Natural Resources Committee on May 16th, 2007

[Wayne Henuset]

I'll give you an example. We have to do an environmental assessment. To do the environmental assessment, there are probably about six bodies that have to come together. They have to give me an overview of what I should do to check the environment to make sure it's correct. It would be really nice for those six or seven bodies to get together and give me a plan and say these are the issues that we have at hand, rather than me now putting in my site application and then negotiating with each one of them what should be done.

I don't want to negotiate. Just tell me what you would like and expect to make sure that we have a safe environment moving forward for our fish and for our communities to live in, and here it is. Don't let's start into negotiations for a year and come up with this is what maybe we should do. Let's just have a little policy and say, “Mr. Henuset, you put your site licence in and here's what we have to do to make sure that our public is safe.”

Don't go into a negotiation factor and go through six different government bodies and everybody come up with a different plan. That's what it's at today. That's what I mean by streamlining. In fact, I like the idea of my environmental assessment being clear and decisive, so that 30 or 40 years from now I know what I started with.

I know what the environment is all about. I don't want to affect it. I have children, I have grandchildren. I want to live here. My children.... We moved. I'm no different from you. I want to make sure it's safe, but I want that process not to be who's around today or how they're feeling. I want, “This is it, Mr. Henuset; please do this to make sure our community is safe.” I'm not looking at streamlining anything. Just give me clear, definite direction.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you, Mr. Henuset.

Mr. Bevington is going to take the questions for the NDP.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

A number of issues around waste of course are very important. I have actually had the experience of two waste cleanups in my community where I live in the Northwest Territories. One of them was the result of a trail of yellow-cake from the Port Radium mine that went through the system and 70 years later you could still find where anybody had dropped any of this material on the roadway or anything that had happened. It's a very long-term source of concern to people, nuclear waste, and it doesn't go away very easily.

As well, I went through the cleanup of Kosmos 954 when it burned up over the Northwest Territories. It burned up probably 300 kilometres away from my home, and still, when they did the cleanup, they could go into my driveway and they could sort the radiation. The particles of radiation had fallen in my driveway from a device about two-feet square. They could find those pieces in my driveway, and this was in a radius of, as I say, 300 kilometres from where the device burned up in the atmosphere.

I think you see where I'm going here. There is a lot of concern about nuclear waste, because it doesn't go away. You can put it in storage. You have to maintain the storage. You have to ensure that it is done well. And if anything goes wrong in the process, such as with Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, you have a problem with this particulate through the system. It's not a light matter.

Who, ultimately, has responsibility for the nuclear waste now existing in Canada?

[Murray Elston]

I identified for Madame DeBellefeuille exactly who was responsible. Heritage waste is with the federal government. In fact the long-term mining, which you just identified--the uranium mine, for instance--is federal government.

I think the folks who are actually contracted to do it.... The reason money is going through the natural resources department is it has fallen to the AECL operation to take over or take charge of it. The people who are on site at each of the operating facilities manage that.

I haven't talked about the material that comes from research reactors at universities and others, but those likewise, I think, are contracted to AECL. I could stand to be corrected on those, but I think almost all of those find their way back through to AECL's operation. Ultimately the operators manage their own sets of waste and, as I say, it is not waste with respect to the fuel, but the used fuel. I think it will again become a source of more energy for us.

[Wayne Henuset]

To add to that, we're concerned about a waste that we actually hold on to--that we actually have control of it and make sure we monitor it. If you put that in an idea of what's happening with the waste from a coal facility and where it's going, I can't see its being comparable. Today we accept coal and its going into a dumping ground in the sky, but we're not acceptable to understanding that we can actually hold on to it and manage that waste.

Not only does that happen, but in 30 years of experience they can actually re-use that waste. I don't know why we keep going back to that same thing. I know it's very dangerous, but it also has a very fast timeline of the radiation dropping out of it. You can maybe allude to the timeline and how fast it drops out and the percentage that's dropped out.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

I think we've gone into that in enough detail right now.

What's the cost right now for a 1,000-megawatt plant?

[Murray Elston]

I'm not the technology seller, so I'm not in a position to answer that. Mr. Henuset is a buyer, but I'd prefer the commercial guys to give you prices. I'm not in that—

[Wayne Henuset]

I think that's between us and the AECL, that costing, but right now we feel we can deliver somewhere around 6¢ to 7¢ a kilowatt. That's about the going price right now. In order for me to develop our facility it would cost us about that.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

That includes the decommissioning cost and the dealing with the nuclear waste. That's your whole package.

[Wayne Henuset]

That's our whole package; that's correct. We have decommissioning costs in there, as well as looking after the waste fuel.

[Murray Elston]

If you want to take a look at a very practical operation at the moment, it's the refurbishment at Bruce. They're doing the two units at Bruce A, units 1 and 2, plus some upgrades at units 3 and 4 once they've done units 1 and 2. That's a $4.25 billion operation, which will yield a price of about 6.5¢ a kilowatt for the movement back on of 1,500-plus megawatts at Bruce units 1 and 2.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

How is that price dependent on the price of uranium?

[Murray Elston]

It's a minor amount in terms of the overall operation.

The big disadvantage for nuclear is that the cost associated with constructing the facility is big compared to a lot of other generating types. Our operation costs are really quite small. In most cases we would see the uranium fuel cost as being under 5% of the cost of operating. Hence, while we've seen an increase in the price of uranium--for instance, when I came here in 2004, it was $7 a pound, and it is now up over $100 a pound on the spot market--still, because it's such a small part of the overall operating component, it leaves us a very competitive production facility.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Is there any thought of using other sources of radioactive material, such as thorium?

[Murray Elston]

Yes, there have been.

There are a couple of things that are happening. The one important element that I didn't get to touch on was the movement of the technology into new areas of consideration. For us, thorium is not now seen to be an opportunity because we have such good and high-grade deposits of uranium.

Thorium is being actively considered in India, however, because they have big deposits of thorium. So there are considerations of using it, but under the current circumstances, we did a very quick calculation....

I'll step back one step. The biggest reserves that we know of right now, in order of the first three, are Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada. Those are the ones we know. We've got about 3.3 million tonnes of known reserves. There are another projected 7 million tonnes of expected reserves.

We think, overall, there are probably 14 million to 15 million tonnes of uranium available before we really have to start looking for other types of generators.

But if you take a look at how Canada produces electricity, people go to what is regionally available. So Alberta has lots of coal and they've been using coal. Water is abundant in Quebec, B.C., and Manitoba, so water is a chief resource. While we end up having a lot of access to uranium and for a long period of time, it doesn't preclude others from going to thorium.

Likewise, it hasn't precluded us from moving our technology. The ACR-1000, which is being designed by our friends at AECL, will probably get more output with a third less fuel than we're getting from our current reactors, which means that the reserves we know about in respect of the amount we're now consuming will be extended even further.

In addition to that, we've got the Generation IV International Forum on which the Canadian government has signed a treaty with international partners. There are 11 partners involved.

The folks at Natural Resources Canada are involved in looking at high-temperature reactors, which again will have efficiency quotients that will permit us to extend our fuel opportunities.

But the short answer is, we have lots of available material and at reasonably good prices compared to others.

And as I said before, we do it in an environmentally sensitive way. We're the only technology that knows exactly what goes into our units, when it went in, how long it was there, when it came out, and where it's been since it came out of the reactors. That very important containment chain, the unbroken carriage of that material, is what I think sets us aside from all other types of generating capabilities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you, Mr. Elston.

Thank you, Mr. Bevington.

We'll proceed now to Mr. Trost.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

There are a couple of major areas I want to get into. I'm most interested of course in the regulatory aspect that was brought up. And specifically, I'm looking for examples, comparisons, etc., that you might have from other jurisdictions internationally, and of course I'm thinking of other jurisdictions that take a very rigorous approach to the environment, to safety--France, Finland. Do you have any numbers, statistics, etc., about how long they would take for their regulatory process, and various aspects they might approach differently from the Canadian experience, regulatory-wise?

[Murray Elston]

I'm afraid I don't have any statistical comparators at all. I apologize for that.

I know our own regulator fairly well, but not the ones outside.

[Wayne Henuset]

On that comment, I just see that we have an opportunity here not to worry about others, but actually to bring a process that's fairly straightforward to our system. We are very concerned about our environment and our people, so if we're that concerned, we should have a process that's very defined so that I, or any other builder of a nuclear facility, can walk in and say here's what we need to do to make sure that it's safe.

In environmental assessment, different processes ask for different environmental assessments, but this is one that we know now and for which we should be ready, after 40 years.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Yes. I would say my concern wasn't so much that we are concerned about others, but I think it might be prudent if there are other countries that have found rather efficient, streamlined ways of getting this done. France has considerable expertise. So if there's something we can learn from how they do regulatory approach, that might speed it up. I think that would be a positive.

[Wayne Henuset]

Well, the United States has the largest number in the world right now. They've now streamlined their process to where you actually pre-approve your facility. They actually have a pre-approval process. You can say, “I want to use X reactor”, and they say, “yes, that's fine, here it is.” The drawings have been done and approved by the regulatory body.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

So basically, once a certain style of reactor has been approved, that reactor is then streamlined for approval? A little bit of siting work done for the local conditions, and away they go?

[Wayne Henuset]

Exactly.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

So I'm assuming, then, that their timelines would be dramatically shorter than what you're looking at.

[Wayne Henuset]

They're hoping to move it along a lot faster, that's correct.