Canadian energy issues

A cold-blooded look at the CANDU: problems and opportunities

Steve Aplin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:14:35 +0000

“Look what happened to the CANDU,” a senior official at Rosatom, the Russian nuclear conglomerate, recently told Platts. “It’s a good reactor, but nobody is building it.” Why the post mortem, for a reactor that at six a.m. today was cranking out 62.6 percent of Ontario’s electricity? Because, said the official, a Rosatom analysis indicates that if you want to be a profitable reactor vendor, your worldwide installed capacity must be at least 100,000 megawatts. Toshiba-Westinghouse has that, so does Areva. Soon, says the Rosatom official, Russia will too. AECL, which makes the CANDU, has only around a quarter of that putative requirement (more…)

Jacques-talk from Areva: the yellow jersey gets the attention

Steve Aplin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:04:09 +0000

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 worn by the front runner in the famous bicycle race. Areva—with reactor projects in Finland, France, and China, and fuel-cycle projects and proposals in the U.S., France, and Japan—is wearing the yellow jersey right now (more…)

Light water nuclear arrives in Canada: NB breaks with AECL

Steve Aplin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:20:50 +0000

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 ACR-1000. NB’s interest in the competition can therefore only be seen as a potentially major defeat for AECL (more…)

Wind missing in action, again, as heat wave smothers Ontario

Steve Aplin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:27:58 +0000

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 contributing one tenth of one percent of the province’s electricity (more…)

U.S. Blue Ribbon nuclear commission should visit France

Steve Aplin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:57:47 +0000

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, where plutonium is extracted from used nuclear fuel. The two facilities embody a course of action the U.S. could take to deal with its inventory of used nuclear fuel. Members of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future should visit these places (more…)

Deconstructing the Floodgates hypothesis: is nuclear recycling a proliferation threat?

Steve Aplin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:51:13 +0000

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 on aqueous (i.e., separative) reprocessing methods like PUREX, UREX+, or COEX, then—say those who oppose recycling—it is a proliferation threat (more…)

State support for nuclear power in Canada and France: a tale of two countries

Steve Aplin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:54:57 +0000

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 Normandy love it: those 2,700 contractors, all well paid, spend lots of money in the region. Watching this economic engine at work at Flamanville, I couldn’t help wondering how the people in Oshawa, Ontario feel about (more…)

Wind missing in action as heat wave pushes Ontario grid past 20,000 MW

Steve Aplin — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:00:30 +0000

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 we need them (more…)

The right way to defeat nuclear proliferation

Steve Aplin — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:42:20 +0000

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 rebuttals were effective (more…)

Operation Dismantle, 30 years on: it’s actually working

Steve Aplin — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:25:27 +0000

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. When I found out that Operation Dismantle had an office in Ottawa, I went and volunteered (more…)