When you look at packed audience halls at a nuclear industry convention, you know there is activity in the industry. Last week’s Canadian Nuclear Association annual conference and trade show was very well attended, and not just by the Ontario…
Category: Isotope reactor
Exporting low carbon electricity infrastructure: what Canada can do for the world
In the economic boom of the 1950s, Canada made a strategic gamble on its industrial future: it invested in developing the CANDU nuclear reactor. The CANDU was invented as a conscious decision to differentiate a product from its competition. Why…
Efficiency and symbolism in Canadian health care and medicine exports
In three and a half years, the operating license of the National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactor at Chalk River will expire. The NRU is a hugely important piece of research equipment, arguably Canada’s most important and certainly among its…
Atomic Energy Canada: the biggest applied R&D payoff in Canada’s history
In the wake of last week’s federal budget, Canadian newspapers have been publishing a lot of material on the current government’s approach to research and development funding. I am a professional practitioner in this space: over the past half decade…
Assessing America’s two-pronged anti-proliferation policy: failures, successes, and a way forward
U.S. policy for preventing nuclear weapons proliferation is a two-pronged work in progress. Prong One is essentially intellectual property protection: blocking certain other countries from access to technologies and processes that can help make explosives and bombs. Prong Two is…