After a year of uncertainty, the U.S. administration will go big on the atom. This coming week’s budget request will include a proposal to triple the amount set aside for loan guarantees for new nuclear projects, from just over $18 billion to $54 billion. This is the clearest signal yet that Obama has swung away […]

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 […]

There is no way a North American cap and trade system will emerge in the near future. That prospect died when the U.S. president showed at the Copenhagen climate conference that he can’t, and won’t, pursue the environmental policies the green lobby demands. Probably just as well. The continental price of natural gas, the most […]

If renewable energy really were capable of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on a large scale and creating the “millions of green jobs” their proponents claim, there would be no need, from the U.S. point of view, for a comprehensive international climate agreement. The U.S. could simply proceed with creating the millions of green jobs […]

How should Canada resolve the medical isotope crisis? A new report says we should build a new multi-purpose research reactor which can produce isotopes on the side.  Though this is the most expensive of the options presented, the authors point out the impressive benefits a multi-purpose reactor would offer. The logic of this recommendation will, […]

Al Gore has been on an oilsands kick lately, telling anyone who’ll listen that gasoline made from Alberta oilsands bitumen makes a Toyota Prius as emission-intensive as a Hummer. He may be right: oilsands operations pump over 50 million tons of CO2 into the air every year. Most of this CO2 comes from burning and reforming natural […]

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 […]

Mention the phrase “hydrogen economy” these days, and most people will laugh at you. That’s because the phrase reminds most people of the endlessly unfulfilled promises of fuel cell–powered cars and hydrogen refueling stations. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, with his famous hydrogen powered Hummers, has dropped talk of the Hydrogen Highway in favour of something a bit more practical: […]

On the federal government’s map of infrastructure projects, the area along Hwy 401 between Oshawa and Bowmanville shows two projects, each worth less than $1 million. Important though these are—the area is home to many laid-off manufacturing workers—there’s another project that would inject billions of dollars into the Ontario economy and create thousands of high-paid, high-skilled, and […]