Is New Nuclear a Good Investment for Ontario?

The Ontario Government is on a nuclear spending spree, extending and rebuilding old reactors and planning to build up to 8 new nuclear reactors (at Bruce and Darlington).

Is nuclear power compatible with a long-term sustainable energy future for Ontario? Is there a role for new nuclear plants in reducing Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next critical decade?

With:

M.V. Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia;

Ralph Torie, Director of Research for Corporate Knights;

Mark Winfield, Chair of Sustainable Energy Initiative and Professor at York University.

Moderated by Laura Tanguay, Ph.D. Candidate, York University

Hosted by Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

For more info:

The Darlington New Nuclear Project: An Economic, Climate and Safety Analysis
https://www.cleanairalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Darlington-New-Nuclear-Report-ONLINE-aug-01-v_02.pdf

A safer interim storage solution for Ontario’s Nuclear Wastes
https://www.cleanairalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Nuclear-Waste-Fact-Sheet-8.5×11-ONLINE-jun-28.pdf

Nuclear is a recipe for failure – The slowest and costliest response to climate change
https://www.cleanairalliance.org/campaigns/nuclear/

Send a message to Premier Ford that Ontario needs to invest in Made-in-Ontario wind and solar energy NOW – rather than more nuclear and gas – to lower our electricity bills and create good, green jobs.
https://www.cleanairalliance.org/gorenewable/

Hello everyone welcome and thank you for joining our webinar I’d like to thank Angela and the Ontario clean air Alliance for hosting the event this evening the Ontario clean air Alliance is a small But Mighty Community organization with a great deal of expertise and commitment to moving Ontario onto a 100% renewable energy

Path my name is Laura tang and I am a PhD candidate at York University where I research mechanisms and discrepancies of consent for nuclear waste sighting in Ontario for those of you tuning in after the live event we are gathering from across Canada this evening it’s Wednesday October 18th we have panelists

And guests tonight from coast to coast to coast on the traditional and treaty teres treaty territories of many diverse First Nations matey and Ino communities I personally am located on the treaty lands and territory of the Miss sagas of the credit governed by the dish with one spoon

Wampum um I’ve got some resources to share for those to engage in additional learning including who’s Doland uh you can look at the calls to action The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Canada’s undrip act the Yellowhead Institute is great resource and the United Nations declarations on the rights of indigenous

People given the content that we will be discussing today and the historical contemporary and future ways that the nuclear fuel chain dispropor fortunately burdens indigenous communities I encourage you to critically engage in this content and consider how indigenous governance laws cultures and traditions are impacted and influenced nuclear

Activities in the Pro in the province this evening we have three amazing and well-informed panelists to cover the context of Ontario’s investment in new nuclear is nuclear the golden ticket to solving the climate crisis or is the government being strong armed by technocrats or somewhere in between I’ll introduce each speaker

Before they present and we will Reserve discussion and Q&A until all panelists have presented tonight we are in live webinar format meaning that questions will be taken in the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom window and for the sake in organization and of running this event smoothly we won’t take questions

With the raise hand function or with mics on so please do use a Q&A and we will get your questions answered so first I’d like to introduce my colleague Mark Winfield Mark is Professor in the faculty of environmental and urban change at York University and co-chair of the faculty sustainable energy

Initiative Mark has published articles book chapters and reports on a wide range of climate change environment and energy law and policy topics he is the author of Blu green Province the environment and political economy of Ontario published by UBC press and he is co-editing sustainable energy transitions for Canada also published by

By UBC press in November so take it away Mark thanks Laura and I’m I’m happy also to be joining you from the territory of the masaga of the credit and and under the the dish with on spoon wamp Bel Covenant um I’m going to do a screen share uh

Here and hopefully that is working for everybody um so I’m going to talk a little bit about context in the specific situation we are here in Ontario at the moment and then uh where that may lead us in the future um Ontario is kind of an interesting place to look at from an

Electricity perspective we’ve got all kinds of interesting debates embedded here between hard versus soft paths very centralized versus more decentralized Pathways tensions between markets and planning although in fact where we’re Landing up is is neither at the moment and and Central to tonight’s discussion is is around the future roles of of

Different Energy Technologies nuclear natural gas Renewables uh distributed resources uh the bands side activities and relationships with other provinces and behind this there’s a there’s a conversation about uh the relationship with energy the economy the environment and climate change um it’s helpful to have some historical context because in

Fact the the the past comes back to haunt us in this story in all kinds of of interesting ways uh for the first 90 years uh the system was dominated by the Ontario hydroelectric commission or laterally Ontario hydro and a central part of this story is is that onara

Hydro effectively bankrupted itself um by overbuilding Supply it worked in what was termed a supply planning Paradigm uh essentially uh built far more than was needed particularly through its nuclear construction program ended up $38 billion in debt um and and part of the analysis that went on at the time was this partially

Because there was no effective regulatory oversight or control over what Ontario Hydra was doing as we’ll see there are some RAR quite significant Echoes of the past which are coming back to haunt us uh quite significantly in the present um one of the key successors of Ontario Hydro in fact the key

Successor in manyways is Ontario power generation uh which initially inherited Ontario hydro’s new I coal and hydro assets uh it now is also although it doesn’t run coal plants anymore it’s now a very significant gas fire generation operator and as things are playing out OPG now seems to control about the same

Portion of electricity generation in Ontario uh as Ontario Hydro did uh back 30 years ago so we we’re sort of the the past keeps coming back in interesting ways um a little bit of background on the system um up until 19 60 Ontario’s electricity system was essentially 100%

Hydroelectric um it’s been described as the perfect Renewable Energy System um demand did begin to ex outstrip the supply of readily available Hydro sites at that point and from there Ontario embarked on this massive nuclear construction program uh between the 1960s and the 1990s here by the mid 90s

The system was was 60% nuclear in terms of energy output um there were some hiccups there uh particularly in the late 90s when a significant portion of the nuclear Fleet had to be taken offline for a combination of Technical and operating issues and we ramped up coal fir electricity instead uh which

Among other things spawned the Ontario clean air Alliance the the sponsor of this event um that said motion ultimately policy decisions to phase out coal and you can see the the transition here uh between 2003 and 2014 when coal was 25% and by 2014 it was zero and we

Also start to see this growth in in non-hydro enables which had been completely absent from the system up to that point um where we stand now uh from a standing start of zero we have installed now over 5,000 megawatts of wind and over 2500 megawatts of solar uh

In a window that roughly stretched from about 2007 to 2018 um the in term this is the distribution connected component which is quite significant for solar um in terms of energy output the system is about uh 60% nuclear at this stage but we also now are at about

10% um non-hydro Renewables the problems we’ll see is that the growth that was happening in that space has now come to an almost complete halt the last actual sort of plan we had in Ontario for electricity uh dates from 2017 it was a legacy of the the wind

Government actually and at that stage they had committed to the refurbishment of the Darlington and Bruce facilities um a life extension as they call it on the Pickering uh B facility which is four reactors which really was supposed to have closed in 2018 there was quite a strong conservation strategy but there

Had been a complete abandonment of any further significant development of Renewables and crucially for the purposes tonight um the wind government had also eliminated any planning structure uh um there had been requirements that there be some sort of system plan that that be reviewed by the Ontario energy board uh those

Requirements were eliminated through Bill 135 in 2015 so effectively the The Province was left with no planning framework essentially the system is run on the basis of of political directives uh that um becomes even more apparent as of course Mr Ford arrives in 2018 um he has a well-known allergy to

Renewable energy projects one of the first things he did was to cancel the last 750 projects which had been left over from the green energy act era uh repealed the green energy act also terminated uh the up to that point quite successful conservation strategy on the grounds it was actually being too

Successful um terminated the province’s climate change action plan um and did get rid of also the very vestiges of any kind of planning framework um that there had been a requirement there at least be some sort of uh um electric energy plan issued every three years um that went as

Well so we were effectively left in something of a vacuum but into that vacuum um began to emerge a kind of pathway um I think it’s it’s sort of uh you know certain actors have shall we say filled the vacuum um and its early stages what began to emerge was uh

Clearly a continuation of the Darlington and Bruce refurbishments um uh proposals for new build reactors at Darlington initially one allthough that now has grown to four um and also efforts to continue the Pickering be refurbishment and we’re also seeing a very dramatic ramp up of the uh role of gas fire generation this

Is in part a coroller uh to the refurbishments that that is those plants go offline um in the short term the generating requirements are being made up through running the gas plants that were built in the 2000 early 2000s more intensively and we’re also adding capacity on gas with the implication uh

That the greenhouse gas emissions from the sector are also on track to rise by a factor of about 8 by 2040 relative to the low we hit around 2017 um the pathway has sort of been uh formalized this was uh effectively the response to the Clean Air alliance’s

Campaign around phasing out gasf fire generation in the interest of decarbonization and the independent atric system operator which isn’t actually that independent um came up with a sort of proposal uh called Pathways to decarbonization which um anticipates a doubling of demand uh by 2050 as a result of electrification but

Then proposes to respond to that uh with a fairly massive construction program especially around nuclear at a cost of of approximately $400 billion um to put some context in that the total economic activity in electricity sector in onaro each year is somewhere less than 20 billion dollar a

Year so it would be more capital expenditure than the total activity in the sector each year um what is being operated rationalized at this stage and is the ongoing refurbishment at Darlington and now proposals to add four 300 megawatt new reactors effectively at Darlington B an ongoing refurbishment at the Bruce

Facility of six reactors and now a proposal to add four of unknown type or scale but these probably be large units um to proceed with the Pickering b refurbishment as I mentioned the the ramping up of of both of existing gas and Al the addition of new

Gas fir capacity emphasizing there is no plan here um and there is no review process uh there is nowhere any of this has to go in Ontario where questions are asked about does this make sense as a pathway to decarbonization or or does this make economic sense uh this is this is

Essentially an an unregulated trajectory that is subject to no meaningful oversight or review a situation that kind of reminds us of the situation Ontario Hydro operated in in the 1960s and 70s and we know how that ended um no movement really on much else certainly no movement on Renewables um we’ve seen

A little bit of movement on grid scale storage but the rationale for that is unclear given we’re not doing anything on Renewables uh there are some hints at a feeble restart on conservation demand management um very interesting work being done behind the scenes on distributed resources is things like

Wiring rooftop solar and parked electric vehicles and other things into into micro grids uh but no actual significant development there and some minor movement around Quebec um the pathway the province is on presents some very very significant challenges all of the new builds are either unproven not exist in the world

In terms of the reactor technology or in the case of Bruce the technology is simply unknown these won’t be cand do these will not be the types of reactors we’ve had in Ontario or indeed uh types we’ve ever seen in Canada before um the costs are essentially

Unknown uh but we know out of the sort of alleged nuclear Renaissance that happened in the early 2000s uh that the industry continues to suffer from a record of sever delay and severe cost overruns you look at the projects in France and Finland in the United States

The handful that did actually emerge all of them look like disasters from an economic perspective it’s not clear who’s going to finance this um the private sector doesn’t like to touch nuclear with the 50 billion foot pole um it’s very very interesting that the only actual investor in the new build so far

Is the federal INF infrastructure bank which is essentially the federal government which has given OPG a billion dollars there are questions around waste fuel management uh Ralph Tori will talk about the uncertainties around demand the demand projections and and indeed the nature of the pathways to decarbonization that may be realized

Especially given the province has absolutely no framework whatsoever for decarbonization and indeed the loads that we would anticipate from a an electrification pathway are increasingly dynamic the types of loads that nuclear is is notably bad at dealing with and we also need to keep in mind the the context that while nuclear technologies

Have not really changed that much um we’ve been a period of of enormous technological development and maturation around the Alternatives particularly Renewables storage broadly what we term smart grids and then their integration into distributed resources and micro grids in these areas we are seeing cost falling dramatically technological

Performance improving and our ability to manage these more distributed resources improving dramatically um Ontario interestingly is also um probably more than anywhere else in Canada um a place where considerable thinking and quite serious modeling has been going on about what Pathways to decarbonization might actually look like

Um many of these Point potentially in the direction that are certainly not as nuclear heavy as what the province is uh proposing the problem here is that the province refuses to listen to any of these Alternatives and there is no for or no structure within which the province is required to answer questions

About well why does its pathway make sense and the ones being proposed by people like the atmospheric fund or the David Suzuki Foundation or others don’t what we’ve been left with really is is a vacuum and and a Kind of Perfect window uh for the incumbents in the sense that

We have no planning framework um no regulatory oversight of any meaningful form whatsoever a government that is fond of building big things and is not particularly noted for its strength and critical thinking and the incumbents particularly on ter power generation Bruce Power have have very much taken advantage of this situation and are

Moving to lock in their preferred Pathways um before anybody can start to ask too many complicated questions uh it is it is a it is a case study in in the success of incumbency um but whether or not where this is taking us makes any sense economically or from a decarbonization

Perspective I think to to say nothing of a wider sustainability perspective is is to put it mildly an open question but a question where we don’t have anywhere to ask it thank you and I’ll stop the screen share too there we go thank you so much Mark always so

Insightful and maybe giving us some insights into the title of the webinar uh next I’d like to introduce MV Ramina who is the Simon chair in disarmament Global and human security and professor at the school of public policy in global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in

Vancouver Canada he is the author of The Power Of Promise examining nuclear energy in India published by Penguin Books in 2012 and also a forthcoming book explaining why nuclear power is not a solution to climate change uh being published by Verso books r is a member of the International

Panel on fisel materials and the Canadian pugwash group and the international nuclear risk assessment group and the team that produces the annual World nuclear industry status report thank you so much for being here with us tonight Rina and whenever you’re ready take it away thank you Laura thank

You all thank you for this invitation um I’m joining from the traditional ancestral and unseated territories of the muspan people uh it’s my privilege to be living here and working here um I’m going to sort of move a little bit away from uh the focus on Ontario to talk more globally about

Uh nuclear energy to give you some sense of what’s happening in that front um so I’ll sort of uh the the story about nuclear energy around the world uh is probably best seen uh in a long time uh perspective perspective and if you look at uh the global nuclear reactor Fleet

Uh the best days of construction of new nuclear plants was over about three decades more than three decades ago uh the uh every year you know this this plot here from the world nuclear industry status report um plots the number of reactors that were connected

To the grid starting in 1954 uh all the way till the end of last year and uh what we see is that the world’s reactors were mostly built in two big waves one in the 1970s which was mostly in North America and one uh in the 1980s which

Was mostly in Western Europe uh and since 1985 uh the 1984 and 85 were the um two years when there was the maximum number of reactors that were constructed a little bit over 30 reactors each of those years after that the rate of reactors being connected to the grid

Fell dramatic ically there are many years since then when more reactors have been shut down uh and the result of this uh slow um construction rate as well as reactors being shut down is that the global capacity of nuclear power around the world has been more or less constant

Um it’s sort of gone up a little bit because uh the many of the older reactors have been refurbish to try and produce more power out of the same um but uh it’s not increasing fast and uh the consequent result is that the share of electricity around the world in

The world’s electricity grids that are supplied by nuclear plants has declined uh dramatically uh it was uh around 17.6% that was the highest it ever was in the mid 1990s and the last year’s number was just barely over 9% and from all sort of um uh indicators

It looks like it’s going to be falling uh more in the future uh in contrast uh Renewables modern Renewables That’s not including uh large nuclear uh sorry large Hydro dams uh has been increasing quite uh rapidly compared to uh nuclear and it reached 14.2% last year um so why

Is this the simp the simplest reason to explain this is that nuclear power is just not economically competitive and that in turn is because reactors cost too much to build uh one can think of a nuclear reactor as essentially just a very complicated way to boil water

You’re using a very hazardous process uh to boil this water and it is never going to be cheap uh no there the idea that you can never have a cheap reactor is just impossible simply because of the complexity of the technology and uh whereas in contrast some of the other Technologies and Mark

Sort of mentioned how um Renewables have been falling and this uh picture here shows the uh estimates made by uh this company in Wall Street called Lazard that looks at the US market the US is probably the largest um energy Market other than China for which we have very

Little data um that um the this calculates the levelized cost of energy which is a metric that is used to estimate the cost of energy production and what it shows is that um the nuclear power is the most expensive Way new nuclear power plants are the most

Expensive way to generate power in the United States uh it’s around $160 to $170 per megawatt hour uh whereas uh solar and wind are now coming out in the 30 to $40 range uh and that’s sort of a dramatic change in the last decade and so uh it’s natural that um nuclear new

Nuclear Plant are not going to be constructed but for many years the uh story in the from the nuclear industry has been you know we know nuclear plants are expensive to construct but uh once they are constructed uh they are relatively uh cheap to operate because

They don’t require a lot of uranium and so the fueling costs are are low but this story started becoming unstuck in the last decade uh when a number of reactors were shut down because of high operational cost and the fact that alternatives are cheaper so and usually

The reasons have to do with uh either not being able to sell their power on electricity markets or because there is some um some major uh uh repair that work that has to be done because some uh piece of equipment has failed uh and then the utility simply decides it’s not

Worth uh refurbishing or or uh replacing that uh plant and then comparing it with the alternative so one of the last ones that did that was in Iowa when the only nuclear plant was shut down uh following uh some damage to it because of a uh of

A of a storm and the uh utility that operated the plant decided um did calculations that showed that they would save about $300 million per year uh just replacing the energy from uh the D arol plant that was nuclear plant was shut down with wind eny so that’s the story and uh new

Nuclear power as uh Mark mentioned has not uh come out at the kind of cost that was expected the Vogal uh plant in uh Georgia has ended up costing nearly $35 billion uh which is uh up from an estimate of $4 billion when construction started around a decade ago uh and in

Turn uh that 14 bill million dollar was about three times the cost estimates that were made by uh Westinghouse Company the company that designed the ap1000 reactor uh which was sort of stated in the uh mid 2000s 2005 2006 the period when there was the all the talk about a nuclear

Anas and at that time westing house said you know we have learned our lesson we know there’s a long history of cost and time overruns but now we know how to do this better and they estimated cost of about $5 billion and uh that didn’t happen and it fell very much in line

With the historical average where one study show found that 97% of all nuclear projects had exceeded the budget um the uh other point I want to sort of mention is that in as much as this is talking about uh climate change uh there’s also a very important parameter which is how

Long uh it will take for any savings in or any reductions in emissions from nuclear power um the uh average construction time uh for a nuclear plant is roughly about 10 years uh and some plants can be significantly longer um 20 years 25 years is Not Unusual um and so

If uh let’s say British Columbia where I live were to decide uh that they want to build a nuclear plant uh it will take them 10 years to build the plant but it’ll probably take them another 5 to 10 years before that to get the environmental permit to find a community

That is willing to host one of these plants and most importantly raise the tens of billions of dollars that it requires to construct this plant so it’s not going to be a quick process uh and uh you know all of the things that we’ve been told about how we have learned from

New technology using modular construction so on just did not work out in the case of the Vogal plant um the so-called sort of uh nuclear Renaissance in both the United States and in the UK talked about building large numbers of reactors by 2020 and that just didn’t happen the

Only reactors that have come online neither the United States or the UK uh have been the Vogal plants uh and a whole bunch of them that were proposed uh in the United States that were sort of uh 30 reactors were ordered and 15 were expected to come online before 2021

None of that happened um and so the point is that if you want to think about the climate we must do not just think not just about the fact that nuclear plants don’t involve Burning uh fossil fuels at the site of generation but we should also think about how much it

Costs and how long it takes and uh by those counts I think nuclear just doesn’t work very well okay uh so if you one other answer to this which you might hear is that uh all of these problems will go away if you build small modular

Reactors uh and there there’s a lot of what the people in the uh regulatory world called Happy talk that this is what you know vendors are going to come and say and so they will say for example that the new small modular reactor designs are simple uh that they are safe

That they are uh more uh proliferation resistant uh that they are going to be cheap uh and they will change the way you’re going to be building reactors and so on and so forth and also that oops uh and also that uh they are going to produce less waste now will this all

Actually happen and the simple answer is that for any of these properties to be realized uh for example if you want to reduce the amount of waste that a reactor produces it has to be translated into a technical requirement on the design and when you try to um compare

What the different requirements are you will quickly realize that all of these properties the reduction in the waste the safer or the lower risk of accidents the lower risk of proliferation and production of faile material all of that just cannot happen in the same design uh

And so if you’re going to make one problem uh less uh or you you’re going to amate one problem you’re going to exacerbate other problems uh in particular uh the fact that you’re talking about small reactors uh small does not mean small physically they’re not even small when you compare them to

The amount of power that is produced by let’s say a solar uh uh project but these are small only in relation to large nuclear plants but still the reason that Ontario and various other places went to large reactors is that they were trying to gain on what are

Called economies of scale and lower their cost and therefore conversely if you’re going to go to small nuclear reactors you’re going to become more expensive on a per unit of electricity uh generation or electricity production uh and they will also produce more spent Fuel and waste simply because uh they’re

Going to be less efficient um and uh the you know idea that somehow by building large numbers of them learning might uh help lower cost is being disproved in the nuclear industry nuclear industry is one uh example where costs have actually increased over time the the graph here

Shows the cost increases in uh the United States and France the countries with the most number of nuclear plants uh and even if there is going to be you know optimistically speaking if there’s going to be learning you’re going to have to build a very large number of

What one might call loss leaders before you can actually even break even with large nuclear power which itself is not economical so small modular reactors are simply not going to solve the uh economic problems of uh nuclear power um just one more thing which I’d say about um uh small reactors again as

I mentioned small reactors aren’t new uh the United States for example built a whole bunch of them uh before the uh 19 in the 1950s and 1960s and uh almost all of them were shut down early the the best example I can think of is one

Called Elk River which was meant to be the one that allows for Rural Municipal cooperatives to build nuclear plants and when that was built cost about 250% over the initial things and within four years there was serious repairs that had to be done that the utility just decided to

Shut it down because they decide thought that it was just not worth it was not making economical sense for them and that uh history is being uh reflected in more recent designs as well so the um the those small modular reactor designs uh which have had some cost estimates

Associated with them you will see they are all much more expensive than the um you know cost of uh even large nuclear plants let Alan uh solar and wind which are far far cheaper at this point uh and uh the best example I would say is that

Of new scale uh in down in the United States which is now uh estimated at around 250% of the cost of the Vogal plant on a per uh kilowatt or per megawatt basis when wal’s construction started and of course that cost ballooned once the construction started and there’s no

Reason to expect that new scale is not going to do the same um the uh there are also long time delays whoops I’m sorry what what happened there anyway so I just going to say there are long time delays uh associated with all of these designs that we are not going to see

Smrs being uh deployed anytime soon um I’ll stop there and uh thank you for your attention thank you so much for your presentation that was give us a lot to think about and I think going to add a lot for discussion um following our last our third and final presentation by

Panelist Ralph Ralph Tori Ralph is an internationally recognized analyst and Communicator in the field of energy and environmental systems uh Ralph is currently director of research at corporate Knights where he recently produced an investment strategy for green economic transition for Canada his expertise in Ontario’s Energy System

Dates to his involvement with the Royal Commission on electric power planning in 1976 he authored the first soft energy path study for Ontario and the first low carbon pathway analysis for Canada so ready when you are Ralph thank you thank you Laura and um thank you ram and Mark

For um your presentations I learned as I always do new things um I’m going to share my screen hopefully that work good I hope I um I want to divide my time um more or less in two I want to first talk about whether nuclear power has a role

Over the long term in a sustainable energy future for Ontario and then the second half of my remarks I want to zero in on whether it can make a meaningful or any contribution to to an effective emergency response to climate change over the next 10 years uh the answer to

That second part is already been uh put forward in a couple of different ways but I’ll return to it but on this first question um I mean I think it’s important with all of the focus on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to remind ourselves that the concept of a sustainable human

Civilization with a sustainable energy system is much broader than only achieving a balance in the carbon cycle which is what the climate change issue is all about and in addressing the question is there a role for nuclear power in such a sustainable future of course one has to

First ask oneself well what would a sustainable energy system look like and I I thought about this and getting ready for it tonight and I really couldn’t think of any great examples that we’ve been responsible for but when I thought about the ecosphere more generally uh and the principles which seem to govern

The way that that system operates and the way that energy flows through and gets applied in that system I began to uh identify what for me are some of the attributes that we need to try and achieve in our human human technology and in our human system if we are going

To emulate the one example that I can bring to mind of where a sustainable energy system has been achieved which is in our planetary ecosphere and so I thought about the renewable energy and diversity and the circularity and the beauty and the balance and the efficiency and the uh

Interconnectedness of that system and I came up with uh a short bullet list and I know I’m not an expert on this and I know Mark Winfield has written peer-reviewed papers on this subject but here’s a few of the things that I would be looking for in a sustainable energy

System does it run on renewable energy is it efficient not only in the narrow sense of of of not wasting energy outright but does it meet needs uh by matching the scale and the quality of the energy being used to the end use need that’s being uh satisfied it wouldn’t generate

Greenhouse gas emissions at least not on a net basis it would be characterized by circular flow of materials it wouldn’t generate toxic waste or radioactive waste in fact really isn’t any waste in the ecosphere system it’s a it’s an economic concept that uh doesn’t really have any meaning in

Ecology it would be resilient and diverse uh when there were failures there isn’t actually it’s interesting in the ecosphere there are not there aren’t really failures in the way that humans tend to Define that word but uh when failures or when death or um other negative things happen to individual

Organisms they don’t happen in a way that threat threatens the whole system the failures themselves tend to be safe uh even productive when you think about it uh the example of the nurse log that I had up briefly a moment ago being being a great example of that and

Certainly it wouldn’t be a system that would generate what’s called ecosal risk that is it wouldn’t even admit the possibility of things happening that could put the eal the ability of the ecosphere itself to support life at risk and finally and this is perhaps the more subjective than the previous uh bullets

On my list and you can make your own uh it would reinforce cultural values uh I think for us that means that you’re looking for an energy system that supports and reinforces equity and accessibility self-determination Community autonomy and what uh Ivan ellich would call conviviality Technologies which while we may not

Understand them at least don’t threaten us uh so with that list in mind I then turned back to the question is nuclear power align with such a future uh does it emit greenhouse gas emissions very very few I mean it’s a very low emitter of greenhouse gas

Emissions so I give them that point uh so uh a check mark there uh is it a renewable and obviously by the way no individual technology can be said to be sustainable or not sustainable sustainability is a system attribute but we can talk about whether Technologies are aligned with or

Compatible with a sustainable system and that’s the spirit in which this this particular slide is intended to uh be taken uh does renewable uh does nuclear power run on renewable energy well no clearly not I don’t think there’s any need for an explanation of uh the score

On that point is it efficient and I’m speaking now as a physicist it is so incredibly inefficient that it boggles the mind you know uh that for every unit of electricity that a c do power plant puts onto the grid it dumps two units of useless waste heat into the Great Lakes

It’s a prodigious amount of wasted heat and there’s so much of it in such a small spot uh that it’s not possible that you could ever utilize uh more than a tiny tiny fraction of it fraction of it in an effective way it the the caral cycle as as R mentioned earlier the

Boiling water to raise steam to turn a turbine to make electricity uh it it we’ll look back on it at some point in history as as a low point in human Innovation I think so efficient absolutely not is it circular well of course not uh we’ve already talked about the once

Through cooling that characterizes nuclear power uh it’s once through fuel the fuel goes through it becomes uh waste uh in the process of being IR radiated waste that needs to be managed uh cooled for a number of years it’s so hot and continuing to generate new heat

And then for decades and even centuries after that it will have to be safely stored probably monitored to prevent its uh re-entering uh the atmosphere or the uh ecosphere where it would present a a health hazard to life does it fail safely well obviously

Not uh a lot of the effort and a lot of the expense of building nuclear power reactors goes into trying to find ways to to to make them safe in the event of accidents because accidents at nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous accidents anytime you have concentrations of Highly radioactive

Material uh particularly in the presence of high temperatures and pressures you have an inherently dangerous situation which if it fails will not fail safely we therefore have no choice if we build these things but to rely on what we call fail safe engineering that is remedial technologies that will intervene quickly

Enough hopefully and be effective Ive enough in their barriers to prevent uh exposure of the public or the workers at the plant to dangerous levels of uh radioactivity is it resilient well that’s an interesting question I for me the answer to that would also have to be

A no uh particularly the way that we do it here in Ontario where we put so many of these reactors on a single site as we’ve seen from Chernobyl to Three Mile Island to Fukushima when you have an accident at one of these plants the whole site will have to be shut down

Potentially permanently and and this is really the opposite of how you would uh build a system if you were trying to achieve resilience and it’s ironic that uh even with the onet of these smaller reactors that that the industry here in Ontario or at least the the general

Electric company wants to build here in Ontario uh offered the possibility of uh maybe spreading around the risk they’ve chosen instead to put them on sites that already have an an exorbitant amount of uh concentrated radioactivity and nuclear power production going on so no not resilient is it diverse again these

Power reactors are among the clumsiest uh most sluggish and and uh least uh flexible contributors to our electricity Supply they do not like to go up and down in power uh they do not follow the load effectively uh they are the opposite of I think what anybody any ecologist would

Would consider to be compatible with diversity in the system I’ve already referred to the ecosal risk that they represent there’s also a geopolitical risk with this technology which Rina has made reference to it’s one which uh we’ve got experience with in this country with the can do a particularly effective plutonium

Producer and now with the new reactors at uh reactor at Darlington it’s proposed that Canada start to build reactors using uh highly enriched uranium uh moving away from pressurized water to boiling water so definitely U increasing the vulnerability of the nuclear fuel cycle in this country to cross over geopolitical risks

Uh it’s aligned with cultural values I’m going to put a question mark here because the G this is perhaps the most subjective of the criteria that I’ve put forward but I did Google the question or Google the phrase uh can Ontario nuclear power plants and Security in preparing

For tonight just to see what sort of images would come up and you know for me uh it’s interesting this this is the first one that came up no this is not a bunch of overgrown children dressed up for Halloween this is a the caption says Bruce poers award-winning nuclear

Response team this is you know part of the day shift up at the Bruce and as you continue to explore the connections between nuclear power and the type of cultural values and and the type of security and uh uh control that’s required to uh maintain safety and to

Keep it insulated from some of these eidal and geopolitical risks that fundamentally presents for me it’s not compatible with the types of values that I would like to think represent Ontario and Canadian culture and it’s no surprise to me as a quick perusal of Michael Snider’s World nuclear industry

Report will show you that nearly all of the nuclear uh construction activity in recent years has been uh either in China or uh Russian built and designed reactors in Russian satellite countries two countries with very high levels of centralized control and restricted individual freedoms very compatible with the nuclear

Option so for me the answer to this first question then is a no maybe it’s not for you but do think about it because it seems to me that the second question which is is there a role for new nuclear power right now in Ontario and is it consistent with an effect of

Emergency response to climate change how you might answer that question question is going to be influenced by whether you think there’s a long-term role for nuclear in a sustainable Ontario if you don’t uh if you agree with me that it it doesn’t have a long-term role you might

Still uh answer yes to this question you might still say in spite of that we have no choice but to build them now uh for the climate change response purpose uh I suppose since that they don’t really seem to have anything else going for them in our checklist uh or if you

Answered uh yes uh nuclear power is is compatible with a sustainable future if you disagree with me and come to the opposite conclusion you might still answer no to the question of whether this is a good time for Ontario to be expanding our dependence on nuclear power a few observations then on the

Second question that I wanted to put in front of you and one of the beauties of a panel like this is one doesn’t feel a responsibility to address every aspect of the question but you know claims that the this new reactor at Darlington and by the way I I

I can’t bring myself to call them small or modular there’s nothing modular about it and as as for small it’s 300 megawatts this reactor it’s 12 stories high there a footprint that’s one and a half football fields long and a football field wide that’s just for one uh I

Don’t I don’t get how that how that that gets to be called small and uh it’s a prototype which is about the opposite of modular as you can get uh but claims that this in any way is going to help us in the 2020s are just not credible it’s

Been 30 years since the last nuclear plant was finished in this province 30 years a generation people that worked on it are retiring uh it took them about eight years per per reactor to build that last plant that was the Darlington plant another interesting thing about the

Historical pattern is that the B plants took longer than the a plants and you would think in the context of modularity that when you twin a plant whether it’s Pickering B to Pickering a or Bruce B to Bruce a the things that you learned building the first set would allow you

To finish the second set quicker but as you can see by looking at the pair of blue bars or the pair of gray bars just the opposite was the historical case we ended up taking more time uh to build the second set than the first set and

The long-term Trend when you look at it has actually been increasing amounts of time to build these reactors and this is just a time from when construction starts and as Ramina pointed out before that there can be a very multi-year period of planning and license applications and approvals and so on

That goes on so no these will not be here in the 2030s nuclear power new nuclear power cannot contribute to climate mitigation in the 2020s not not in this province and I don’t think anywhere uh the GE Hitachi 300 megawatt reactor for which site preparation is underway at darling it’s a prototype as

Uh Mark already pointed out it used a very different technology from can do it’s never been licensed here or anywhere it’s about as different from modular as it’s possible to be and it’s fraud with risk um the other dimension of this question uh that I wanted to say

Something about has to do with the the um the relative cost effectiveness of nuclear as a response to climate change and here again uh there are more cost effective options that can actually get us results in the 2020s when we need them if we’re going to bend the curve of uh greenhouse gas

Emissions there is a global energy transition underway it’s an expanding nuclear power in Ontario runs counter to the direction of that transition and it would divert cap capital and human resources from the Investments that we need to be making to avoid falling further behind in the ability to produce

The products and services that will underpin the 21st century economy this is a losing strategy doubling down on nuclear and not withstanding the priority that’s been given to cost cutting in the design of the new reactor at Darlington and I have to say when you read the design documents the repeated

Emphasis on cost cutting is by itself somewhat worrisome the capital cost for nuclear would have have to uh have continued to increase as rammen showed uh while the costs of the Alternatives have been falling at historically unprecedented rates for efficiency and for renewable energy and for storage Technologies and we work on these

Technologies uh very intensively at corporate nights and I can tell you that the solutions for our climate problem and for achieving a sustainable energy transition are growing very very fast here you see growth rates for solar electric cars residential heat pumps battery storage additions these are uh very very steep exponential growth

Curves that are projected by the International Energy agency to continue throughout the 2030s these are the cost reductions some of the cost reductions that we were referring to earlier uh these are if you look at this right hand side these are incredibly steep reductions in costs that we’ve been seeing for batteries and

Solar and wind um at a time when the cost for nuclear power has actually been going up it’s uh it’s the only energy technology in history actually nuclear which has got a long-term pattern of increasing unit cost over time oil gas coal solar wind all of the others have

Uh a long-term Trend to lower costs and this very briefly uh gives you a sense of the momentum of this transition that I was referring to a moment ago uh the Top Line tracks companies uh we do this at corporate nights the top line is track tracking the companies that are

Score the highest in our measure of sustainable production so there’s no fossil fuel production in that green line there’s no nuclear in that green line we do have the electric vehicles and the solar and the wind and the green buildings in that line those that green line represents the growth of the

Companies that are making those things the nuclear and the oil and the gas and the rest of the uh uh World economy on average is represented by the Blue Line This is the train that you want to be on the future of the energy transition in this world is heading in a direction

It’s a very exciting direction that offers the promise of a sustainable energy system which uh will be more distributed which will run on renewable energy and I I think which will be much more compatible with the values that we all hold deer here in Canada finally my

Last piece of advice would be Keep Calm use energy efficiently and build the new grid we’ve got some time here in Ontario electricity consumption is down this year over last year it’s down 12% compared to 20 years ago in spite of growth of population and economy electrification of heat and

Transport will be necessary to respond to climate change but if you couple it in a clever way with efficiency we can keep electricity consumption growth to low levels very low levels well below 1% I think possibly as low as 0.5% so there’s no cause for panic we’ve got the

Time to get this right our goal should be to Electrify while holding total electricity consumption to under 1% per year there’s no way that you would come to the conclusion that nuclear would be a good choice in the context of this transition or the other possibilities

That are facing Us in Ontario for our Energy Future I’ll stop there thank you thank you so much Ralph that was that was amazing presentation um we’ve got a lot of questions in the in the Q&A so I think I’m going to start um by just asking some of the more clarifying questions

First and then we will uh we will move on so maybe if all of the presenters want to come back I think Mark I’m going to start with you um we have been asked for you specifically one of your slides uh mentions that there’s A7 billion annual electricity rate

Subsidy um and could you please elaborate on this do other jurisdictions subsidize electricity rates uh yes thanks Laura um this is essentially a a vestage of the fair Hydro plan that the wind government adopted to reduce electricity rates by 25% essentially overnight um and effectively um transferred a portion of

Electricity cost picking Capital costs um well initially it was actually being added to the debt of Ontario power generation and the conservatives then effectively transferred it to General revenues um so this is effectively related to Capital cost of investments in the system um that is I say is coming

Straight out of General revenues that is equivalent to the preco provincial deficit so that’s money that would otherwise be going on Health Care education other things um subsidization on this scale out of General revenues is not normal Al um it violates every principle there is around uh the

Economics of energy and alcy systems um inherently inefficient in a misallocation of resources um what the province could have done and should have done because of course we were we were in a period of of significant rate increases in the 2010s um driven principally by the refurbishing projects of the nuclear

Fleet um would have been to have a much more targeted relief at the rural and lowincome and more marginalized consumers who really were suffering very badly um as opposed to an across theboard rate reduction so that’s where that’s coming from and the the current projection is for that essentially to continue virtually

Indefinitely um uh I mean some of the capital costs are being paid down but they were expend extended well out into the 2014 s in some cases so so that’s what’s going on there but the basic answer is is uh this is not normal um the basic principle is that the the C

The system should be paying for itself um and that it should not have to be being subsidized out of General Revenue and if you’re having to do that that is a signal that something is seriously seriously wrong thanks for that um I believe that was only slide specific uh clarification

But maybe I’ll I’ll open this up sort of as a more a broad question if any see who wants to answer and then we’ll go into some panelist specific questions but uh there’s a question about a report by ministers gibo and Wilkinson um from the report powering Canada forward

Building a clean affordable and reli iable electricity system for every region of Canada and the target is net zero electricity by 2035 and the plan to get there is by nuclear so is it possible to achieve a goal of Net Zero electricity by 2035 if nuclear is not an option me

To um it depends on on what you mean I mean the focus there is is principally on on additional new nuclear um as opposed to what exists and certainly I mean Ontario is by far the most depend nuclear dependent problem it’s really only Us in New Brunswick who have reactors reactor r as

One facility um St certainly it’s feasible without new build um indeed it will ENT we have to be essential um because for the reason we’ve discussed you’re not going to have new build by by the mid 2030s of any significant scale um I would point in particular to the

Modeling that was done by power advisory for the atmospheric fund that looked at these questions very specifically in an Ontario context um and emphasize the importance as as Ralph was hinting at already on the conservation demand management side in in managing these these transitions um the Suzuki Foundation sort of longer

Term projections towards net zero are similar I mean both assume um the that the the Darlington Bruce refurbishments which are pretty committed would probably happen and then continue out to the end of their service lives at this stage the costs are very sunk um but the short answer is is yes

Certainly not without uh the need for any new nuclear construction um you know given the range of options we have on the demand side too because keeping in mind um you know most provinces do not have any effective demand side strategies in place uh BC is an exception New Brunswick Nova Scotia a

Bit because they have utilities I was involved with deck and Quebec but even there that’s sort of winding down um so the potential there is enormous um the Renewables potential is enormous um you so I think the short answer is is yeah we can do this uh we don’t need to go

There that is a great answer and Rina did you w to I just had that you know I mean entirely agree with what Mark said uh but I think there’s a real risk that provinces and the federal government will go ahead with some new nuclear construction by taking the uh you know

The marketing materials that all these companies are producing which say things like we can produce the we can construct this in four years and things of that sort and you know at a very sort of underestimated price and they might embark on these projects which won’t get completed but because that’s happening

Projects won’t go on and so for we will not meet those things and this is actually happening in New Brunswick uh because they kept saying that they’re going to shut down their cold plant based on new nuclear plants and now it’s clear that neither the ark nor the

Multics design are going to be ready and so they’re not talking about how are we going to keep what are we going to do with the coal plant and so that I think is the real dilemma yeah I wouldn’t want to understate slide I didn’t get to uh I

Wouldn’t want to understate the current federal government’s enthusiasm for nuclear uh which is which is quite stunning um and and has completely ignored the kind of issues that that Ralph was Raising in terms of sustainability um I mean there there’s the billion dollars for Darlington uh there’s more in the budget the

Expectation is a large amount of the clean electricity tax credit will actually go for nucle um I expect we would see more investments from the infrastructure bank if New Brunswick Saskatchewan Alberto were to try and move ahead um you know this is the question who’s going to

Finance this the answer is you and I as our capacities as Federal taxpayers um is who’s going to finance this because the private Capital isn’t interested and that’s what we saw with the earlier nuclear Renaissance where the Obama Administration unat St shoveled you know you know enormous amounts of money in

The direction and we we ended up with two reactors in the end because it simply is not economic but I think I think you big questions need to be being put to the federal government about what it thinks it’s doing here um uh and and where

Things is going I mean I find the support for moltec just shocking in in light of the the weapons proliferation issues that are being you know ser ious questions being raised about whether that puts us into violation of the non uh the nonproliferation treaty um and they won’t even conduct an assessment of

It under the impact Assessment Act um so I think there’s a lot of questions out there about the federal level and I think that’s that’s a good leeway I was um you know rammen in one of your slides about in Ohio um but also Ralph you sort of talked about like the

Geopolitical the geopolitical aspects that aren’t often talked about or covered and so you know presumably there are economists working for the government um and I wonder you know I wonder where the the persuasion comes for this type of investment uh given even if the the only information given to them was these

Presentations here today so I don’t know if Ralph or Rina you want to maybe speak if there are some underlying Persuasions um that are less transparent about where some of this investment uh initiatives come from from the government in terms of new nuclear infrastructures well you know you can

You can address a question like that on so many levels I’ve I’ve been asking that question for 45 years now and uh I have had a lot of interaction from time to time not so much in recent years with enthusiasts of the nuclear option

And on one level I it’s a it’s a very emotional and to a certain extent irrational base of support and it always has been with nuclear power and it’s kind of ironic because it was a card that was often played by the industry’s communications to suggest that those who

Opposed nuclear energy were coming from an emotional or an irrational perspective when it’s really the opposite that’s been the case I I think it probably goes all the way back to the origins of this technology in in uh in the atomic bombs in Japan and the desperate uh uh effort to assage the

Guilt I think that that that probably came in the wake of that the program called Adams for peace can we uh swords into plowshares those were the kinds of slogans that that characterize the early days when when there was a a a a very very strong uh Cadre of scientists and

And Engineers that had been involved in the weapons project that were dedicating themselves to try and rescue something good out of this horrific uh Power that they had Unleashed so that’s one way that you can you can attack that question that you’ve posed uh another dimension is that there’s just been

Decade after decade of of of large financial and institutional investment in this technology it got wrapped up in Canadian nationalism another somewhat irrational and emotional element of the support for this option so there’s a lot of a lot of factors at work we could go on about this that tend to result in

Irrational and illogical uh choices being made among among those who are are you know who are are directing the public support at this technology the reason why the people who are trying to urge them to provide that support are doing so are much more obvious you know

It’s the industry that stands to benefit financially from from increased government investment and what they do and so on but the question of why generation after generation of uh of bureaucrats and particularly Federal bureaucrats have have so uh uh energetically and enthusiastically Embrace this uh this technology in the

Face of clearly irrational uh in the face of of clear rational arguments for why it was time to stop doing that I think you really are getting into an area of uh Mass psychology yeah and yeah thank you for that I I um there’s can I add something

To that oh yes yes sorry sorry no worries yeah I just wanted to say that you know we can also look at this from a a different not focused on nuclear perspective which is to think about how uh some of these decisions are being made first I would say that you know

Like Mark said the federal government seems to be very committed to nuclear power and to some extent the same thing is true down south uh under the Biden Administration and part of their problem I think is that they want to not be seen as supporting all of the above uh so

They give a little bit of money to carbon caption storage and to hydrogen and even nuclear fusion uh and everything under the sun basically if you just say I have a climate solution you’ll get some money uh and that’s I think part of the problem and the second

Thing is I think when you think about some of these uh economists and these modelers uh and this is also true at a at a global level people who look at these integrated assessment models they are being told essentially that you have to find a model that will actually

Result in reductions uh and meet 1.5 degrees celus or whatever it is but keep everything else as it is so you know economic growth has to be continuing etc etc and so then they basically say we have to make a bunch of assumptions which we know might they may even know

That these are unrealistic assumptions but if they put in realistic assumptions for nuclear or for hydrogen or for any of these things they will never meet the 1.5 degree celsius Target and so they but they have to come out with the positive message and I think that’s the other constraint that or we

Um Dynamic that we are seeing yeah that’s a that’s a really good point thank you for that um the chat is full of questions about Alternatives which I will say um as somebody in this sphere myself one of the questions particularly was after uh your presentation Ralph about does this mean

That we’re going to go back to like just relying on gas whereas I’m often asked like if nuclear isn’t uh a part of our energy equation we’re going to go back to Coal um can I know that everybody talked about Alternatives and Ralph specifically about Solutions in your uh

Presentations but can we get a little bit more into that about um what some other Alternatives could be if we’re going to phase out nuclear and still achieve uh a climate forward pathway yeah I mean first of all I want to just point out that the focus of tonight’s

Conversation was whether new nuclear investment was a good idea for Ontario the challenge of phasing out the existing nuclear is much more uh it’s a different question it’s a more difficult one given the high level of dependence that has built up in this province uh for nuclear as part of our electricity

Supply and it has not been studied uh in any in any detail the only phase out scenario that I have ever seen for Ontario was one that I did and that was like 20 years ago and completely irrelevant given the advances that have been made in solar and wind and

Efficiency and conservation Technologies and heat pumps and all the rest so we’re long overdue for a and you would think you would think that if for no other reason to have a contingency plan and the event that it for some reason became necessary to close down the nuclear

Plants that there would have been more work done on this than there has been but we do not have as far as I know a uh articulated pathway for the phasing out of nuclear power in Ontario and we should have one at the margin however

Avoiding new nuclear is is is a walk in the park frankly I mean we just don’t need to go there between the uh conservation and efficiency options that are available to us between the tremendous efficiency gains that electrification itself brings including to end uses like uh baseboard heating

Where it reduces electricity use by a factor of two or three and reduces Peak we have a lot of options for leaning into the electrification of heat pumps and uh uh Transportation before it would have to trigger a decision to build large new capacity in this province and

In the Canadian context we’re sitting next door to Quebec which has has has a surplus of carbon free electricity which could increase that Surplus by tens of Tera hours a year if it would also pursue the efficiency in conservation resource that is sitting in its buildings in the form of of uh

Inefficient baseboard heating that could be converted to heat pumps so uh we we have enormous solar and wind resources in this province I mean this Canada is blessed in the sense that we have a lot of land for the number of people here and The Sun Shines on all of it

And the wind blows across all of it more than we would like some days so we’ve we uh we are in a good position in this country uh to show the world really how an advanced industrial society can complete the transition to a sustainable energy system and do it in a way that

Would involve no new investment in nuclear and over the longer term and as I say the study needs to be done to say how long that longer term would have to be phasing out the dependence that that Ontario it’s really the only province in New Brunswick to a certain extent uh

Quebec has already turned its back on the nuclear option so it’s not like this is rooted across the country in a deep way but here in Ontario it’s very deeply rooted the dependence is very high and it’s a it’s a big question uh that’s worthy of a lot more analysis than it’s

Been given as to how we could how we could phase out our existing dependence there are countries I mean you could there are lots of countries in the world that that uh have Lifestyles uh equal or or higher than ours that have U figured out a way to do it

Without relying on nuclear power so it’s not like it hasn’t been done in other places I just point the Suzuki foundation’s modeling that they did out to Net Zero for 2050 does in fact include a ramp down of the existing nuclear Fleet in Ontario so so they did actually

Model out what that might look like they did it using very very sophisticated models um Folks at UIC did the actual modeling um and probably were underestimating the potential on the demand side when they did that um so so the the the process of begin to think

About what that looks like has actually started in some serious way um most of the other modeling has been focused you looking at 2035 to begin with and and certainly you know the case as well says the case to there for a new build either

On on the gas side or the nuclear side is very weak um the iso among other things did a um a study on distributed resources I don’t know how it ever saw the light of day but it did um which basically well we don’t we don’t need any additional capacity given the

Potential out to the the the the 2030s so um we’re in we’re in no shortage of options um and have begun to think about what this looks like in the longer term and it is it is the nuclear piece really isn’t as Ral says it’s an Ontario problem nobody else in Canada is

Anywhere near as dependent um on the scale that we are I mean we are we are the hard case um alberan is SC one will face other challenges but there are other Pathways for them as well anything that you’d like to add on

That RAR or I can no no I think we have plenty of questions in the chat so um there’s a lot of questions in the chat also that uh have to do with waste um some of them um about you know returning waste back to the minds they came from

And the sort of safety of Transportation but also about the ability to use waste um as it’s dumped into the Great Lakes for example and the warming of the lakes and if there’s an ability to produce energy from waste and um yeah if somebody feels comfortable speaking to that maybe Rina

Yeah I’ll start with the the question of radioactive waste and I also noticed there was a question about whether the waste can be used as fuel in reactors and I bring that up because this is a big selling point in uh new brunwick with moldex and uh claiming that they’re

Going to be able to use that uh but I want to sort of go back to one of my slides where I talked about the fact that the same design can never meet all of these constraints so if you want to go to a design that tries to use nuclear

Waste then uh what that means is you’re going to use uh reactors that operate in what we call the fast Spectrum which is with uh neutrons which are not slowed down um and just just sort of back up you know that you cannot use nuclear waste to produce energy you what you can

Use is just the plutonium isot plutonium isotopes that are being produced and maybe some of the transuranics uh which is only a very you know one or two elements there there’s a large number of radioactive elements that are produced in nuclear plants that simply cannot be used for

Fishing reactions and so those things have to be dealt with but even those you know the ones that use the plutonium and so on if you’re using in the fast Spectrum you necessarily are going to have a much higher concentration of facile material in the core which means

It’s more proliferation risky it also increases certain kinds of accident risks in particular what we call code disassembly accidents and so there are always going to be tradeoffs and and consequences for making those uh choices uh so in that sense using waste will also make it more expensive and already

As I said nuclear power has an economic problem so I’ll just say that and then lastly about the question of waste heat in principle yes you can use waste heat in some ways but often the there is a cost Associated trying to convert that heat into some useful energy for example

If you want to use it to heat homes or something of that sort you’ll have to build pipelines and water that sort of circulates around and it depends on how close you are to the reactor and you don’t want to live very close to the reactor because of the risk of meltdowns

And and reactor accidents so you don’t want to have large communities of people living nearby and so that’s a a constraint so yeah I would add I mean the nuclear waste management organization which was set up by the federal government to deal with the waste fuel actually ruled out

Reprocessing their early on um for the reason Roma says the weapons proliferation risks but also in some ways the waste you end up with from reprocessing or even more difficult to manage they’re likely to be liquids which are basically impossible to contain uh over the time scales we’re

Talking which is a million years um Ando sort of open the door a little bit but if you read their documents they’re still very very cautious and um I think very tough they need they should be asking a lot more questions about the nature of the waste that would come from

Molx for example in New Brunswick uh but also from these other reactor designs I mean the whole thing was pre not that they have anywhere to put the waste but uh um the whole thing was premised they would just be dealing with waste from cand and uh you know if Ontario does

What it says it’s going to do then we’re not dealing with can do waste anymore and and uh you know the whole set of cascading questions that should be coming out of that that I’m not hearing from nwmo um and I think we should be agreed Ralph did you want to add to

That or sorry if I I thought you unmuted but um so there’s there’s a question here um that talks about the Clean Air allines advocating for purchasing Hydro from Quebec and another that talks about why aren’t we buying Hydro from Quebec so if Quebec

Sells so much of its power um why are we not utilizing you know power that already exists at a surplus within Canada then doing something that seems economically not feasible and also creates such a burden of waste um on this way I hate to plug the book

But there is a there is a fabulous chapter by my friends and colleagues Pria Pino andan Whitmore as University of maral uh specifically on the situation in Quebec um this is getting slightly more complicated that Ontario is at risk that it it missed the initial opportunity

With Quebec and we may recall ISO was begging Doug Ford to take the surpluses off his hands and and Doug Ford absolutely refused to listen um the situation in Quebec is get some more complicated in terms of there may or may not be be utilization in the future for the surpluses that existed

But then on the other hand as Ralph says and Pier olier has said and others have pointed out the Energy Efficiency po potential in Quebec is enormous um uh you because of the Reliance of very inefficient electric space Heating and other factors as well so um it would

Be slightly more complicated but not that difficult to put Quebec into a clear Surplus situation again and then yes there’s an absolute logic to to partnering with them especially if we anticipate growth in intermittent Renewables because Quebec system also has this enormous storage capacity it’s an ideal partner if you’ve got a large

Uh portion of variable renewable energy and Quebec can store a years’s worth of electricity Supply behind the dams um so very very position there’s similar conversations also see as we seem to be stuck with muskrat Falls in Newland um there are discussions too about an Atlantic Loop in Atlantic

Canada uh to make use of that Resource as a way of facilitating higher Renewables penetration there as well um so it is the the last game of Quebec we missed the easy boat with Quebec um M the go begged we said no um that window might not be quite the way

Where the where it was before um but there are other opportunities around Quebec which you could make very very good use of a great answer also muskrat Falls plug I appreciate that it was a bad idea but we’re stuck with it stuck with see there there was also in the book an excellent

Chapter from uh team in Atlantic Canada who talked about that in in considerable depth not that I mean to be plugging too much but we’re a few weeks from publication and we do have chapters on these very themes well I’m really looking forward to

To reading that book I will say um so on that topic just of like Quebec storing so much energy there’s also some questions in here about hydrogen and the storage of like hydrogen storage for energy um is anybody I know that that’s uh sort of it’s a it’s an alternative

But I don’t know if anybody’s prepared to sort of talk about that hydrogen generation as a strategy for energy storage and distribution I know there’s some activities sort of going on in the Great Lakes area is can anybody speak to that I can if you want um the the general answer is my

Standard answer and again uh there are research groups who are working more specifically on hydrogen um generally the the energy balance for what’s called power to gas so using electricity to make hydrogen for another purpose are very bad um you put in a lot of energy to make the

Hydrogen store it handle it uh the general consensus seems to be you’re better off doing direct electrification where you can and skipping the conversion stages of turning it into gas um there may be uh particular applications for hydrogen um particularly things that you can’t Electrify and the classic examples that

Have come up have been steel particularly high quality steel um cement is another certain chemical production processes are another um where the production process is tied up with the physics and chemistry of what you’re doing um so there there may be roles there I mean theoretically Ontario and Canada have

Put a billion dollars into def fast and Al to move them to each to move them to a hydrogen based process um so maybe you know there there are some applications but on the other hand the Federal Environmental commissioner said uh you know that overall the role of hydrogen is probably being

Overstated so that’s that’s kind of where we I mean the big backers of hydrogen I’m afraid are the natural gas industry who see it as their future and but only you uh from if you combine with carbon capture storage and then the other folks who have talked a

Lot about this sorry the nuclear folks because they would think they’re going to provide electricity for electrolysis um so it’s it’s it’s a complicated one but I think it’s worth looking into it’s one that requires another higher level of scrutiny than it’s getting uh in terms of where does

It fit I mean it probably has a role in a transition but it may not be as large as some of its backers seem to think it’s likely to be thank you for that um couple questions in there about that so I think that that’s really helpful um I think

I’m going to start wrapping it up here I think we’ve had a really really great discussion tonight but I want to ask one more question maybe each if that’s okay um Rina because you sort of in your intro I uh sort of talked about a new book that you have coming out which

We’re all um really eager to read so you know in a nutshell not that this is a complex question or anything but can you tell us um why nuclear power is not a solution to climate change thank you laa um very happy with that question uh I’m also looking

Forward reading my book I’ve been working on it for a long time it’s just not getting written fast enough but um so uh in a in a nutshell as you said you know I think there are three kinds of arguments I would make I make about

In my book uh one is there are a set of uh properties of nuclear energy which are not desirable uh we’ve talked about the risk of accidents we’ve talked about the generation of radioactive waste that stays hazardous for a very long period of time and the linkage with nuclear

Weapons now there are some people who would say that climate emergency is so grave that we need need to overlook these problems uh and we can have that argument but that’s one set of uh uh reasons the second are set of reasons where which I would say are about the

Feasibility of nuclear energy and that has to do with the high cost and the time that’s actually what I presented in this uh thing so if I could have ended that by saying for these reasons I don’t think we should be building nuclear power there’s a third set of reasons

Also which I think we’ve sort of talked about a little bit uh during the Q&A which has to do with the political economy of nuclear energy who are the people who are building these plants uh who are the people who profit from them and what is the sort of underlying set

Of reasons that people are using to advance nuclear energy right and so if you look at many places for example the United States is a great example simply because they have all these different states which have different property I mean different uh rules you find there’s a strong overlap between the utilities

That own nuclear plants and that have large fossil fuel interests and this is to be expected because a nuclear plant is so expensive you have to be a large utility and you’re not going to be a large utility only having nuclear plants and so for those utilities they don’t

Have a strong interest in reducing uh their emissions fast and meeting climate targets And Then There are a whole bunch of people you know the Bill Gates of the world if you like or Sam Alman or somebody like that who you know would like to build nuclear plants because

They are sort of these techno Ultra optimist if you like and also you know see technology as the solution to everything uh and because they just like the way the world is and they benefit enormously and they would like to sort of replace it with some magic technology

Leave everything else the same and I don’t think that’s never going to work out so this is sort of the reasons I have that was a nutshell and thank you so much for that I think that’s an excellent answer and like maybe I’ll be using that in my future

Um that also sort of uh touched on a question that I had for you mark which you alluded to it um okay maybe you talked about it and you just didn’t use these specific words um but you know regulatory capture big buzzword in the uh nuclear industry I think beyond

Canada but certainly within Canada so I wondered if like in a again in a nutshell uh just as we wind down here if you could tell us a little bit about um maybe how how that holds so true for for Canada and where the lack of transparency comes in um for the people

Who are paying for for nuclear Investments which is us and if there is any pathway forward that could make a more transparent system um that’s that’s a just an easy question right um well I mean the problem of course is the the actual nuclear regulator the Canadian nuclear

Safety commission is is is the poster child for regulatory capture indeed I’m I contributed to a volume that one of our adjunct professors Bruce Campbell put together on uh it’s called corporate rules from Laurer didn’t intend to be plugging so many books here but this is

What we’re doing um and you know it’s essentially about regulatory capture in Canada of course the the lead chap substantive chapter is about nuclear regulation in Canada um you know you have a regulator who turns up as a cheer effectively for the industry it’s very difficult to take

Them seriously as as a regulator in that context um so clearly uh breaking the revolving door relationships with the industry are crucial um but also keeping in mind that that um cnsc is not an economic regulator or an environmental regulator so it does it refuses to look at the

Questions about whether um in economic terms or environmental terms or climate change terms these projects make any sense and and part of the situation We’ve Ended up in Ontario is we have no Forum at all for asking those kinds of questions in a serious way which is precisely what the industry is taking

Advantage of is the fact that you can’t ask those questions because every time in Ontario those kinds of questions have been asked the on the Royal Commission on electric power system planning that Ralph was part of in the 70s and 80s the Ontario Hydro demand Supply plan review

In the 1990s and indeed the integrated power system plan review in the early 2000s the case falls apart um the the the it has not survived the encounter with evidence um and and so that’s that’s the that’s part of the window that the industry is looking to exploit in in

Ontario especially and Canada more generally is that they found a very weak regulatory environment both on the safety side but also on the economic and environmental side and are looking to to you know combined with governments that are not particularly noted for asking critical questions um

And they’re looking to lock in um before anybody can really realize what’s going on and what the implications are in the longer term those record timing for a question of that complexity thank you so much and I guess last question for the night um Ralph unless there’s something else

You’d like to speak to I’d like to ask you there’s sort of a lot of uh well a lot of folks sort of talk about reutilizing the brown fields of nuclear as you know sites where reactors currently exist are invariably useless for anything else um after they House

Old reactors or other radioactive waste so would this be a valid enough reason for modernizing uh current reactors or for you know adding new reactors in this type of space or what do you think about that you’re on mute there sorry I think that it’s just delay inevitable I mean these sites are

Eventually are going to have to be rehabilitated or made safe uh even with the Life Extensions and so on in the longer scheme of things uh these sites are going to have to be reclaimed in some way uh it’s interesting and and the Clean Air Alliance uh did some work on

This a couple of years ago the dismantling and decommissioning of old nuclear power plants is actually a a very uh fast growing industry there are as uh again referring to Michael Snider’s excellent World nuclear industry review that comes out every year there’s more plants being shut down

Than there are being uh built and uh they all are going to have to be defueled taken apart cleaned up the waste is going to have to be disposed of there’s no alternative but to do to do that cleanup so um there’s actually an opportunity there for those countries

That figure out how to do this uh because the global demand is going to be huge whether or not I mean obviously the the the approach here in Ontario has been to use the existing sites for new reactors in spite of the fact that that increases the uh some types of

Vulnerability and lack of resilience that we were talking about earlier because the prospect of uh putting a new site through an environmental assessment which would be unavoidable I think is just uh one that they they don’t even want to contemplate and so uh the Bruce the Bruce site for example

If four more large thousand Mega watt uh reactors were to be built on that site would become Far and Away the largest concentration of nuclear power on any one site in the world there’s nothing good about that kind of concentration from a security point of view from a

Resilience Point of View from A diversity and reliability point of view it’s it’s really stupid actually so um I can’t say that um I guess I’m wandering around inside your question what uh uh whether it Mak sense to use oh somehow muted there R you’re muted sorry uh

I think just to close though there’s a bigger picture here which um we always have to keep in mind when we’re asking these more narrowly focused questions which is whether or not we are going to get serious in Ontario and in this country for that matter about making this transition to sustainability which

So many other parts of the world are are well on their way to addressing now uh and are ahead of us uh nuclear power is sort of a throwback option in that in that Outlook when you look at where the momentum is uh in the energy uh economy

Of the world where the excitement is where the young Engineers are most excited about working where the venture capital is most excited about investing it’s in the new Energy System that’s emerging uh that is based on renewable sources on storage on Clever efficient buildings on Smart buildings on electrification on uh uh and

Underpinning all of that and and just to uh give a nod to comments made in uh in the question field from Tony mcell this evening underpinning all of that we also have to come to terms with this growth mentality which continues to to uh drive all of our economic and public policies

That we we can somehow uh continue to increase consumption and increase growth as if there were no planetary limits that will be uh transgressed if we do that we haven’t really talked about that here this evening this has been largely a technological and policy focused uh energy policy Focus type conversation

But there’s a big big challenge facing us and facing Humanity in general it’s the big challenge of this century are we going to find a way to start living within the planetary limits and any question whether it’s the role of nuclear power in Ontario whether it

Makes sense to use this site for the for for more reactors or to not build more reactors must always be addressed in the context of how are we going to finally uh bring our technology and our economies and our way of living back within the boundaries of of the

Planetary limits of this place where we live because if we don’t do that uh we’re just bequeathing to our children and our grandchildren a world of hurt a world of expense and a world of of a sort of an increasingly difficult environment in which to to try and build a prosperous and healthy

Future thank you so much for that answer that’s that’s food for thought that’s something to I think that’s a great way to end off so thank you so much to all panelists for this evening and thank you to the Ontario clean air Alliance for hosting such a wonderful event I’m uh

Yeah really thrilled and honored to to have been able to moderate and to to learn so much from all of you today but also you know long before just today so I’m really appreciative for your time and and energy and expertise and thank you so much for for

Tonight thank you for inviting us and thank you for your great moderation Laura yeah thank you Laura thanks from Mark and R for I learned a lot from what you had to say as did I from from everyone good night good night