Clean Electricity for the Future

The electrification of our society is proceeding rapidly. Recently I have been thinking about how Canada should seek the electricity we need in the years ahead.

The best evidence shines a light on the need for electricity generated by nuclear energy.

The energy experts who pen the popular Substack series Doomberg put it this way “There is no path to significant decarbonization of our economy without a global nuclear renaissance”.

Three issues are at the current forefront in Canada.

1. Many provinces still rely on coal and fossil fuels to generate electricity.

2. Wind and solar are relatively expensive and affected by season and weather

3. New technology is  available today for nuclear energy generation that is portable, safe and simple to implement even in remote regions.

A quick cross-country check-up reveals that British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland predominately employ hydroelectric generation. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia mostly use a mix of natural gas and coal burning to provide for their grid. Ontario stands alone as a province with a majority of its electricity needs sourced from nuclear reactors.1 PEI generates much electricity from the wind with one small caveat—they need more power than they can produce and have to import the majority of their needs from New Brunswick and its diverse profile of generation sources. Nunavut has to burn oil to make electricity for each individual community.

Bottom line: we don’t want to burn fossil fuels if there are alternatives.

Plus it is challenging to find regions where wind or solar will be enough; there just are too many problems with their intermittency, seasonal weather shifts, and lack of sufficient storage options to give the 24/7 supply that we all need. Here we clearly need the federal government to take leadership and coordinate national infrastructure development

Fellow emergency medicine doctor Chris Keefer is doing great work with his group Canadians 4 Nuclear Energy. They make the case that nuclear energy is our best bet either existing with the technology of CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) reactors or new designs of small modular reactors (SMRs).

A major new documentary by Oliver Stone “Nuclear Now” agrees and shows the many upsides of supplying our household and industrial needs via nuclear energy electricity generation.

How does it work? (Great balanced unbiased review of SMRs here).   Nuclear energy does not equal nuclear weapons. In short, nuclear reactors produce heat by splitting atoms, and then converting water to steam, moving a turbine that spins a magnet and produces electricity. Waste storage requires only a tiny allocation of space and is safeguarded.

The federal government must promote the best national infrastructure. A major role of a Member of Parliament is to foster debate and bring forth fresh ways of looking at issues.

Our need for increased caseload electricity and the path for nuclear energy to supply is a topic we must truly explore and debate as a citizenry.

SMR schema

1 www.opg.com.about-us