All businesspeople love sports analogies. Most analogies border on cheeseball; many don’t even apply to the situation. But last Friday, Jacques Besnainou, CEO of Areva North America, used one that actually fit the point he was trying to make. “At the Tour de France, everybody watches the yellow jersey,” he said, referring to the colour […]

Canada’s first light water–based power reactor will be built in New Brunswick, if an agreement between Areva, the Province of New Brunswick, and NB Power is implemented. The reactor would be one of Areva’s “mid-size” machines, the 1,100 MW Atmea PWR or the 1,250 MW Kerena BWR. Both are exactly in the range of AECL’s […]

Anybody who thinks wind and other intermittent renewable energy sources are the answer to Ontario’s power supply problems needs to monitor the electricity system operator’s website. Here we are, in a major heat wave, and the provincial wind fleet is operating at a ONE PERCENT CAPACITY FACTOR. That’s right: wind, the mainstream greens’ preferred power source, is […]

There’s nothing like actually seeing processes you have up to then only read or heard about. The mythical suddenly becomes real, and more normal and innocuous. Two weeks ago, I toured Areva’s MELOX plant near Avignon. MELOX makes new fuel from recycled plutonium. A couple days later, I visited the La Hague plant in Normandy, […]

I recently visited the Flamanville nuclear generating station on the channel coast in Normandy, where the French electric utility, EDF, is building a new 1,650-megawatt EPR reactor. Two thousand seven hundred contractors, split into three shifts of 900 each, work around the clock six days a week to get the thing done. The locals in […]

At four p.m. on Tuesday, with temperatures pushing toward 30 degrees, Ontario electricity generators were collectively cranking out 20, 514 megawatts. To that, the province’s wind farms were contributing a laughable 0.3 percent. That works out to around 5 percent of their capability at that time (see the IESO’s output tables). Nice to know they’re there when […]

A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto Star published an opinion piece whose author accused Canada of facilitating nuclear proliferation through international sales of uranium and CANDU reactors. It drew a couple of rebuttals: a short, pithy one from Jeremy Whitlock of AECL, a longer one from me. I’ll let readers judge for themselves whether the […]

The Canadian government’s follow-the-U.S. strategy on climate policy is still paying off, in petro-dollars. As I mentioned back in December, Canada gambled that the U.S. won’t make any environmental moves that hurt Canada’s oil industry. Of course that is a safe bet: America imports most of its oil, and Canada is its biggest foreign supplier. But with […]

The Holland Marsh, one of the most unique and fertile pieces of natural marshland in Ontario, is about to get a new neighbor, in the form of an industrial park featuring a 393-megawatt natural gas–fired power generating station. What does the official green lobby, which says it is against fossil fuels and in favour of […]

Earth Hour has been a Going Thing for three years now. Every year I hope the promoters of this feel-good event will abandon their usual simple-minded and vaguely misanthropic message that energy is bad, and do something to promote actual energy literacy in the general public. While this year’s version produced no new promotional rhetoric—and, in Ontario, no […]