontario’s nuclear projects and Canada’s clean energy targets.” USNC did not respond to a request for comment.
“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them.” – Susan O’Donnell, St. Thomas University
Industry groups such as the Canadian Nuclear Association and the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries have also been lobbying officials in the past year, as have several unions including the International Union of Operating Engineers. The Ontario Society of Professional Engineers is also registered to lobby in Ontario.
Reached for comment, Snigdh Baunthiyal, a spokesperson for the Canadian Nuclear Association, provided a statement to the IJF that said, “We have asked for the Federal government’s support to accelerate the deployment of strategic tools such as ITCs [investment tax credits] and CMT [corporate minimum tax] to ensure Canada retains its leadership role and meets its domestic and international climate and energy security objectives.”
None of the other organizations responded to requests for comment.
In total, four nuclear power plants currently operate across Canada, producing about 12.7 per cent of Canada’s electricity. Three plants — with 16 operational reactors — are located in Ontario, while a fourth housing a single reactor is in Lepreau, New Brunswick.
Alongside the privately operated Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, the other two Ontario-based plants in Pickering and Darlington are operated by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a Crown corporation.
OPG has lobbied the federal government 21 times so far this year regarding “issues pertaining to federal legislation, policies and programs with respect to OPG’s existing nuclear operations or new nuclear opportunities including small modular reactors,” according to its lobbying registration.
The Darlington site is already halfway through a refurbishment costing $12.8 billion while the Ontario government recently announced plans to refurbish four of the reactors at the Pickering plant starting in 2027.
Construction of an SMR at Darlington is scheduled to be completed in 2028. Last July, the Ford government announced that this SMR would soon be followed by an additional three at the site, projected to go online by the mid-2030s.
Jennifer Stone, a spokesperson for OPG, said that these projects will help the province “meet the growing demand for clean electricity for decades to come.
“As OPG helps secure Ontario’s clean energy future, these projects also generate good jobs and drive economic growth across the province both at our facilities and through Ontario’s robust nuclear supply chain,” added Stone.
NB Power plans to build an SMR at its Lepreau site in conjunction with ARC Clean Technology Inc.
NB Power acknowledged the IJF’s request for comment, but said it would be unable to provide a response before deadline.
While Canada’s only operating nuclear plants are in Ontario and New Brunswick, the uranium used to fuel them comes entirely from Saskatchewan, largely via uranium mining giant Cameco.
Cameco engaged in a lobbying campaign in March targeting various federal government officials, including those at Natural Resources Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. According to its most recent lobbying registration, Cameco wants to “advocate for the federal government to include nuclear energy as a major component in Canada’s greenhouse gas/carbon reduction strategy.” Cameco is also registered to lobby in Saskatchewan.
Dale Austin, Cameco’s director of government relations and one of its registered lobbyists, previously worked as a director of the policy analysis and coordination division for Natural Resources Canada as well as a director of policy coordination for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
Susan O’Donnell is an adjunct research professor at St. Thomas University and a core member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick. O’Donnell said the influence of the industry extends beyond what appears in the official lobby registry.
“‘Do they even need to lobby?’ is what I would say. Because they’ve got all their people in the government,” said O’Donnell.
“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them. You have, for example, nuclear industry people that get jobs in the government. It’s a revolving door.”
Worries over safety risks and environmental implications of nuclear power have been around for decades, embodied by incidents like the Chornobyl and Fukushima disasters.
However, the concerns expressed today by anti-nuclear advocates seem to revolve more around nuclear being too costly or excessively slow to build.
“It just doesn’t make any economic sense. And it doesn’t make any climate sense,” said Gibbons. “Wind and solar, combined with storage, can keep our lights on at less than half the cost of new nuclear reactors.”
…………………………………O’Donnell said that given Canada’s commitment to decarbonize its electricity grid by 2035, the idea that new nuclear power projects, especially SMRs, will be ready in time is simply unrealistic.
New nuclear reactors typically take 10 to 15 years to build. And besides the first Darlington SMR, no other SMRs in Canada will be operational until at least the early 2030s.
“On the other hand, we do have mature technologies, which are wind and solar, we do have [storage] technology that’s coming along tremendously,” said O’Donnell. “We’ve got the technology now if we’re serious about meeting our targets.”…………….. https://theijf.org/nuclear-power-lobbying
“Crisis of radioactive waste mismanagement in the Ottawa River watershed”
Hill Times letter: “Crisis of radioactive waste mismanagement in the Ottawa River watershed,” Chief Lance Haymond and Dr. Gordon Edwards Monday May 20, 2024
We are writing to alert Hill Times readers to what we see as a crisis of radioactive waste mismanagement in the Ottawa River watershed. Components of the crisis include:
A giant, above-ground landfill for one million tonnes of radioactive waste at Chalk River Laboratories, less than one kilometre from the Ottawa River. According to the licensed inventory for the facility, more than half of the radionuclides are long-lived with half-lives exceeding the design life of the facility by thousands of years. Experts say the waste is “intermediate level,” and should be stored underground. There are concerns the facility will leak radioactive contaminants during operation, and break down due to erosion after a few hundred years.
There is a proposal to entomb “in situ” a defunct nuclear reactor less than 400 meters from the Ottawa River at Rolphton, Ont. In our view, the proposal flouts international safety standards that say entombment should not be used except in emergencies.
A multinational private-sector consortium is transporting all federal radioactive wastes, including high-level irradiated fuel waste, to Chalk River. These imports are occurring, despite an explicit request by the City of Ottawa in 2021 for cessation of radioactive waste imports to the Ottawa Valley which is seismically-active, and a poor location for long-term storage of radioactive waste.
All of the above is taking place despite the opposition of the Algonquin People on whose unceded territory the Chalk River Laboratories and defunct Rolphton reactor are located. This contravenes Canada’s United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.
In our view, this crisis is a direct result of Canada’s inadequate nuclear governance regime under which almost all aspects of nuclear governance are entrusted to one agency, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is widely perceived to be captured by the nuclear industry, and to promote the projects it is supposed to regulate. Other concerns include conflicts of interest, lack of checks and balances, and an inadequate nuclear waste policy.
Despite repeated resolutions of concern by the Assembly of First Nations and more than 140 downstream municipalities—including Ottawa, Gatineau, and Montreal—the current government appears unwilling or unable to take meaningful action to address this crisis. We are therefore appealing to the International Atomic Energy Agency and requesting a meeting with its peer review team that is scheduled to visit Canada next month.
Chief Lance Haymond, Kebaowek First Nation
Gordon Edwards, PhD, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
Moving nuclear waste through traditional territories could face opposition, Ontario First Nation says
‘Think about how many treaty territories that waste would have to go through,’ chief says
Colin Butler · CBC News · May 27, 2024
A First Nation in southwestern Ontario says even if the community votes yes on a proposed $26 billion dump for nuclear waste within their traditional territory, it would likely be opposed by other First Nations, through whose territories the more than 5.5 million spent fuel rods would have to pass.
Canada’s nuclear industry has been on a decades-long quest to find a permanent home for tens of thousands of tonnes of highly radioactive waste. The search has narrowed to two Ontario communities — Ignace, northwest of Thunder Bay, and the Municipality of South Bruce, north of London.
Both will vote later this year on whether to build a deep geologic repository, a kind of nuclear crypt, where more than 50,000 tonnes of waste in copper casks will be lowered more than 500 metres underground to be kept for all time, behind layers of clay, concrete and the ancient bedrock itself.
But so will their Indigenous neighbours, whose traditional territories the towns are within, which gives each respective First Nation a veto.
In the case of Saugeen Ojibway Nation in particular, it means the community again finds itself as the future arbiter of a potential nuclear waste site on their traditional lands for the second time in a few years.
In early 2020, its members voted overwhelmingly against the construction of a deep geologic repository outside of Kincardine, that was proposed by Ontario Power Generation.
This time around, Chief Greg Nadjiwon of the neighbouring Chippewas of the Nawash, says the proposal by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a non-profit industry group, for a similar facility has a better chance, but is still a tough sell…………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/nuclear-waste-ontario-south-bruce-saugeen-nation-1.7213878
Indigenous opposition to nuclear waste being transported through their territory
Concerns growing surrounding nuclear waste management
Anishinabek, The voice of the Anishinabek nation. May 22, 2024, By Rick Garrick
FORT WILLIAM — Fort William’s Elysia Lone Elk is raising concerns about the transportation of nuclear materials through Northern Ontario if the proposed nuclear waste site near Ignace in Treaty #3 territory gets the go-ahead.
The Trans-Canada Hwy. was closed for about 20 hours in 2001 after a head-on collision between two transport trucks, one of which was transporting two canisters of radioactive material — iridium — about 25 kilometres east of Dryden, 105 kilometres west of Ignace. The collision resulted in “widespread destruction” and the deaths of four people, two from each vehicle, according to a news report. Officials from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission eventually arrived on site, found there was no leakage, and removed the canisters to a safe location.
“Water is life, it’s our most sacred resource,” Lone Elk says. “We need that to survive, animals need that to survive, and I don’t think we should be drilling underground and playing with aquifers with a very toxic harmful material that has a half-life beyond my conception of time.”
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has been following a process to select a site for Canada’s plan to safely manage used nuclear fuel long-term since 2010, and has since narrowed down the potential sites to two areas for Canada’s deep geological repository, the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace area in northwestern Ontario, and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation-South Bruce area in southwestern Ontario. If the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace area is selected as the site, nuclear materials would have to be transported across Northern Ontario to the site.
“If it’s so safe, then why are you even transporting it, just bury it where it is? We know how dangerous those highways can be,” Lone Elk says. “The fact that no one on the [potential transportation] corridor gets a say is a democratic problem, very frustrating.”
Lone Elk adds that the nuclear material would be transported across Northern Ontario for the operating life of the proposed deep geological repository. The NWMO states on their website that based on current projections of Canada’s inventory of used nuclear fuel, transportation is anticipated to take about 40 years to complete. The NWMO adds that they are exploring road and/or rail options for transporting used nuclear fuel to the deep geological repository.
“The (Fort William) Band Council has passed two resolutions, one focusing on the proximity principle and then the other one specifically outright stating we do not support nuclear fuel being transported through our traditional territory,” Lone Elk says. “We’re trusting their scientists, we’re trusting industry scientists, we’re trusting industry factors; so when does the First Nation get to participate with Indigenous knowledge?”
Fort William Chief Michele Solomon says Fort William passed two resolutions in the last four years opposing nuclear waste being brought into Fort William territory.
“I think that it’s fair to say we stand with other First Nations in Robinson Superior Treaty territory to say that there’s nothing that gives us comfort that there would be any safety with this being transported through our communities,” Solomon says. “We see the increase in accidents on the highways going through our homelands so we’re strongly opposed to it.”
Solomon adds that their community has not been consulted on this issue.
Based on how the community has responded to other possible threats to our homelands, the people have been strongly opposed to other things that have been proposed for our territory,” Solomon says. “If the government wants to proceed with this, then they need to consult with the rights holders of this territory. So if it needs to pass through Robinson Superior territory, you need to consult with all of those communities.”
Solomon says it is not enough for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to say that it is safe.
“I think there should be independent research done and that has not happened as far as I know,” Solomon says, noting that unhealthy things have been brought into her community’s airspace and waterways before. “So we are strongly opposed.”
The Assembly of First Nations is holding four Regional Dialogue Sessions: A Dialogue on the Transportation and Storage of Used Nuclear Fuel at locations across the country, including on May 22 at the Delta Hotels by Marriott in Thunder Bay.
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New Brunswick’s nuclear reactor emits high levels of radioactivity, increasing cancer risk.
Expert report for the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group
by Ian Fairlie, May 9, 2022, https://nbmediacoop.org/2022/05/09/new-brunswicks-nuclear-reactor-emits-high-levels-of-radioactivity-increasing-cancer-risk/
New Brunswick Power’s Point Lepreau nuclear reactor on the Bay of Fundy emits much higher levels of radioactive tritium than other nuclear reactors in Canada. Ingesting and breathing in tritium increases the risk of cancer in humans and other animals.
Tritium is the radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and international agencies recognise it as an unusually hazardous radioactive substance. One of its properties is to bind with carbohydrates, proteins and lipids in cells to form organically-bound tritium (OBT) which sticks inside the body for years.
These alarming findings will be tabled on May 10 by the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group in Saint John during Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) hearings on the application by NB Power for an unprecedented 25-year extension of its licence to operate its Lepreau reactor. The CNSC is the regulator of all nuclear activities in Canada.
Although industry scientists in Canada claim tritium has low toxicity and does not bioaccumulate, official reports show tritium is twice to three times more radiotoxic compared to external gamma radiation. And many studies indicate OBT levels increase the longer people are exposed to tritiated water.
Considerable evidence exists – from many epidemiology studies around the world, that children who live near nuclear plants emitting large amounts of tritium are more likely to get leukemia than those living further away. References to all these studies are included in the appendix to the CNSC submission by the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group.
The problem is that Canadian CANDU heavy water reactors emit much larger amounts of tritium than US or European reactors, so the health effects here are very likely to be greater. However the industry and CNSC avoid any studies that could spell trouble for them.
Mainly because of pressure from Canada’s powerful nuclear lobby, safety levels for tritium here are very lax compared to other countries. For example, acceptable levels for tritium in drinking water in Canada are 70 times those in the EU, and approximately 400 times higher than in some US states.
High emissions
In my expert report for the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group, I found that annual tritium releases from the Point Lepreau reactor are very large in comparison with all other nuclear reactors in Canada and indeed in the world.
In 2020, its tritium air emissions were 290 terabecquerels, that’s 290,000,000,000,000 becquerels – which is a huge amount of radioactivity. Worryingly, these releases have been increasing in recent years.
It is well understood that the older a reactor the higher the tritium levels in its moderator and cooling circuits. As well, various operations and maintenance activities increase tritium releases. Without a means of removing tritium, its inventory and releases will continue to increase each year.
These worries are exacerbated by NB Power’s proposed 25-year relicensing from 2022 to 2047. The reactor started operations 40 years ago in 1982 (with retubing between 2008 and 2012). The CNSC has recommended the NB Power nuclear facility is re-licensed to operate for another 20 years to 2042, see the CNSC’s response.
However, this would mean that Lepreau would have operated for 60 years which is unacceptably long as it was originally designed with a 30-year lifespan. This is arguably an unsafe proposal and it flies in the face of the Precautionary Principle, which states that “complete evidence of a potential risk is not required before action is taken to mitigate the effects of the potential risk.”
How does tritium get inside people?
When tritium is emitted from Point Lepreau, it travels via multiple environmental pathways to humans including through air. It cycles in the environment, because tritium atoms swap quickly with stable hydrogen atoms in the biosphere and hydrosphere.
This means that all open water surfaces, rivers, streams and all biota, local crops and foods in open-air markets, animals and humans will become contaminated by tritiated moisture up to ambient levels – that is, up to the air concentrations of the emitted tritium.
According to New Brunswick Power’s environmental assessments, local residents will receive radiation exposures from these tritium emissions, from the tritium in food and water, from the tritium breathed in, and from the tritium absorbed through their skin.
For example, NB Power already admits that people are exposed to radiation from tritiated water vapour in the air, drinking water in local wells, diving for sea urchins, harvesting clams and dulse, and eating local seafood. But local people will also get doses from eating wild foods such as mushrooms, berries and other fruits, gardening vegetables, honey hives, and the harvesting of seaweed for fertiliser.
These are all important matters for Indigenous peoples who take pride in living close to their lands and sea. The continued radioactive poisoning of their lands and sea is deeply offensive to them.
These intakes increase their risk of getting cancer and other radiogenic diseases, but NB Power does not measure tritium levels in people near its Lepreau reactor, nor does it carry out epidemiology studies into ill-health levels in nearby populations.
Nevertheless epidemiology studies at other Canadian facilities which emit tritium all indicate increases in cancer and congenital malformations. In addition, evidence from cell and animal studies, and radiation biology theory, indicates radiogenic effects occur from tritium exposures.
New studies show increased risks
Recent, large, statistically powerful, epidemiology studies of nuclear workers in UK, US and France have increased our perception of the radiation risks of low-level radiation, including tritium. The new studies show a 47% increase in solid cancers and a 580% increase in leukemias. This evidence is directly applicable to tritium’s radiation exposures from Point Lepreau.
These high and increasing tritium emissions, high levels of radioactive contamination, and increased estimates of cancer risk together mean that tritium poses worrying health risks to workers and to people near Lepreau and in the direction of the prevailing winds, including in Saint John.
There is already a long history of NB Power ignoring tritium dangers at Lepreau.
The conclusion from my report for the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group, is that Point Lepreau should not be granted any extension of its operating license, far less a 20 year one. As shown by experience around the world, much safer, healthier, less expensive alternatives exist for generation electricity, such as wind turbines, solar panels and tidal schemes.
Dr. Ian Fairlie is an independent citizen scientist based in the UK who has specialised on radioactivity in the environment with degrees in chemistry and radiation biology. His doctoral studies at Imperial College, UK and Princeton University, US examined nuclear waste technologies. One of his areas of expertise is the dosimetric impacts of nuclear reactor emissions, in particular tritium.
The plutonium connection: Why I no longer conduct my research at the University of New Brunswick
I had already learned enough about the power and influence of the nuclear industry to know that I would be fighting a losing battle if I kept my research at UNB
Once during my 13 years at the NRC I was asked to work on a military technology project, and I refused. I had a visceral negative reaction to doing research that could potentially be implicated in mass killing.
by Susan O’Donnell, May 17, 2024, https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/05/17/the-plutonium-connection-why-i-no-longer-conduct-my-research-at-the-university-of-new-brunswick/
On Thursday this week, two very different emails landed in my inbox minutes apart. The juxtaposition jolted me, and I thought: it’s time to share my story about my departure from the University of New Brunswick.
The first email, from the NB Media Co-op, informed me that my commentary written with Gordon Edwards was just published. Our article marked the 50th anniversary of an event that had shocked the world: India’s test nuclear explosion made with plutonium extracted from a ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactor, a gift from Canada. We questioned if Canada was making the same mistake by backing the Moltex project to extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick.
A UNB professor friend sent the second email. He wrote: ‘This will be aggravating to read, but I thought you’d want to see it. I’m attaching the announcement about Arthur Irving’s death coming from UNB’s President. Arthur Irving is celebrated for his commitment and dedication to the environment. Meanwhile, people who are actually committed to the environment (e.g., you) are blacklisted.’
The two emails had this connection: My research and writing about plutonium and Moltex is the main reason why in 2023 I moved my research program from the University of New Brunswick, the largest university in the province, over to St. Thomas University, a small liberal arts undergraduate institution that shares the campus with UNB in Fredericton.
My journey from UNB to STU began in 2020. At that point, I had been with the UNB Sociology department for almost 16 years as an adjunct professor, on faculty but not on staff and so not in the faculty union. During those years, I brought considerable federal research funding into UNB and hired and trained more than a dozen UNB graduate students. My research expertise includes technology adoption: analyzing the social, political, environmental and economic contexts in which people deploy technologies. I joined UNB in 2004 while employed at the National Research Council of Canada on the Fredericton UNB campus, as a senior researcher and vice-chair of the NRC’s research ethics board. Once during my 13 years at the NRC I was asked to work on a military technology project, and I refused. I had a visceral negative reaction to doing research that could potentially be implicated in mass killing.
At the start of 2020, I could not have imagined a connection between NB Power’s Point Lepreau nuclear reactor and weapons of mass destruction. That February, my UNB research project RAVEN was invited to partner with local groups to bring nuclear expert Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, to New Brunswick to give public talks in Saint John and Fredericton. I readily agreed. Several months previously, I had read Gordon’s article in the NB Media Co-op about ‘small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs)’ and wanted to learn more. I put up posters around the UNB campus promoting Gordon’s upcoming talk. I asked the UNB communications office to help me promote Gordon’s visit, but they never came through, and I assumed they were too busy to help.
Gordon Edward’s talk, moved online when the pandemic hit in March 2020, sparked my research interest in the adoption of nuclear technology. I began looking into the two small nuclear reactor projects planned for New Brunswick, Moltex and ARC. In July that year, I co-wrote my first commentary with Gordon that mentioned our concerns about the Moltex project and plutonium extraction from used nuclear fuel. The same day that our piece was published in The Hill Times, the newspaper on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the CEO of Moltex emailed, asking to meet with me. I agreed, and during a break in the pandemic that month, we met outside at Picaroons Roundhouse along with Janice Harvey, the coordinator of the Environment & Society program at St. Thomas University and a co-investigator on my RAVEN project. At the meeting, Janice and I disagreed with the Moltex CEO about the wisdom of his project to extract plutonium from the used nuclear fuel at Point Lepreau.
I continued my research into small nuclear reactors and plutonium extraction by reading research articles and consulting with Gordon and other experts across Canada and internationally. In May 2021, the federal government gave Moltex a $50.5 million grant to develop its technology that could be exported globally. Shortly after, nine U.S. non-proliferation experts wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau expressing concern about the Moltex project, writing that by ‘backing spent-fuel reprocessing and plutonium extraction, the Government of Canada will undermine the global nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime that Canada has done so much to strengthen.’ The Globe and Mail published an article about the nuclear weapons proliferation concerns with the Moltex project, and Gordon and I published commentaries in The Hill Times, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the NB Media Co-op.
During this time, I co-founded a public interest group with local activists, the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB), to advocate for a nuclear-free renewable energy future. Janice Harvey invited me to join her in the STU Environment & Society program as an adjunct research professor, and in June 2021 I was appointed to the STU faculty in addition to my UNB faculty appointment.
In August 2021, I received a phone call that augured the end of my research program at UNB. On the phone, a friend told me about overhearing the UNB president say: ‘Susan O’Donnell is spreading misinformation about nuclear energy.’ That shocked me for several reasons. First, I would never knowingly spread misinformation. Second, I’d never met the UNB president and didn’t know he knew I existed. Third, why the heck would he say such a thing? To find out, I filed a Right to Information request with UNB, asking for all communications received by the UNB President and the Vice-President Research that mentioned me or my research project RAVEN.
UNB released the information to me in November 2021. The release package, HERE, is dozens of pages, almost all of it redacted. Just enough information was left for me to know that the UNB senior administration’s concern about me began in February 2020, while I was putting up posters around UNB for Gordon Edwards’ talk about small nuclear reactors. Over the weeks leading up to Gordon’s event, a flurry of emails – involving the UNB president, his chief of staff, several vice-presidents, the UNB secretary, two UNB professors I’ve never met, numerous people in UNB communications, and the Atlantica Centre for Energy, a lobby group funded by the energy industry – fretted about the upcoming ‘anti-nuclear event,’ imagining that it was linked to the Green Party and would jeopardize funding for nuclear research at UNB. I finally realized why the UNB communications office had not responded to my request to help publicize Gordon’s talk.
Most interesting to me in the package was an email from the CEO of Moltex to the UNB vice-president research on July 6, 2020, the same day the CEO wrote to me requesting a meeting. To the VP research, the CEO wrote:
‘You may have seen the article recently written by Dr Susan O’Donnell and her group in NB media coop. It was today issued in the Hill Times which gives it significant exposure and credibility. I understand she is a lecturer at UNB. I have emailed her to request a meeting… I do have concerns that her group RAVEN is supported by SSHRC and yet it is being used as an advocacy group and she is using her Academic Freedom to express views without scientific credibility and in conjunction with political parties but I don’t plan on bringing that up with her. I greatly appreciate debate around nuclear and clean energy (I used to be anti nuclear) but it is hard to compete with misinformation backed by a university.’
There it was: the accusation that I was spreading ‘misinformation’ – the same accusation repeated later by the UNB president that my friend had overheard. Finally, I understood why the heck the president had said that: Moltex had stated it as a fact. I knew that Moltex was collaborating with UNB’s Centre for Nuclear Energy Research, and that in addition to the federal grant to Moltex of $50.5 million, UNB received more than $560,000. The Right to Information request showed me that half a million bucks buys a lot at UNB.
To learn more, I filed a complaint in December 2021 with the New Brunswick Ombuds office, asking UNB to release the redacted information. In April 2022, my complaint was dismissed, and I decided to drop it there.
I had already learned enough about the power and influence of the nuclear industry to know that I would be fighting a losing battle if I kept my research at UNB. I was due to write another application for federal research funding. My main concern was that the UNB VP research – who had written many emails about me (that had been redacted) and who would need to sign off on my future requests for federal research funding – was also on the advisory board of the UNB Centre for Nuclear Energy Research. An application for federal research funding takes months of work, and I was not willing to take the risk that after preparing the application, it could be vetoed at the final stage. I asked my UNB Sociology chair not to renew my faculty appointment when it expired in 2023, and I submitted my funding application via the research office at St. Thomas University.
When my UNB appointment ended, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded me a five-year research grant at STU for the CEDAR project – Contesting Energy Discourses through Action Research. CEDAR has excellent co-investigators, collaborators and research assistants. We research the energy transition – focusing on nuclear energy – with the support of my new university administration.
As a bonus, my experience with the Right to Information system raised my awareness of how access to information requests could be useful for research. I’ve since filed more than two dozen requests with different federal and provincial government departments and agencies to learn what goes on behind the scenes between the nuclear industry and governments related to plutonium extraction from used nuclear fuel. As the release packages arrive, many heavily redacted, I’m making them available to other researchers, journalists, and anyone interested, via a page on the CEDAR project website, HERE. Using that information, The Globe and Mail published an article last September, and Gordon Edwards and I published another in March this year in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the collusion between the nuclear industry and the federal government to develop a policy on nuclear fuel reprocessing. My research continues.
Susan O’Donnell is the primary investigator of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University.
Canada’s plutonium mishap in India was 50 years ago this week – is history repeating itself now?
the International Panel on Fissile Materials states: ‘the most important reason to be concerned about the practice of reprocessing is that plutonium can be used to make weapons.’
Canada’s support for the Moltex technology could be used by other countries to justify their own plutonium acquisition programs
by Susan O’Donnell and Gordon Edwards, May 16, 2024, https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/05/16/canadas-plutonium-mishap-in-india-was-50-years-ago-this-week-is-history-repeating-itself-now/
In the public imagination, nuclear power for electricity and nuclear weapons are entirely separate issues. Because Canada is not a nuclear weapons state, Canada’s nuclear power reactors are thought to be unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, and its nuclear technology exports are considered ‘peaceful.’
Yet this week marks the 50-year anniversary of one day in May when Canada’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear image was shattered. On May 18, 1974, India shocked the world by conducting a test A-Bomb explosion it called ‘Smiling Buddha.’ The nuclear explosive was plutonium, obtained from a ‘peaceful’ research reactor – a gift from the Canadian government in 1954.
Plutonium is not found in nature but nuclear reactors create it as a by-product. Plutonium was the explosive used in the A-Bomb that the U.S. military dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945, killing 70,000 civilians, half of them on the first day.
The story of India’s first A-Bomb shows that ‘intent’ is all that separates military from civilian use of nuclear technology. On that fateful day in 1974, it suddenly became clear that any country with a nuclear reactor can choose to extract plutonium from the fiercely radioactive used fuel and secretly make a nuclear bomb.
Plutonium extraction is a sensitive procedure called ‘reprocessing.’ Plutonium can also be used as a nuclear fuel. But this can only be done by first reprocessing used nuclear fuel, and this increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. As the International Panel on Fissile Materials states: ‘the most important reason to be concerned about the practice of reprocessing is that plutonium can be used to make weapons.’
India’s nuclear explosion deeply traumatized Ottawa and shocked the world. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly shamed Canada when he told the media that: ‘The Indian nuclear explosion occurred with material that was diverted not from an American reactor under American safeguards, but from a Canadian reactor that did not have appropriate safeguards.’ His statement conveniently ignored the fact that the U.S. encouraged India in its reprocessing technology.
India’s nuclear explosion led to a de-facto ban on commercial reprocessing in Canada by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau following an explicit ban on reprocessing by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The de-facto ban in Canada remains today, despite industry efforts to overturn it.
In 2022, Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, delivered ‘Canada’s National Statement on Nuclear Energy’ in Washington, emphasizing just one word, ‘peaceful’: ‘Canada began a legacy of nuclear excellence as the second country ever to produce nuclear power. Since that time, we have been actively involved in promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy around the world.’
In 2023, Canada signed the G7 Leaders’ Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament, committing the country to ‘prioritizing efforts to reduce the production and accumulation of weapons-usable nuclear material for civil purposes around the world.’
India’s nuclear explosion led to a de-facto ban on commercial reprocessing in Canada by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau following an explicit ban on reprocessing by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The de-facto ban in Canada remains today, despite industry efforts to overturn it.
In 2022, Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, delivered ‘Canada’s National Statement on Nuclear Energy’ in Washington, emphasizing just one word, ‘peaceful’: ‘Canada began a legacy of nuclear excellence as the second country ever to produce nuclear power. Since that time, we have been actively involved in promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy around the world.’
In 2023, Canada signed the G7 Leaders’ Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament, committing the country to ‘prioritizing efforts to reduce the production and accumulation of weapons-usable nuclear material for civil purposes around the world.’
The U.S. experts stated that Canada’s support for the Moltex technology could be used by other countries to justify their own plutonium acquisition programs and undo decades of efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of countries that might want to join the ranks of unofficial nuclear weapons states: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
In subsequent letters, the experts expressed concern that the Canadian government has forgotten the lessons learned 50 years ago with the launch of India’s nuclear-weapon program. They reminded the Prime Minister that the experience led Prime Minister P.E. Trudeau and U.S. President Jimmy Carter to oppose the separation of plutonium from spent fuel.
After India’s nuclear explosion in 1974, Canada and the United States became founding members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group that helped to ensure there has been no export of reprocessing technology to non-nuclear weapons states since. The U.S. experts stated: “It is imperative to uphold this decades-long norm of not reprocessing, lest we find ourselves in a world of many states with latent nuclear-weapon capabilities.”
Canada’s support for reprocessing now is sending the wrong signal to the world and threatening the already fragile global non-proliferation regime. Will history repeat itself?
An earlier version of this story was published by The Hill Times.
Susan O’Donnell, PhD, is the lead investigator of the CEDAR project in the Environment & Society program at St. Thomas University. Gordon Edwards, PhD, is president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility in Montreal.
Ontario’s nuclear option is the wrong path to meet green energy targets
The province should focus on cost-efficient wind, solar and hydro expansion, as well as increased interprovincial transmission.
by Quinn Goranson May 13, 2024, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2024/ontario-nuclear-option/
Ontario is failing in its strategy to reduce emissions to meet the province’s climate commitment of reducing emissions by 2030 to 30 per cent below 2005 levels (which is already 10 to 15 per cent below the current federal target).
The province’s auditor general released a report in 2021 stating the Ford government’s policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were already falling short by 14.2 megatons.
Fast-forward three years and the situation is likely to get worse.
Plans to meet the province’s possible 1.7-per-cent annual increase in electricity demand include the addition of natural gas-powered turbines, refurbishing old nuclear reactors and developing small modular reactors (SMRs).
This presents a dual problem. First, burning natural gas produces CO2, so expanding capacity using new gas turbines will increase emissions. Second, nuclear power generation cannot successfully help meet 2030 targets
Ontario’s nuclear hopes out of step with reality
SMRs are a class of nuclear reactor, built in a factory and shipped to a site, designed to generate up to 300 megawatts (MW) of electrical power per unit. By comparison, larger conventional reactors in Ontario have a capacity of roughly 900 MW.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) states it is “leading the way in the advancement of SMR technology in Canada” and that SMRs are “the future of nuclear power generation.”
This position collides head-on with technological realities.
SMRs are a futuristic technology at best. The only operational SMRs anywhere in the world are in Northeast Russia and in Shidao Bay, China.
Both reactors faced construction delays, primarily due to cost overruns and poor economics., The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has yet to fully approve a single SMR licence.
SMRs cannot be built in time to help meet Ontario’s 2030 emission targets. Worse, by betting on them, OPG has committed to making Ontario’s electricity grid dirtier.
Nuclear power a costly option
In addition to being largely unproven, SMRs will not be cheap. While their absolute cost may be lower than conventional nuclear reactors, their lower electricity output means they become significantly more expensive per megawatt to operate.
Beyond the fact that every single new nuclear project in Ontario’s history has gone over budget, gas and nuclear energy now contribute the most to increasing energy bills for Ontario residents.
A 2018 report from the Canadian SMR roadmap steering committee, a group of provincial and territorial governments and power utilities, estimated the baseline cost of electricity from SMRs would be 16.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). Comparatively, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency renewable alternatives are less expensive:
- Onshore wind electricity costs consumers an average of 4.5 cents per kWh;
- Offshore wind costs an average of 10 cents/kWh;
- Solar PV farms cost an average of 6.6 cents/kWh;
- Hydropower costs an average of 5 cents/kWh.
In North America, the only SMR design certified by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission was cancelled due to “lack of interest” once rising costs deterred potential customers. Originally announced in 2015 at the equivalent of $4.1 billion Cdn, estimates rose to $5.6 billion (2018), then $8.4 billion (2020) and finally $12.7 billion (2023).
Time keeps on ticking
New nuclear projects are taking on average of 10 to 15 years to become operational. Ontario’s first SMR designated for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station is planned for 2028.
Meanwhile, the Ontario government says additional SMRs could come online between 2034 and 2036. In reality, nuclear projects typically exceed time estimates by 64 per cent and given a strong trend of delays for such projects globally, new SMRs are unlikely to come online before 2042, if ever.
So, in addition to the speculative viability of SMRs, likely delays even under the best of circumstances mean this technology is unable to help meet Ontario’s emissions reduction targets.
Radioactive waste another key factor
The “green” label often applied to nuclear energy should be viewed with scepticism. While no fossil fuel is burned to generate nuclear power, the industry produces radioactive waste and is not “renewable.”
In fact, there is evidence to suggest SMRs will produce a greater volume of radioactive waste per unit of electricity generated than existing large reactors.
Radioactive waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years and there are no demonstrated solutions to managing this risk. According to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is owned by Canada’s nuclear power companies, radioactive nuclear waste must be fully isolated from people and the environment for one million years or more.
Committing to new nuclear projects in Ontario as a climate solution is essentially trading one intergenerational threat for another.
The green path toward Ontario’s emissions targets
A report from the David Suzuki Foundation in 2022 found that “reliable, affordable, 100 per cent emissions-free electricity in Canada by 2035 is entirely possible.”
In 2020, the International Energy Agency declared wind and solar the “cheapest sources of new electricity in history.”
In 2018, Ontario cancelled 758 signed contracts for smaller renewable energy projects, many of them in Indigenous communities Only recently, the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has announced it seeks to procure 5,000 MW of new non-emitting (wind, solar, hydropower or bioenergy) energy.
Utility-scale solar costs plummeted by 90 per cent between 2009-21. Wind energy costs declined 72 per cent. This presents an important opportunity given Ontario’s more than 1,500 kilometres of Great Lakes shoreline and abundant sunshine.
The already low cost of hydropower in Ontario through existing infrastructure, combined with the potential for integration with Hydro-Québec, can help Ontario convert its “intermittent wind and solar energy into a firm 24/7 source of baseload electricity,” according to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance.
Likewise, offshore wind-generating potential in Atlantic Canada far exceeds energy needs in the region and could be exported to Ontario via existing mainstream high-voltage direct-current transmission lines.
By cancelling SMR development and focusing on cost-efficient wind, solar and hydro expansion, as well as increased interprovincial transmission, Ontario can reclaim leadership when it comes to green energy development now and for future generations.
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