On Oct. 17, 2022, a local state of emergency was declared on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. Months of drought had reduced the region’s water reserves to dangerously low levels leaving experts worried that without rain, the area only had a guaranteed water supply to last until early November. And it’s not just the residents of Sechelt that need to be worried — BC Hydro is concerned about the welfare of fish stocks as reservoirs dry up. The situation was a far cry from November 2021, when torrential rains flooded towns, washed away roads, and threatened to revert the Fraser Valley back into a lake. These wild swings in the typical weather patterns are certainly not isolated to British Columbia. The western United States is in the midst of a “megadrought,” the worst in 1200 years (though now California is flooding); tropical storms keep gaining intensity, doling out kaiju-level devastation to coastal cities; and wildfires are burning through forests from the Russian Taiga to the Australian Coast. Al Gore’s probably feeling pretty smug right about now.
“Climate change is very real, and it’s coming at us fast,” says Brian Smith, CEO of Persephone Brewing Company in a conversation with CBC news. “My thoughts are, alright, let’s get to work to solve this.” Smith is one of many B.C. residents who are feeling the effects of the wildly shifting weather trends. While I appreciate his gumption, I worry that the very same hurdles that impeded the public in recognizing the threat of climate change will dampen our ability to combat it. Unlike community-sized issues, climate change is global in scale, difficult to measure, and profoundly interconnected with virtually all of human activity. It’s so big, that for the last thirty years, we’ve largely focused on selling recycling and energy-saving measures to the populace at the expense of making any radical changes to our way of life.
It’s not that we didn’t know that climate change was going to be a problem, but there was a hubris about our ability to just work through it. In an article for The New York Times entitled, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, Nathaniel Rich writes, “Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?” Indeed, humanity has matured out of many of its growing pains in the past, and there was reason to believe that it would do so again. The post-war West had its eyes set firmly on the world of tomorrow, and the future — powered by capitalism, ingenuity, and the atom — looked bright.
A generational shift?
By the end of the 1970s, optimism had turned pessimistic. Gas prices soared, stagflation crippled economies, and the people ousted their progressive leaders en masse. Disillusioned with tomorrow, citizens wanted their governments to focus on the needs of the day. Then, on March 28, 1979, unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. It came less than two weeks after the release of The China Syndrome, a Hollywood disaster thriller depicting the narrow avoidance of a nuclear catastrophe. If the convergence of these events moved nuclear expansion to the back-burner, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster would scuttle those plans indefinitely. Dozens of projected reactors were abandoned, and the world doubled down on more traditional means of generating power. Dreams of a nuclear future had come to a halt.
In recent years, nuclear power has come back into the public conversation. The effects of a rapidly changing climate has many serious people concerned that without a revitalization of nuclear power, we’re fighting with one of our hands tied firmly behind our back. While we have collectively made a great deal of progress in funding, developing, and implementing renewable energy production, we are still losing ground in our fight to reduce our carbon emissions.
Much of our day-to-day lives still run on fossil fuels. We use them to power our vehicles, heat our homes, and mine our bitcoin. The quicker we can electrify our technology the better — but where you charge your Tesla matters. Selling your coupe for an electric truck isn’t helping the planet if that plug is connected to a coal-fired power plant. That might not be an issue in B.C., a province that gets 87 per cent of its energy from hydroelectric power, but it’s very much an issue in Alberta where fossil fuels account for 90 per cent of the province’s electricity.
Resources are not equally distributed from country to country or province to province. That applies to timber and oil, but also to waterways and sunlight. There are simply some areas that, despite the advances in renewable technology, will never be conducive to certain forms of power generation… at least not reliably. In order to offset the predictable interruptions brought on by seasonal changes or the sun going night-night, we need the capacity to store massive amounts of electricity. It’s far from an ideal solution, in part because we’re nowhere near able to do it yet.
And therein lies the rub. Renewable energy is the future, but we need to attend to today. When the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow, the cheapest and most readily available option is to burn stuff. Fossil fuels make up 66 per cent of the global total energy demand — and that demand is increasing. The need for resources only expands as the world continues to develop and as people’s quality of life increases. The construction and consumption that comes with economic development needs to be fueled, and renewable energy is not yet able to meet that demand. It will be a long while before it is, and it’s this stark reality that has rekindled the conversation of a nuclear renaissance.
How we think about risk
Nuclear energy is not without its problems, but they’re often not the issues you’d first suspect. For starters, nuclear energy is relatively safe, despite the fear surrounding it. Studies vary, but deaths attributed to nuclear power are much more analogous to renewables than to fossil fuels. Per terawatt-hour, coal is roughly 351 times more fatal than nuclear. It’s not even close. The estimated collective death-toll of fossil fuel-related air pollution is approximately 100 million people over the past 50 years. One study estimates that nuclear energy has actually “prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths,” between 1971 and 2009, by displacing fossil fuels from the energy sector. Burning hydrocarbons poisons our bodies and heats our planet, but the effects are so gradual that we don’t feel the danger.
By comparison, when nuclear goes wrong, everybody knows about it. Accidents at Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, for all their press, resulted in a relatively low loss of life. Deaths directly attributed to Chernobyl’s meltdown have totalled 31, a remarkably low sum given the Soviet technology and deficient government response. In contrast, the Fukushima disaster resulted in the loss of 573 lives; not from radiation, but rather from the stress and chaos of the evacuation. These accidents — the two most famous nuclear disasters in history, resulted in a similar death toll to what British Columbia suffered from its heat-wave just this past summer.
When it comes to fatalities as a result of power plant accidents, the clear outlier is actually hydroelectric. Hydro accidents and dam failures have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the latter half of the 20th century. The most colossal failure is the Banqiao Dam in China, which succumbed to the combined pressures of Hurricane Nina and Soviet engineering in 1975, resulting in catastrophic flooding on a massive scale, and an estimated 80,000-240,000 deaths. Hydro disasters, however, aren’t just a problem for poor, developing nations, as China was in the 1950s when Banqiao was constructed.
When the Vajont Dam was built in Northern Italy in the late 1950s, engineers failed to recognize the geologic danger casting a literal shadow over the project. As the reservoir filled, it eroded the porous mountainside of Monte Toc. On Oct. 9, 1963, the entire slope gave way, careened into the valley, and filled the basin with earth. Picture a fully-grown man doing a cannonball into a bathtub, and you’ll get a sense of what happened next. The speed and severity of the collapse displaced the lake, sending a megatsunami almost 250 meters up and over the dam, and flooding the unsuspecting villages in the countryside below.
There are other issues that come with Hydro besides hastily building dams where they geologically shouldn’t go. Dams can be used to control rivers that transverse international borders, generating geopolitical tensions in addition to electricity. They can also cause regional hostilities. When Hydro-Quebec’s Phase II proposal of its James Bay Project threatened to flood a large swath of traditional Cree territory and displace the Eeyou First Nations in the late-‘80s and early-‘90s, it embroiled the Quebec government in international protests until the project lost support.
None of this is meant to demonize Hydroelectric energy — I’m personally a big fan. It’s only meant to demonstrate that how these projects are constructed and managed really matters. We’re pretty trusting of dams here in B.C. because they provide cheap, clean, and reliable energy. Similarly, the majority of Ontarians support nuclear energy as a safe, clean alternative to fossil fuels. A 2012 survey even found that despite the Fukushima accident the year prior, “a majority from all three main provincial political parties in Ontario support[ed] nuclear power generation.” Ontario’s power supply is composed of nearly 60 per cent nuclear energy, and that relationship results in a drastically different view of the technology compared to the rest of Canada, where support is generally lower.
The trouble with going nuclear
Nuclear energy, however, does have a couple of serious barriers to hurdle — and they’re significant ones. The first and most obviously negative byproduct of employing nuclear power generation is radioactive waste. If the term “radioactive waste” evokes images of drums of neon green goo, you’d be forgiven; but this is a cartoonish depiction divorced from reality. Radioactive waste comes in a variety of forms, from low-level waste like personal protective equipment; to spent fuel rods, which constitutes high-level waste and is the primary concern for long-term radioactivity and storage.
As a means of power generation, the concept is relatively straightforward. It’s essentially a steam engine, but rather than heating water by burning fossil fuels like coal or gas, it’s powered by nuclear fission. As uranium decays, its atoms split and release energy that generates heat. By submerging uranium rods in water, the process heats the surrounding liquid and creates steam. Pressure in the system builds, and that hot gas turns a turbine, which is connected to a generator. Of course, it’s infinitely more complicated than that, but the takeaway is that you can achieve on-demand energy without stoking a furnace. In some respects, the nuclear submarine is the natural evolution of the steamboat.
One downside to using nuclear fission as an energy source is that as the uranium rods decay and become less efficient at generating heat, they grow increasingly hazardous. These spent fuel rods remain highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years, which begs the question: what the hell do we do with them now? In the face of that uncertainty, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) was established in 2002, and tasked with figuring out the answer.
According to Russell Baker, Manager, Public and Media Relations for NWMO, “Canada’s plan for the safe, long-term management of used nuclear fuel is known as Adaptive Phased Management (APM).” APM calls for the containment and isolation of spent reactor fuel buried deep inside geologically stable rock, a safe system of transportation of spent fuel, and international cooperation and sharing of knowledge. It also requires numerous site evaluations and the development of partnerships with potential host communities who have expressed interest in participating — a process that began in 2010. In that time, 22 interested municipalities and indigenous communities have been whittled down to a shortlist of two. According to Baker, NWMO plans to make a final selection in 2024, with construction of “one of the largest environmental infrastructure projects in this country’s history,” slated for 2040.
I’m filing this under the heading “better late than never.” Government projects — especially ones of this magnitude and long-term importance — are known to move at a glacial pace, but this timeline seems pokey even by these charitable standards. For perspective, the world’s first permanent nuclear waste disposal site is set to become operational in Finland this year. Named Onkalo, which is Finnish for “cavity” or “pit,” the site was greenlit back in 2000 and took roughly 23 years to complete. Canada, by comparison, seems to be taking a much more leisurely approach.
Of course, that’s not an argument to run fast and break things. It’s certainly understandable that site selection should take care to ensure that both the geology and the people of the area are amenable to the arrangement. In contrast to the Canadian approach, Yucca Mountain — the American location selected for permanent waste disposal — has been mired in litigation and political opposition for decades. To be clear, we’re still producing high-level radioactive waste with no permanent storage in which to deposit it. I’m glad that care and attention is being paid, but it’s hard to get behind increasing our reliance on nuclear energy when we’re storing the plutonium on-site like it’s the office Christmas decorations.
Assuming we can figure out how to properly store radioactive waste until the end of time, there’s another roadblock to navigate — the cost. Nuclear reactors are monstrously expensive to build. In 2017, a South Carolina twin-reactor nuclear generator named V.C. Summer was scrapped after repeated budget overruns and blown-up timetables. Spending 9 billion dollars of taxpayer funds to essentially dig a big hole and then fill it back in was a tough pill to swallow for the state. In the West, we stopped building reactors decades ago. Engineers retire, technology moves on, and before you know it, knowledge is lost. The V.C. Summer debacle demonstrated that a nuclear renaissance would not come without significant growing pains. The project was plagued by regulatory disagreements, shoddy work, poor planning, and a general lack of experience — all things you can’t entertain when “nuclear” is in the title. Safety is paramount, and it’s a reasonable up-front cost to avoid paying a much greater price in the future.
One state over, in Georgia, America’s first new reactors in 30 years are finally coming on line. Plant Vogtle’s units three and four, which were approved back in 2009 with a budget of 14 billion, are nearing completion — years behind schedule and almost $16 billion over the initial estimate. If 30 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money for a power plant, that’s because it is… but I suppose it’s better than spending a third of that for no power and the lament of a sad trombone. Wah wah wah wahhhh.
Canada’s nuclear aspirations
Canada’s planned expansion of its nuclear energy sector is charting a different path. Rather than building massive new reactors capable of powering entire cities, the federal government is setting its sights on leading the way in new tech — the Small Modular Reactor, or SMR. SMRs aren’t actually all that new, (they have been powering many naval vessels for decades), but the idea that they can be mass-produced to provide on-demand power to numerous land-based applications is very much an emerging concept. According to Canada’s SMR Roadmap, “there are over 150 proposed designs for SMRs worldwide,” reflecting “both the excitement around their potential, and also the wide spectrum of possible nuclear reactor technologies.” It is, admittedly, an exciting idea with a range of potential applications.
The small size and self-contained nature of the SMR design means these portable reactors can be deployed in off-grid areas that would otherwise be heavily reliant on fossil fuels. These units could be trucked to remote communities and industries to power everything from daily life, to water purification and desalination, to resource extraction. Their diminutive size means they lack the power of their big brothers, so to offset this they can be networked for larger applications. Some SMR designs carry enough fuel to run for approximately twenty years, at which point, they can be swapped out like a battery. Some designs even run on spent reactor fuel that has been recycled.
Leading the way in SMR development could be a potential boon to Canada’s economy. There is a clear market within Canada for emission-free energy, especially in isolated areas, but the government estimates that “globally, the SMR market is much bigger, with a conservative estimated value of $150 billion between 2025 and 2040.” A developing world with an ever-rising standard of living is a world increasingly thirsty for energy, so just how committed is Canada to leading the charge on large-scale SMR development? I was fortunate enough to discuss Canada’s commitment to its SMR Roadmap with Keean Nembhard, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Natural Resources.
“Canada is equipped with a unique set of characteristics that provide us with a competitive advantage in the developing SMR market,” said Nembhard, “including a supportive regulator; viable sites for demonstration; and an active industry and supply chain. [In late October], Minister Wilkinson gave a statement when the Canada Infrastructure Bank committed $970 million towards Canada’s first Small Modular Reactor.” The venture also has a wide base of support. According to Nembhard, “the SMR Action Plan has continued to add new partners – presently up to 119 – and they have committed to over 500 concrete actions.”
SMRs are not, however, a slam-dunk. If large-scale nuclear reactors are already prohibitively expensive per terawatt-hour, SMRs are impaired to an even greater degree. Given the compact nature of the technology, the safeguards required, and the rigorous testing these units will undergo, the cost per energy unit is astronomical compared to fossil fuels and renewables. SMRs might be well-suited to powering Supercarriers, but will they ever be cost-effective enough to pursue en masse? M. V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia doesn’t seem to think so.
“I think there is good reason to believe that they will never be cost effective,” said Dr. Ramana in response to my query. “Historically, in the United States and France, the countries with the highest number of nuclear plants, costs went up, not down, with experience.” Even if SMRs could be manufactured at a scale that would bring their relative cost in-line with large reactors, according to Dr. Ramana, “that would not be sufficient to make SMRs economically competitive, because their electricity production cost would still be far higher than solar and wind energy.”
The widespread distribution of SMRs also has another potential downfall: nuclear proliferation. Large reactors are massive operations with tight security, but the potential downsizing of reactors could lead to a dispersal of nuclear material under comparatively lower guardianship and surveillance. This means that even greater measures would need to be taken to ensure the security of these units which only adds to the cost and complexity of the project.
It’s also important to consider what problem we’re really trying to solve. If SMRs are aimed at powering isolated communities, Dr. Ramana poses the question, “is it justified to convert these small remote communities, that contribute a fraction of the carbon emissions of well-to-do urban areas in the country, into guinea pigs for new, untested, and hazardous technologies?” I don’t have the answer.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t
In 2011, Germany began rapidly scaling back its nuclear footprint, closing eight reactors that year, with plans for a complete decommissioning by 2022. Germany used to get a quarter of its energy from nuclear power, but it now accounts for only 6 per cent. Initially, the German government had put its chips on wind-power, but shifted to a greater reliance on inexpensive Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) imported from Russia. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it put Germany in a difficult situation. European reliance on cheap Russian gas had given Putin leverage. In order to extract itself from under the Kremlin’s thumb and keep the lights on, Germany has turned back to the dirtiest option available… coal.
The question of nuclear energy’s role in fighting climate change will not be answered here, but it’s one we need to keep asking. Nuclear power is not a boogeyman — it is a technology filled with risk and reward; advantages and drawbacks. When it comes to the capacity to build, regulate, and safely operate nuclear reactors, as well as to effectively dispose of waste, Canada is perhaps better suited to this energy supply than any other country. However, nuclear power will always be the expensive option, and investment in nuclear infrastructure can divert funds away from renewable energy sources. That’s a big consideration.
Yet another factor is how we measure cost. The price tag on a reactor may be steep, but it’s known. The generational costs of a changing climate are much harder to calculate. How do you total up the expense of desertification, rising sea levels, deforestation, water and food insecurity, rapid extinction, and mass migration? I don’t know how long we’ll need nuclear energy… but it’s pretty clear we need it right now. Canada, like other developed nations, has made lofty commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of grave consequences should we fail to meet the moment. We should meet it with force. No options are off the table. Our microbreweries (along with everyone else), are counting on us.
Long ago, when DeLoreans roamed the earth, Brad was born. In accordance with the times, he was raised in the wild every afternoon and weekend until dusk, never becoming so feral that he neglected to rewind his VHS rentals. His historical focus has assured him that civilization peaked with The Simpsons in the mid 90s. When not disappointing his parents, Brad spends his time with his dogs, regretting he didn’t learn typing in high school.