The following article was originally published in the weekly newspaper Inside Stratford/Perth (otherwise known as the springboard to Lexington, or at at least Bagehot), September 15, 2006, under the feeble headline (mine) 'Competition Not A Nuclear Disaster'.
Ontario needs more energy, and all indications are that the province will turn to new nuclear plants to increase base-load capacity. The two primary drivers for this policy shift—all but unthinkable just ten years ago—are a sudden inclination to take global warming and greenhouse gas emissions seriously, and, in the face of relentless natural gas price hikes, a recognition of the strategic advantage of an energy source which is relatively insensitive to the price of its fuel.
The debate over the merits of nuclear power has become hackneyed and entrenched, and, given the position of the Ontario government, irrelevant. More urgent is the need to overcome the myopic parochialism that insists we must do as we have always done, and buy our reactors from that perennially beleaguered crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada, Limited (AECL).
Before exploding any myths, a word on the competition. Announced contenders for proposed nuclear plants are AECL, Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC, and Areva NP. Westinghouse is based in Pennsylvania, and has recently been sold by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) to Toshiba. The Areva Group is a French state-owned multinational which does business at every level of the nuclear industry, from mining to decommissioning. Further, an oft-quoted statement from General Electric Canada's vice-president for nuclear products points to GE's interest in entering the Ontario market, should Westinghouse or Areva break the AECL monopoly.
The first argument one generally hears has to do with jobs. A widely-cited figure, found in an Ernst & Young report, puts the number of Canadian workers employed in support of AECL's CANDU reactors here and abroad at 30,000. Anti-nuclear advocates, notably the Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout, insist this is an exaggeration, and publish estimates of around 18,000 workers. The number of employees at AECL itself has been dropping steadily since a peak of 7,871 in 1981 to 3,221 in 2005. That trend, AECL hopes, is set to change; but, we are told, if AECL can't win contracts for new reactors in Ontario, many of those 21,000 to 33,000 jobs will vanish.
This is nonsense. Canada is the world's largest exporter of refined uranium. The peculiarities of the uranium supply business mean that our mines and refineries already do business not only with Westinghouse, Areva, and GE, but with individual plants and utilities all over the world. The existing fleet of CANDU reactors will continue to need natural fuel rods—not to mention the endless cycle of expensive repairs and maintenance we've come to expect. And the same Canadian engineers AECL has cut and claims it will be in a position to hire if it builds more CANDU 6 and the new ACR-series plants are capable of working for someone else. There is no reason the buyers—OPG and Bruce Power—cannot insist on staffing quotas (localization) during contract negotiations, as China and others routinely do.
When it becomes clear that neither Canada's ancillary nuclear industries nor Canadian engineers qualified for direct employment in nuclear power plants depend exclusively on AECL, the argument turns to profits. Why should we allow the French government to get all the profits from building a plant here? Or Americans? Or Japanese? (That Westinghouse's profits ultimately devolve upon Toshiba's shareholders and that nothing prevents Canadians from buying Toshiba stock is usually ignored.)
The truth is that, today, there are no profits in building nuclear plants in Canada. An exhaustive analysis conducted by Energy Probe and published in January of this year concluded that total direct subsidies to AECL since 1952 amount to $20.9 billion in today's dollars. Decade after decade, Canadian households and profitable businesses have paid to pump the water out of a sinking ship, and if another company can build a power plant here without wasting vast sums of taxpayers' money, it is entitled to the profits.
AECL is not shy about touting foreign trade when it suits its interests: it is apparently bad in principle for Canadians to buy French or American reactors, but a positive boon when the Chinese government sends its money here. One wonders if the Chinese see it the same way; but one doesn't wonder long. Their level of enthusiasm with the two CANDU 6 reactors comprising Qinshan phase 3—a project financed in part by a $1.5 billion low-interest loan from the Canadian government and delivered, as AECL crows, "ahead of time and on budget"—can be gauged by their announcement that they won't be buying any more.
Backers of new CANDU 6 plants like to point out that the design is already licensed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the proposed Areva and Westinghouse reactors are not. This is because CANDU 6 is fast becoming an antiquated model. AECL wants to use CANDU 6 as a wedge in Ontario to help it secure contracts for its Advanced Candu Reactor (ACR), a design which has not been licensed. It remains unclear whether or why Ontario wants the mammoth, outdated CANDU 6 units, particularly in light of the unanticipated shutdowns and costly repairs that have plagued the heavy-water reactors at Bruce and Pickering; and while any third-generation plants would be subject to first-time licensing, the proposed Areva model is already under construction in Finland and the Westinghouse design has been approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The last bastion for AECL diehards—apart from the irrelevant and mistaken idea that the company generates substantial revenues (not to mention a healthy dividend of old-fashioned Canadian moral high ground) supplying the world with medical isotopes (it doesn't; the division in question was renamed Nordion International Inc. in 1988 and sold to MDS Health Group Ltd. in 1991, which sale was followed by years of expensive litigation and a settlement which cost Canada and AECL over $17 million outright and an interest-free loan of $100 million)—is generally the slogan "energy self-sufficiency".
This usually boils down to the issue of fuel. A primary advantage of the CANDU heavy-water designs is that they consume natural fuel, meaning that the expense of enrichment can be forgone. This has enabled Canada to develop its own, self-sufficient nuclear fuel cycle. The disadvantages of natural fuel are its very low burn-up (on the order of one-sixth the electricity generated per tonne of uranium compared with the more common light-water reactors) and the physical size of the reactors. CANDU reactors are very large and very expensive, and they produce large volumes of spent fuel. Recognizing that this is a liability in the export market, AECL intends to abandon the natural fuel it insists is so important for Canada's energy security in the ACR, which runs on slightly-enriched uranium; so even if Ontario doesn't buy French or American reactors, we will still face the necessity of importing fuel or developing a domestic enrichment program.
All this is not to say Ontario should not buy Canadian-designed and built reactors. If AECL can present a genuinely competitive bid, one that delivers real value to the province's taxpayers without hiding its expenses behind wasteful subsidies, it should by all means be considered. But we deserve better than flag-waving. The dismal maintenance record of nuclear power in Ontario and his company's failure to recoup abroad the expense of using Canada as a test bed should have given AECL president Robert van Adel pause before he recently repeated the old slogan, "Canada is CANDU country"; if he wants to keep it that way, he should have to come up with the goods.