Duane Bratt, MRU professor and author of Canada, the Provinces and the Global Nuclear Revival (MQUP), says yes.
The last few years have seen active discussion of introducing nuclear energy in Alberta due to the emergence of small modular reactors. SMRs have been used in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers since the 1950s. What’s new is that they are now being commercialized for civilian electricity generation. The “small” part of SMRs comes from their generating between 50 MW and 300 MW (compared to over 1,000 MW in traditional reactors). “Modular” refers to their standardized construction and their being shipped to sites by rail and truck. This makes SMRs substantially cheaper than earlier nuclear reactors, which were each one of a kind. SMRs also include new features that make them safer.
In fall 2018 Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) released its SMR roadmap; this was followed by its SMR action plan in fall 2020. Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick signed memorandums of understanding (MOU) on SMRs in December 2019. Alberta joined that MOU in August 2020. The original three provinces completed a feasibility study for SMRs in March 2021, and in March 2022, now joined by Alberta, released a strategic plan for their deployment.
The main motivation for Alberta’s interest in SMRs is to lower the province’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are the highest in Canada. In particular, the oil sands (identified in the roadmap as one of three locations for SMRs) would see its emissions significantly reduced through the use of nuclear energy instead of natural gas to produce bitumen. Although the Kenney government is an outspoken opponent of the federal consumer carbon tax, it continues to levy a provincial carbon tax on large-scale emitters as a way of incentivizing lower GHG emissions from electricity producers and oil and gas companies. By levying a price on carbon, the UCP government is also improving the business case for nuclear energy (very low emitting) vs. natural gas (high CO2 emissions).
This isn’t a top-down approach. If anything, the Kenney government in its SMR discussions is simply following the private sector’s lead. Utilities, oil and gas companies (Suncor, Imperial Oil, Conoco Phillips) and industry associations (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance) all actively participated in the SMR roadmap/action plan process. A consortium of companies called “Oil Sands: Pathway to Net Zero” has identified SMRs as a major way for them to reduce GHG emissions.
Small-scale nuclear can also be used as part of Alberta’s coal phaseout. Alberta used to be dependent on coal electricity, but starting with the Notley government and continuing today, coal is being replaced largely by natural gas (with a smaller contribution from wind, solar and biomass). But since natural gas produces half the GHG emissions of coal, and nuclear’s emissions are roughly equivalent to renewables, replacing coal with nuclear would be better for Alberta’s environment.
Theresa McClenaghan, the executive director and counsel at the Canadian Environmental Law Association, says no.
Canada’s nuclear industry has generated hype of late, especially around small modular reactors. Almost $100-million has been given by the federal government to private companies, and agreements are in place to support SMRs in New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. But new nuclear energy is unnecessary, introduces serious risks and will delay genuine climate action.
SMRs are a wasteful expenditure and detract from serious climate action. Nuclear power isn’t necessary to reach Canada’s net-zero carbon emission goals. The surest and cheapest way of lowering emissions is through expanding renewable energy generation and improving energy efficiency. There is room for renewables to provide a much higher percentage of our energy. Conservation and demand-management have barely been tapped. In fact, when conservation potential has become evident, it’s been scaled back in some jurisdictions so as not to reduce demand too much! The costs of both approaches—renewable energy and conservation—are falling yearly, and technology around energy storage is improving rapidly. Alberta in particular has huge potential for additional wind and solar, whose commercial viability has already been demonstrated by existing projects in the province. In contrast, the cost of nuclear power greatly exceeds current costs of renewable energy sources, including wind, solar and geothermal.
Worse, new nuclear SMR technology won’t be ready in time to meet the emission goals laid out by climate scientists. The proposed technologies haven’t been built anywhere; any new nuclear SMR projects will take a decade or more to even get to a demonstration scale, let alone commercial viability.
The second reason to avoid new nuclear power is that it would introduce new risks, especially the potential for catastrophic accidents, with releases of radioactive substances presenting dangers to people and the natural environment. Despite industry propaganda, even SMRs can undergo accidents. Transporting nuclear material adds another risk, not only from damage to the vehicles or containers but from increased risk of diversion of nuclear materials to terrorism by non-state actors. This makes it difficult for Canada to ensure we meet our international non-proliferation commitments. Proliferation risk is especially concerning with SMR technologies because they would use enriched uranium, rather than the natural uranium used in Canadian nuclear plants today, or plutonium fuel from reprocessed nuclear fuel waste. Diversion risks would occur across the whole fuel chain, from the point of reprocessing through to fuel fabrication, transportation and use.
And not least, the proposed SMR projects would also result in a greater range of nuclear fuel wastes, some even more hazardous than the current Canadian nuclear fuel wastes, which are already incredibly toxic, with the resulting hazard lasting hundreds of thousands of years.
Duane Bratt responds to Theresa McClenaghan.
Theresa McClenaghan offers a critique of SMRs, although some of it is just a critique of traditional nuclear energy. I’ll respond to each point in turn.
McClenaghan is correct that wind and solar costs are coming down. However, she then compares those costs to traditional nuclear. One of the benefits of SMRs is their modular design, which includes standardization of design and economies of scale. This drops the costs of SMRs significantly.
Renewables have their place. I’m a supporter of energy pluralism (except for coal). Renewables, however, cannot produce the steam required for use in the oil sands. The key target for SMRs in Alberta is the oil sands. Lowering emissions intensity is in everybody’s best interests. This is why the Alberta government and the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero are so bullish on SMRs for the oil sands.
McClenaghan maintains that SMRs “won’t be ready in time.” Ironically, this same scaling up issue is often thrown at renewables by the fossil fuel industry. SMRs have been operated by militaries for decades. From a commercial perspective, Russia has operated an SMR since 2020 and China will have one by 2026. In Canada, a demonstration SMR will be constructed at Chalk River by 2026, Ontario Power Generation will have a 300 MW SMR at its Darlington site by 2028, and another one in New Brunswick by 2029.
Terrorism is another argument used against the nuclear sector. Terrorists acquiring a nuclear bomb is a staple of novels, TV and movies. But not in reality. This is because it’s very difficult to do, due to security and technological complications. Even if terrorists successfully bypassed security and acquired enriched fuel from an SMR (because of its small size, a very low amount), they would still need the technology to enrich it from 20 per cent (reactor grade) to 90 per cent (weapons grade). As Iran is demonstrating, even countries with a vast scientific establishment and resources have great difficulty in developing weapons-grade enrichment.
High-profile nuclear accidents took place at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). While these generated massive media attention and public fear, nobody died at Three Mile Island or Fukushima. Chernobyl caused 31 deaths and, longer-term, several thousand thyroid cancer cases. This is much lower than major oil or coal mine disasters. In fact, when you compare death rates from accidents and air pollution, nuclear (0.07/per terawatt hour) is similar in safety to solar (0.02) and wind (0.04). All of these sources are well below coal (24.6), oil (18.4) and natural gas (2.8).
We need an all-in approach: wind, solar and geothermal, but also small modular nuclear reactors.
Waste is the Achilles heel of the nuclear sector. But several points can be made here. First, nuclear waste is much smaller in volume than waste from fossil fuels. Second, much of what is called waste is spent fuel, which has 96 per cent reusable uranium. Advances in technology could greatly reduce nuclear waste by recycling used uranium back through a reactor. Third, all energy sources (even renewables) generate waste. For example, cadmium, a major ingredient of solar panels, is incredibly toxic. Fourth, nuclear waste has been safely stored at reactor sites in Canada for decades. Finally, it can be permanently stored for thousands of years with a deep geological repository (DGR), a “multiple-barrier system,” with nuclear fuel bundles placed in copper-coated canisters and encased in bentonite clay boxes 500 m underground.
Finland is building a DGR and Canada is going through an extensive site selection process led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. This process started with 22 interested communities and is now down to two: Ignace and South Bruce, both in Ontario. A DGR can safely store waste from natural uranium reactors (traditional CANDUs) and enriched uranium (Canada’s research reactors and SMRs) alike.
As I say, I support the expansion of renewables. But McClenaghan ignores two of renewables’ weaknesses. The first is capacity factor—the ratio of actual electricity divided by the maximum possible electricity. Nuclear’s capacity is over 90 per cent, while wind is 35 per cent and solar is 25 per cent. Nuclear produces electricity 24/7; wind and solar are intermittent. Geothermal’s capacity factor is higher, at 75 per cent, but currently no geothermal is being produced in Alberta. The second is footprint. Wind farms require 360 times more land and solar plants 75 times more land than an equivalent nuclear plant.
Likewise, energy conservation is desirable. Virtually all experts, however, believe that electricity demand is expected to go up significantly through, for example, the increased use of electric vehicles. Converting to electric vehicles reduces/conserves oil, but not electricity.
Reducing Alberta’s emissions will require an all-in approach. This means expanding wind, solar and geothermal, but it also means introducing SMRs.
Theresa McClenaghan responds to Duane Bratt.
Duane Bratt’s main argument is that it is better to replace coal with nuclear than with natural gas. This is simply a false choice. Many choices other than nuclear or natural gas exist if one wants to replace coal. While the exact mixture will vary from place to place, many energy modellers have shown how adding renewables—mainly but not exclusively solar, wind and hydropower—reducing demand for energy, and increasing our capacity to store small amounts of energy will enable us to reliably meet the fluctuating demand for energy.
Managing variable power generation is an old and solved problem: grid managers do it all the time. Many of these methods provide greater resiliency to an electricity system, with more dispersed sources of generation and less reliance on a single, centralized system. For example, decentralized systems are less prone to impacts that can hit a widespread grid at the same time, such as the eastern North America blackout in 2013. Similarly, a more dispersed set of power sources puts society at less risk from unexpected developments that can shutdown a whole category of complex technology, such as occurred in Japan following the Fukushima accident.
SMRs are new versions of old reactors that have not been commercialized due to unresolved technical problems. (Yes, nuclear reactors are used by the military for submarine propulsion, but these operate with military-grade fuel and are designed for a different set of objectives; they have very little to do with the electrical-power-generating SMRs currently proposed by the nuclear industry.) The SMR that is the most developed in the US, for example, NuScale, has been mired in the design phase for more than 15 years.
The nuclear industry proponents of SMRs have been advocating, and securing, an erosion of public oversight in the development of nuclear power in Canada. A notable example is the SMR roadmap that Bratt mentions. That “roadmap” was a document produced by the Canadian Nuclear Association, and it did not consider social and environmental implications from a non-industry perspective. Nor was there any public engagement on the subsequent action plans and memoranda of understanding between the industry and governments.
Social and economic costs, including accident risk and fuel wastes, have had inadequate public debate.
SMRs will be expensive. Proponents have studiously avoided talking about the costs to build their projects or made unrealistic claims about the costs of their theoretical reactor designs. Even the SMR roadmap—produced by nuclear advocates—projects the electricity will cost $163/MWh; in comparison, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated in 2021 that a utility scale photovoltaic plus storage system that can provide backup for four hours would cost US$77/MWh, and this cost is fast declining. Without massive subsidies, SMRs are simply unfeasible, because private-sector investment is only a minuscule fraction of the necessary capital to build these expensive technologies.
This is, of course, not new: traditional nuclear power in Canada has been developed with unparalleled amounts of public money and unique protections from accident liability, whereby suppliers to nuclear operations are completely protected from any liability, and the operators are protected from lawsuits beyond low limits of coverage. No other sources of energy have these unique liability provisions, and the nuclear industry made it clear to the Canadian government in the 1950s that it wouldn’t develop the industry without this government protection.
It gives one pause to consider that Alberta is considering SMRs to enable continued production of bitumen. The bulk of the GHG emissions associated with the use of oil and gas is created when a fuel is burned. Trying to lower the emissions produced during the extraction of these fuels, while continuing to produce and export bitumen, will make only a minuscule difference. Especially when placed against the requirement that the world must halve emissions by 2030.
The need for fast emission reductions is another strike against SMRs. The earliest an SMR could be up and running, even under optimistic assumptions, is the mid-2030s. The proposals and demonstration projects currently proceeding with public funding are years away from results. They all have considerable cost risks and none have been licensed anywhere.
As a result of recent changes to environmental impact legislation, some of Canada’s proposed SMRs are exempt from the federal impact assessment process, meaning that social and economic costs, including the pros and cons of accident risks, generation of new types of fuel waste and risks to nuclear weapons materials proliferation will not be considered in a public review. These issues have had inadequate public debate, and there is no justification for imposing these risks on Albertans. Small modular reactors should not be Alberta’s answer to climate change.
