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Nukes enter new age
Alberta joins 3 other provinces to explore low-cost small modular reactors for use in oil sands, to advance economic diversification Gary Park for Petroleum News
Earlier this century then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein shrugged off a pitch to build a nuclear power plant in his province, emphatic that Alberta was a “fossil fuel based economy.”
A few years later, Ontario-based Bruce Power, a partnership that operates eight nuclear reactors, proposed building a facility in the Peace River region of northwestern Alberta to create steam for the thermal recovery of oil sands bitumen. That idea was shelved in the face of strong resistance in 2011.
But what goes around often comes around.
The idea of nuclear power has resurfaced with the Alberta government of Premier Jason Kenney signaling he is ready to join the provinces of Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick in a memorandum of understanding to explore emerging nuclear generation technology in the form of small modular reactors, SMRs.
Pairing with renewables Nate Trela and Hana Askren, who cover the energy sector for Mergermarket, wrote that SMRs appear to be gaining ground as a source of “carbon-free power to pair with renewables, combined with promises of increased safety over traditional nuclear plants.”
Chris Colbert, chief strategy officer for SMR designer NuScale Power, said the “abundance of options” available for power in the U.S. are “solutions that the world will need.”
NuScale, along with StarCore Nuclear, Moltex and Advanced Reactor Concepts have told Mergermarket they are all seeking investment capital, while a United Kingdom consortium led by Rolls Royce is working on the development of a 440-MW reactor it calls an SMR.
Until now, SMRs have been limited in scope to generating less than 300 MW, making them easier to locate, while their modular format allows them to be fabricated off site.
Ontario and New Brunswick are the only Canadian provinces producing nuclear energy, while uranium fuel is mined in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca resource region, which contains the world’s largest high-grade deposits of uranium and straddles the Saskatchewan-Alberta.
Economic diversification The Alberta announcement by Kenney and Energy Minister Sonya Savage said that signing on to the MOU is a part of the province’s efforts to explore potential avenues for economic diversification.
They said the development and deployment of SMRs could play a significant role in addressing climate change, meeting energy demand in remote and small communities and would advance research and innovation opportunities.
Kenney and Savage noted the SMRs would not emit greenhouse gases, making a powerful argument in support of the Canadian government’s commitment for Canada to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
Joseph Doucet, dean of the University of Alberta’s School of Business and a member of an Alberta panel that in 2008 examined the prospects for nuclear energy in Alberta, offered a blunt assessment.
“It’s always good to think out of the box ... but it’s probably not going to happen,” he told reporters.
Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, suggested the MOU announcement was “a press release and nothing more.”
Wayne Henuset, who pitched the idea of SMRs to Klein, insists the answer to Alberta’s long-term energy needs will rest with SMR technology.
“Nuclear is going to happen in Alberta,” he insisted.
John Gorman, chief executive officer of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said the SMRs “can be mass-produced, which means that we can dramatically bring down the cost.”
Even most of the doubters agree that it makes sense for Alberta to join the other three provinces and the federal government to make a relatively small investment in pushing the SMR idea to the point of conclusive decision making.
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