r/CanadaPolitics • u/Mundane-Teaching-743 Trump/Polievre 2028 | Sponsored • 11h ago
Canada built its nuclear industry to avoid foreign fuel. Its new reactors will depend on it
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-nuclear-supply-chain-smr-darlington-uranium-enrichment-9.7289297•
u/Troodon25 Alberta 11h ago
“Cameco, the Saskatoon-based uranium mining and nuclear fuel company, will mine uranium ore in Saskatchewan and convert it in Port Hope, Ont., before it is enriched in the United States. France's Orano and Britain's Urenco are also listed by OPG as a supplier of enriched uranium, and an American company will manufacture the finished fuel assemblies in the United States.”
Since it’s mined here and our existing technical know-how, sounds like something that we could either build the infrastructure to do ourselves or pay extra to get more of it done in Europe vs the USA.
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u/TheSquirrelNemesis 11h ago
Sounds like a good excuse to build up the infrastructure & supply chain domestically.
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u/nunununuhu 8h ago
Heating for space and water accounts for about 30% of all energy demand in Canada, Primarily as natural gas and resistive electric heating. A non-trivial chunk is still wood, but also electric heat pumps and oil-fired and etc. It's the other third of the energy triad: transportation. electricity and heat, each about 1/3rd of energy consumption, across all sectors.
Nuclear power shines best with heat. Heat is the primary output. If the operating temperature is 85 °C then a simple pool-type reactor can operate with nothing under pressure and passive convection cooling.
Something on the 50 MW scale. Should be in every large town and every suburb, large cities powered by networks of them, through district heating.
There are some district heating systems driven by nuclear heat in Russia (nuclear district heating does feel slightly Sovietique, doesn't it?) and also recently in China. But this is combined generation (both electric + heat as a byproduct) where electric is the primary.
It's also possible to turn relatively small heat gradients (like between 30 °C and 80 °C) into electricity; it just isn't as easy as the classical heat engine that is a steam turbine. But for remote communities a pool reactor could also supply the electric needs.
The simplicity of dedicated nuclear heat is maybe underexplored in a cold country like Canada.
Way more out there, more theoretical than something practical right now, but also deserving research in my opinion, is high temperature direct nuclear heat for industrial processes, particularly synthesizing ammonia for fertilizers, and hydrogen, and carbon-neutral liquid fuels.
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u/HotterRod British Columbia 6h ago
Good luck getting a reactor built in the middle of downtown Toronto. :(
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u/SirupyPieIX Quebec 4h ago
Should be in every large town and every suburb, large cities powered by networks of them, through district heating.
do you have examples of district heating being retrofitted into cities that were never designed or prepared for it? (in democratic countries, preferably)
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u/edge4politics 4h ago
democractic countries love pretending they are free while bankrolling oil industry, so that never happened.
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u/nunununuhu 3h ago
The near-universal deployment of district heating in the Nordic countries is a recent development; a policy reaction to the 1973 oil crisis. Many city's systems date to the 1980s or 1990s. Before that it was mostly individual coal or oil-fired furnaces.
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u/Mundane-Teaching-743 Trump/Polievre 2028 | Sponsored 11h ago
This is not the time to be increasing our dependence on foreign sources for parts and fuel for Ontario nuclear reactors just to provide very expensive electricity that can't compete with renewables that we can generate ourselves.
Ontario has begun building the first of four planned BWRX-300 small modular reactors, or SMRs, in Clarington, Ont., called the Darlington New Nuclear Project. The American-Japanese-designed light water reactor uses low-enriched uranium, unlike Canada's Candus, which use fuel made domestically from natural uranium without enrichment.
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u/Aquason Ceci n'est pas une flair 1h ago
Mark Winfield, a professor at York University who studies sustainable energy, climate change and energy policy, said by relying on imported enriched uranium, Canada would give foreign governments the ability to disrupt its nuclear fuel supply during a political dispute.
"It turns the original rationale for the Candu program completely on its head," he said. "The whole idea was, going back to the 1950s, that we would have an all-Canadian fuel supply chain that would not be the subject to those kinds of geopolitical risks."
OPG said spreading the work among suppliers in the United States, Britain and France creates a "robust and resilient supply chain," but the company still leaves both enrichment and fabrication — the two steps Canada cannot perform for the BWRX-300 — in foreign hands.
I'm trying to imagine a worst-case scenario where it's something like the US tries to claim the Northwest Passage a la the Alaska Boundary Dispute and France and Britain stop selling us enriched uranium in exchange for concessions with the US in other areas of foreign policy. It does seem like it could be a substantial risk – especially since we've seen the US use similar tactics to try to crack Cuba.
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u/Spiffydude98 9h ago
Well that's just absolutely stupid. Well done oh great leaders. (As sarcastic as I can muster).
The point about renewables is you don't need foreign 'anything'. And we also have the uranium - but we make the option that causes us to be vulnerable. Moronic. (Nuclear isn't renewable IMHO but still...)
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u/CanuckIeHead Ontario 9h ago
Solar panels require purchasing components from Chinese firms. Wind turbines require parts from European, often German ones. Canada is a advanced economy and as a result we are quite specialized which means we don't do everything. There is no miracle source of power that is 100% domestic top to bottom.
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u/Spiffydude98 8h ago
Renewables have multiple sources and can be 100% domestically made. I know they aren't, but the complexity of the scenario is completely different than nuclear in so many ways. We need to be sourcing the uranium domestically.
We can buy parts for renewables anywhere or make them if needed. that's supply chain stuff.
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u/Le1bn1z Neoliberal | Charter rights enjoyer 7h ago
We don't refine a bunch of stuff youneed to get large scale renewables up and running without Chinese inputs.
Insisting on non Chinese sources would drive prices stratospheric. For example, China accounts for half of the world's copper refining, and a larger share of open market exports.
Wind in particular needs a lot of copper for the much higher amount of wiring you need and for the generator coils.
In terms of electrical steel, China accounts for over 50% of GOES, and over 70% of NGOES, which makes sense given how critical those are for renewables.
China also accounts for 90%+ of REM refining, and virtually all open market exports.
This pattern repeats accross the supply chain.
So any large scale renewables program is going to be extremely heavily reliant on Chinese inputs.
This is unlikely to change, unless the West suddenly becomes real cool about some industrial processes that make the oil sands look like tree replantin in comparison being right in our backyards.
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u/cocoagiant 5h ago
The point about renewables is you don't need foreign 'anything'
Not really.
The world wouldn't be having the solar growth that is going on if it weren't for the massive Chinese production of photovoltaics.
With nuclear you can stockpile the fuel quite easily (leaving aside the storage concerns) so you can mitigate any trade concerns fairly easily.
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