Thank you very much for providing me with this opportunity to speak with you. My name is M.V. Ramana and I teach at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. The University of British Columbia is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
I carry out research on various technical and policy challenges associated with nuclear energy and small modular reactors. I will focus my remarks on the implications of the potential deployment of SMRs, small modular reactors, for the governance of nuclear waste in Canada.
My research shows that SMRs cannot solve the problems confronting nuclear energy, specifically its inability to compete economically with alternative sources of electricity. If they are actually constructed, SMRs could accentuate this problem.
The term “small modular reactor” actually encompasses a wide variety of reactor designs and these produce different kinds of nuclear waste. The SMRs being considered for possible deployment in Canada in the foreseeable future all have one common feature: They are all very different from the traditional CANDU reactor designs.
The designs I'm referring to are the ARC-100, which is a sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor; the micro modular reactor, a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor; the BWRX-300, a light water reactor; and Moltex, a molten salt reactor coupled with a reprocessing plant.
Each of these will produce radioactive wastes that vary in characteristics such as chemical composition, physical form and uranium enrichment. These differences mean that the methods developed for dealing with CANDU reactors will not work as such for these wastes. For example, a geological repository will have to account for the higher uranium enrichment levels because of concerns about criticality.
Some SMR designs envision the reprocessing of spent fuel. Advocates of reprocessing claim that it solves the waste problem, but except for most of the plutonium and uranium, the radioactivity present in the spent fuel is redistributed among different waste streams that enter the environment sooner or later. Most models of repository behaviour suggest that the radioactive doses to the public in the long term are dominated by long-lived fission and activation products, which will not be taken care of by reprocessing. Therefore, reprocessing makes little difference to long-term management of nuclear wastes, while making nuclear weapons proliferation easier.
The challenge with some of the wastes generated by SMRs is their chemical nature. Wastes from molten salt reactors could be in chemical forms that are not known to occur in nature and thus unsuitable for geological disposal. For fast reactors like ARC-100, the problem is that metallic sodium is very reactive.
The historical experience with wastes generated by earlier reactors of similar design reinforces these concerns. For example, the fluoride salt wastes generated by the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment that operated in the United States have been very difficult to manage, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been spending about $10 million every year for decades, all for a small eight-megawatt reactor that operated for under four years.
To summarize, borrowing from George Orwell's Animal Farm, I would say that all radioactive wastes are problematic, but some radioactive wastes are more problematic than the others.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you.