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, […]

Opposition to recycling used nuclear fuel in the U.S. centres around the assumption that if the U.S. resumes recycling, an activity it stopped doing in the 1970s, then that will open the floodgates worldwide. Countries that allegedly followed the U.S. lead in the 1970s will begin their own recycling programs. And, if recycling is based […]

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 […]

On November 20 1983, along with millions of other North Americans, I watched The Day After, a horrifying television film about a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The CBC carried it in Canada. After it finished, CBC carried a live discussion which included Jim Stark of Operation Dismantle, a group dedicated to nuclear disarmament. […]

Media coverage of last week’s nuclear summit in Washington focused mostly on game-framed analysis of how the U.S. president’s nuclear policies might affect his standing in domestic and world opinion. That is unfortunate, especially in the case of the measures for dealing with the so-called “loose nukes.” There was almost no mention of the biggest […]

You may wonder why a blog called Canadian Energy Issues so closely follows U.S. energy and environment policy. Aside from the deep interdependencies between the Canadian and U.S. economies, and aside from the fact that Canada, a friendly country, is now America’s main source of foreign oil, there is a policy affinity between our countries […]

Over the last couple days I have participated in a very interesting discussion on the relevance of proliferation concerns to the renaissance in civilian nuclear energy. This closely preceded the announcement, a few minutes ago, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” have been reset from 5 to 6 […]

Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman dictator whose ex post facto victory over the original Hannibal has for centuries inspired both admiration and contempt, would applaud the strategies of the major players in the Ontario nuclear reactor competition. The major players are the governments of Ontario and Canada. The decision strategy of each is pure Fabius: […]

Think big or go home. That used to be the Ontario way: anybody who has looked at Ontario’s three nuclear power plants knows that the people who built them were big thinkers and big doers. No surprise then that the three bidders in the ongoing billion-dollar reactor competition are AECL, Westinghouse, and Areva. And on […]

Areva is still in the Ontario reactor competition, and remains open to playing a role in the future of Canadian nuclear research, a company executive said in a conference call on September 18. This follows the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s announcement on August 31 that it sees “no fundamental barriers” to licensing the new CANDU reactor in Canada. AECL, […]