Natural Resources Committee on May 16th, 2007

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Can you show us where you are?

[Murray Elston]

This one.

When you take a look at that graph, what it really says is there are a number of advantages to using low-carbon emissions and other atmospheric emissions-free technologies, including nuclear power.

If you turn to the next table, it comes from the Japanese Centre Research Institute and was released in 2002. Again, it looks at the relative placement of various types of generation fuels. Included in that you will see wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric at the very bottom course of that table indicating that there are some real advantages to going with emissions-free generation for the production of electricity.

The next two slides basically have quotes from two eminent environmentalists, James Lovelock, who has spoken at our seminar, and Patrick Moore, who has also spoken at our seminar, which is held every year either at the end of February or beginning of March. Both of those people, who have been instrumental in doing a great deal of active work to save the planet have, after years of examining what the options are, come to the conclusion that if we are really to have an impact on saving the globe from the carbon emissions issue, nuclear is going to be a big part of that, and those two quotations are there to remind us.

Well, let's take a look in Canada. The next table shows hydroelectricity at 61.5% of electricity generation in the country, and nuclear at 15.5%. When we look at nuclear at 15.5%, only three provinces have nuclear generation at the moment: Ontario, where we are over 50% of the electricity generated; Quebec has one plant at Trois-Rivières, Bécancour; and Lepreau at New Brunswick is our final generating nuclear facility. The table shows coal at 19.6%. Obviously, Alberta has a huge amount of coal. I think it's about 60% coal-generated electricity. So it's very obvious that people have chosen technologies that take advantage of their resident resources. I guess the exception might be, in that sense, Ontario. Although there used to be mining of uranium in Ontario, that has now changed and the uranium for Ontario basically comes from northern Saskatchewan.

Mr. Trost knows a little bit about that wonderful deposit in Saskatchewan. I have never seen anything like it, I must say. Cameco and Ariva Resources have a marvellous deposit there, sometimes over 90% pure ore, unheard of around the rest of the world. I don't like extending invitations on behalf of companies, but I would recommend that if people have a chance, if you can, visit that wonderful source of energy, not just for us, but for around the world, because a great deal of that energy, of course, is exported for consumption outside Canada.

The next slide reviews the nuclear industry in Canada. I won't stop there, but I must just highlight one thing, which is extremely critical for us in the nuclear industry. We have won one Nobel Prize. Dr. Bertram Brockhouse won it for his work in the nuclear industry. We are at the stage of being leading experts in nuclear technology in this country.

We are now at a stage where we need to renew the types of scientific and research facilities that are important for us to continue to keep that lead, so that we can stay at the head of this very competitive field these days. As I say, again, there are about 150 firms, 30,000 jobs, and growing because of the extra activity we are involved in, but you can see we are important in Canada, not only from the point of view of the commercial side, but also the academic and international slide.

The next slide is a very important item. It only is a snapshot of the fact that there are costs associated with each type of energy source--nuclear, coal, gas, biomass. All of those are at the very low end of costs--large hydro, obviously. All of that indicates to you that whatever we choose, there will be a cost, and we have to be cautious about the options we choose, because we are in a highly competitive international trading world that requires every advantage to be taken so that we can make sure Canadians come out on top.

I will just quickly go through two or three things.

For the first time in Canada, we have a private operator of a nuclear facility, at Bruce Power. They are, with private capital, starting to refurbish four units, which have been down. Two of them have been restarted; they are refurbishing units 1 and 2 on bank A at Bruce.

This is a $4.25-billion private capital investment on nuclear facilities. It is looking forward to highlighting the return to service of units that were shut down in 1997. Two of the units in the bank have already been brought back to service and have been performing very highly.

The next slide talks about oil sands extraction. My colleague will be talking more specifically about that, so I won't stop on this, other than to say that while people shouldn't say it's impolite to have your cake and eat it too, if we're going to get close to being able to liberate the oil from that wonderful facility in Alberta and keep our emissions low, then it would seem that nuclear offers the best opportunity of getting very close to it. We're very pleased in the industry that there are considerations to permit us to compete on a commercial basis for the wonderful opportunities that are there.

The next table lists something about which we're extremely proud, and that is the high level of performance you will see outlined in green. Bruce unit 6, Darlington unit 2, and Darlington unit 4 are at 97%, 98%, and 98.8% capacity factor for the year 2006.

One of the questions about our facilities has been whether or not they are reliable. The new technology and the upgrades that have been applied to these plants, and the new operating performance guidelines that each of OPG and Bruce have implemented, have driven us to provide this type of facility improvement, to the point where we are now approaching what most people wanted to see many years ago, and that is an 80% capacity factor lifetime for these units.

As you can see, we're not done yet with those improvements, and we're looking at going even further as we go on.

Here are a couple of quick points I can talk about a bit later in much more detail. Our safety record is second to none. There have been no fatalities related to radiation exposure at any of our plants. We have effective regulation with our regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is headquartered here in Ottawa, but which has representatives on each of our sites and is there to see what is happening on all occasions.

Concerning long-term fuel handling, we have a report in front of the government, which came in 2005 and is still residing there for decision, with respect to long-term handling of our used fuel. The report was made by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization in, I think, November of 2005. We are awaiting the option they have identified, which is, of course, deep geological storage. It is not just, in the words of an infomercial, to “set it and forget it”, but to maintain it in such a way that it can be monitored long-term and even recovered for the purposes of reprocessing, if that is seen to be necessary.

Something not well known is the fact that when those fuel bundles come out of our calandria, we have used less than 1% of the available energy, so there is a huge amount of energy still available in that spent fuel. We are looking forward to not just dumping it someplace, but to keeping it available so that the tremendous amount of energy there is available for us in the future.

Here are a couple of points along the lines of the inquiry from Madame DeBellefeuille. Electricity generation around the globe sees nuclear at about 16%. I will just touch on the fact that there are new units being built in Finland. One is under construction now, and a second is being planned. There is one that has just been approved for France at Flamanville. There are several in China.

In fact, we had both the Chinese and the U.S. ambassadors at our seminar a couple of years ago. China was looking at building 31 new units, which would increase their total electricity generated from nuclear power from 2% to 4%. That's 31 units of nuclear capacity.

The United States is looking at roughly a 20-number addition, and who knows what will happen as we move further down the road. In addition to that, there are obviously changes happening in Russia. There are considerations about where nuclear goes in many other of the European countries, including Germany, Sweden, and others as they look at that energy crunch, particularly around electricity.

I must say one other thing in summary. Globally we have saved between two billion and three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year because of nuclear generation. We have 440 nuclear units operating around the world, and several more are being planned--over 200, in fact.

Here I should say that our member company, AECL, has just signed an agreement to investigate the prospect of working collaboratively again with the folks in Argentina.

So there are very many opportunities. I can say that in Canada, the CANDU reactors have avoided about 1.4 billion tonnes of emissions since 1972.

All of that in a package indicates that we can help with the greening of the environment here by avoiding these emissions. We're pleased to do it on the basis of performance, on the basis of commercial competitiveness, and on the basis of timely building of our projects.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you, Mr. Elston. Thank you for an excellent brief, very well done. It's material we can follow up on and look at.

We're going to continue with witnesses before we proceed to questions.

Our next witness is Mr. Wayne Henuset from Energy Alberta Corporation. Welcome again, Mr. Henuset. You know the game. Please proceed.

[Wayne Henuset, President and Co-Chairman , Energy Alberta Corporation]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for having me here again. I don't know if you remember, but I was here a couple of months ago, when I talked about nuclear power for the oil sands.

To date, we've moved along. I'll give you a quick overview of where we are today. If you remember who I am, it's Energy Alberta. This is a privately owned company. There are two shareholders to date, Hank Swartout and me, the owners of the company.

We have an exclusivity agreement with AECL, Atomic Energy of Canada, to build two reactors in Alberta. We're hoping to build the ACR-1000. We're actually putting in for our site licensing approval on June 15.

We're working with two communities as we speak. To give you an idea, tomorrow night I do my first open house at a town-hall meeting in Whitecourt. Not only are we doing the Whitecourt community, we will also do the first nations at three o'clock. We're having three meetings: we'll do the Rotary Club, the first nations, and the town-hall meeting, all in the same day, which is tomorrow. So my material for you is limited, because we're getting our material ready for the town-hall meetings.

I'm quite a firm believer in what Murray has just mentioned, which is what's happening in the world right now with the renaissance of nuclear power. We brought that power and that idea to Alberta. What has happened in Alberta that everybody here should be aware of is that Alberta does have some oil companies that are very concerned about the CO₂ issues. So we have an off-taker in Alberta that wishes to buy nuclear power in Alberta and likes the idea of using Atomic Energy of Canada's nuclear generation system.

This is private business for a private company that wishes to use the clean technology that nuclear power has to offer. Not only is it clean technology, but we, as well as our off-taker, believe that it's reliable and has stability of pricing. Here's a company in the oil business that believes that it needs a stable energy source, and it's going to use nuclear power. You can bring up a whole bunch of questions or concerns about whether it is right or wrong. Well, you have a private oil company that wishes to take that much power, which is a substantial amount.

Just to give you a quick rundown, to date, council members from two communities wish to host our facility. We are working closely with Whitecourt and Peace River in Alberta. Whitecourt is where we're going tomorrow. We've talked to the council in Peace River, as well, and they're very interested. In Whitecourt, not only do we have the council interested, we have the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club interested. And the community hopefully will be interested tomorrow as well.

We actually have taken an approach that's a voluntary approach. So we're trying to inform the community about nuclear power to make them feel comfortable. We're asking them to host us. Tomorrow night, in both cases, we've been invited guests to the community. We did not go to the community.

Just to give you a little bit more of an idea of why I'm here today, I need government support on the regulatory side, as well. We're very concerned about what's happening on a regulatory basis in Canada today. They have a number of mining projects. They have a number of nuclear projects that are being planned. They have some upgrading facilities they're upgrading. We're concerned about their ability to look at our process in a timely fashion. That timely fashion comes from you people who give them the directions to make sure that not only do they have the resources, but they have a commitment from you people that you feel that this is the right thing to do for Canada today.

That timely review is important to us. Not only does it cost money, but you also have an off-taker that needs it in a timely fashion. If we don't meet that in a timely fashion, they won't take that power.

What's happening, what I'm hearing not only from yourselves but also from the community, is that they want us to clean up that CO₂ issue. This is an opportunity that we have to clean up the CO₂ issue, and we need you and the regulatory body to do that in a timely manner. If it's not done in a timely manner, we as a group fail. I think we as a group need to make sure that regulatory body does it in a timely manner.

That's what we're doing in Alberta, and I do need the help from the committee and from the government to make sure the regulatory body does their job in a timely fashion and they have the resources to do that job.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Well, I'm sure that will provoke questions, in any event.

Thank you, Mr. Henuset, for that. That's an interesting disclosure.

I understand that many of the committee members were sent a detailed package from AECL some time ago, I think, outlining your proposal in Alberta and your intention to proceed as soon as possible to build two plants. Is that right?

[Wayne Henuset]

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We have informed the provincial government, we've informed some of the ministers here in Ottawa, we've informed the community, and now we're informing the general population of the communities where the reactor is going. So far, as my partner says, we've had fairly good, clear sailing, and hopefully we'll have clear sailing with the regulatory bodies in making sure our applications get reviewed in a timely manner.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you again for the presentation, and also Mr. Elston.

We'll proceed now to questions from the committee, beginning with Mr. St. Amand.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to both of you for presenting this afternoon.

Mr. Elston, I represent a riding in Ontario, and those of us from Ontario and probably others around the table will know how well you served the province of Ontario with integrity and great skill for some years. So it's nice to have you present before us.

I want to talk a little bit about the perceived risk vis-à-vis nuclear. Whenever nuclear is mentioned, in some circles it conjures images of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and it seems to me that at least in North America there are communities and individuals who have been scarred by what happened elsewhere. I appreciate the data with respect to the safety records, which is laudable, but do you find in your presentations or in your discussions with citizens a concern about the safety of nuclear, people saying it's relatively inexpensive, it doesn't produce the greenhouse gas emissions that coal, for instance, surely does, but they really don't want to live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor? Is that still out there, that type of view?

[Murray Elston]

Yes, I think it is.

In fairness, people who have not had to live in close proximity to any major facility, any major industrial facility, I think understand less about the type of safety required of the people who work inside the plant gate. That's not only with nuclear, but it is particularly with nuclear an important one, because you've identified both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which were the two large events that everybody has been able to focus on.

In 1979, Three Mile Island, the interesting thing about this was that the vessel worked exactly as it was designed to do, there was total containment, and no loss of life. There was an incident inside the containment, but it was kept safely there. The big problem, obviously, was Chernobyl, which of course was designed without containment. That was in fact a weakness of that type of reactor going forward, and I think a lot of people knew that.

While accidents can always happen, and while we plan our safety systems in depth with respect to the Canadian technology, the type of accident that happened in Chernobyl cannot happen with our units.

That having been said, we spend all our time making sure the women and men who work inside our plant keep it safe. So we've now had I think probably fourth-generation people showing up at the gates of our facilities to work inside those places and we have host communities that are extremely supportive of the types of operations that go on there.

We do not just work inside the gate. We of course have very strong emergency measure planning, in conjunction with the communities, so we work with those communities at a very high level. But as you rightly identified, once you're a long way away from there and you don't understand all the things that happen, it's very hard to persuade people until they've actually become accustomed to the knowledge that comes from working with the technology over a series of years.

We have discovered over the last several months that the more we speak to people about the technology and the more they understand the record we have, there is an easing of the concern about safety. But there is no question that you've identified one of those issues. If we go to a brand-new community, as Mr. Henuset is, you start all over. You prime the community for questions and you show them what the technology can do, and then you demonstrate, through the 40-year history we have, that we can do it safely.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

If I may ask either of you, then, I understand that tremendous strides have been made with respect to the storage of nuclear waste. Can you touch on that a little bit?

[Murray Elston]

I can.

There are two stages now in the Canadian context, in the world context. As the material comes from the calandria, where it is generating the heat to generate the electricity, it is put in water sometimes called the swimming pool and it cools there between seven and ten years. Then it is moved into dry storage above ground in concrete designed facilities in Douglas Point, which was our first prototype commercial operation, a 200-megawatt unit at Bruce. Those are above-ground storage facilities that look like silos. At Becancoeur, they are what is called a “max store”, designed by AECL, which is a different shape, but they do the same thing. They contain in dry storage the spent fuel. And that is where it is now.

The third phase, which is what the NWMO has worked on, is then to take the material and introduce it into a deep geological repository with the prospect that there will be an intermediate step, slightly below-ground storage area, which would permit us not only to monitor the dry fuel storage area, but also to retrieve it, if we needed to reprocess it.

So I think the big thing is that when we first started taking the material from the calandrias, we theoretically had an understanding of what would happen. When I toured the Douglas Point facility, which was taken out of service in the mid-eighties, I asked if things were happening the way they were expected to with respect to the decommission that occurred there. And people identified that is exactly what's happening.

The interesting thing about physics is that it's physics, and once you know the properties of the materials you're dealing with, you can predict pretty well how this is going. What you can predict as well is how the man-made structures that are designed to contain and deal with them are working, and those structures are all working extremely well indeed.

So we've been very sophisticated. We've got a lot of science that goes into dealing with it. And I think the other thing that permits us some degree of comfort is that the deep geological repository option is one that is also well along the way in Finland as well as in Sweden as well as in France. Of course I think everybody has probably heard about the Yucca Mountain Program. So we're on the right track, a good strong record now of forty-plus years of storage. I think in the early days we thought we'd just be leaving it. I think now we're turning our minds to thinking about making sure we can get at that energy when we need it later.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Last question.

[Wayne Henuset]

I want to add something to that. Murray mentioned one thing that's happening in France, U.K., Russia, Belgium, Japan. They're all refurbishing their fuel right now, so they're reusing it; 95% of the fuel can be reused. The United States right now is looking at building their own refurbishing facility, and Japan is well into the refurbishing facility.

Right now in Canada we don't refurbish. We store it on-site and then we hope to store it off-site in an underground facility. But that's an asset for our future generations. The technology has been around for 30 years, but when Canada gets to a point where we need to use that uranium and reuse it, we can do it. The technology is there. We have a lot of fuel available for our future generations' energy needs, and we should never not look at that.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

One last question, Mr. Chair. Thanks for your indulgence.

If there were a groundswell of support to increase our nuclear output by 10%, for instance, what would need to be done--an expansion of current plants, building of new plants? What would happen?

[Murray Elston]

Some of all of that, obviously.

In Ontario, for instance, we're at about 12,006 now, I think it says in my notes. We were around closer to 14,000 before, and then we shut down a couple of the units. But 10% is not that much any more. They put in a 1,000-megawatt unit, the ACR-1000, which produces about 1,175 megawatts gross power. So it doesn't take much to increase your output by 10%.

Two units that are being discussed for Alberta would more than match that. And there is consideration in the Ontario Power Authority's report in Ontario to build a couple of units. Part of that would be, of course, to replace the two Pickering units that are not going to be reopened. But I think it is not too difficult to see our moving well beyond an increase of 10% in nuclear generating capacity as we see our population grow.

What is so startling for us is—taking a look at Ontario as an example again—when people believed that we were oversupplied with electricity. I have a slide that shows the gap in supply for Ontario, but unfortunately I didn't bring it to this because I thought that would be a bit too long. Through the 1990s, we thought we had all kinds of electricity. If you go from one side of this country to the other now, there is a very strong belief, a very strong reflection in major parts of this country, that we do not have enough electricity supply at the very time when we're anticipating, for Ontario again, seeing about 300,000 people arriving here each year, in addition to the population we have. That's just the province of Ontario, but that is happening right across the country.

So looking at supplying the energy needs of people with computers and televisions, production facilities with computerized and mechanized operations, it's not too far beyond the prospects of the 10% increase.

[Wayne Henuset]

I'd like to add to that.

As a businessman, my biggest challenge is the regulatory issues. It scares the living death out of me to take four to five years. So my business model is nine years to build a nuclear power facility. There's no reason for nine years for this to happen. For some reason, we have a regulatory body that takes four to five years to come up with a “Yes, it's okay”. If we can streamline that...we can get approval for a coal-fired power facility in Alberta in one year. For this process, I should be looking at anywhere between four and five years for that approval process.

For building a power facility.... This is a power facility, gentlemen. Yes, it's got nuclear attached to it, but that nuclear is quite similar in the sense that we do have coal facilities, we have gas facilities. Let's streamline that regulatory process, to make sure that Canadians are safe, yet we fix the CO₂ issue and we make it economical for people to build nuclear facilities.

You asked a question about what the community responses are. In the communities where nuclear power is today, there's a 90% approval factor: “Build more right here in my community, come on.” Everybody is scared to death, saying that you can't build them in any other communities. I'm saying the opposite. I have everybody in that community, other than the general public, saying “Yes, come to my community”.

So that little question and that cloud over everybody's head who's worried about opening and going to a new community.... I was invited to two communities. Since then, I've been invited to three others. These are communities asking me to come, not me going to them. So some of that is misbelief.

The other thing is, if we can clean up our regulatory issues so that it doesn't take four to five years to get approval, we would have more nuclear facilities. Because they've got such a stellar track record after the last 40 years.... What industry has that kind of a track record? And you could bring the cost down if you just clean up the timelines, because the cost of my funds is ridiculous. So that's just good business.

[Murray Elston]

I think what is critically important is that the regulator has mandated upfront consultation processes. The opening up, as it were, of nuclear industry transparency, the engagement with people in a way that I think has never been seen before, has helped us move the ball a great deal on that. As I said, what is helping us is the more people hear about us, know about us, and the more people they know who have worked in the facilities, the better it is for us. So maybe there are some advantages to having people being much more familiar with us and our industry.

You know, a 40-year history is not that long in the world of industrial development. This is really our first commercial run at using nuclear power as a commercial generating option. We're doing pretty well with it, but we need to get our story out, and that's what we're trying to do.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. St. Amand. Those are questions that people like to have answered.

We'll proceed now to Madame DeBellefeuille.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Thank you very much for your presentations. Nuclear energy is back in the news. Last evening, a Radio-Canada radio feature dealt with the pressure on uranium prices caused by the construction of nuclear power stations in China. This is a subject that interests me greatly. We have to be able to weigh the pros and cons. In that sense, your presentations gave us food for thought.

On the other hand, Mr. Elston, I am a little surprised to hear you call nuclear energy clean energy. It is as if the fact of reducing CO2 earned the title “very clean”. The problem of the waste remains very real, even if solutions are possible. The management of nuclear waste is our greatest environmental problem at a moment, and we still have no clear solution to it. As a result, some environmentalists and members of the public are afraid of radioactive waste being transported and buried, and of radiation. The public is really wary of nuclear energy.

To be considered clean, it is not enough that nuclear energy does not emit CO2. The question of waste must also be considered appropriately and responsibly. After all, Canada has still not decided how and where the waste will be buried.

Quebeckers are particularly concerned because one of the potential sites under consideration is the Canadian Shield, which in part lies in Quebec territory. Since Quebec uses only 2% of the country's nuclear energy, it is certainly not interested in burying waste that comes from Alberta or from other provinces. This is one of the reasons why Quebeckers are very sensitive to the nuclear question and why they follow it so closely.

Mr. Henuset, you make me smile when you say that oil companies want to reduce CO2. Actually, they have been very honest and are not embarrassed to tell us that their main concern is to reduce their consumption of natural gas because that is one of their greatest expenses in oil sands development. Nuclear energy is an alternative that would allow them to use less natural gas, and, above all, to reduce their energy costs for extracting oil from the tar sands.

I have two questions. The first is directed to Mr. Elston. I have carefully looked at the government budget that deals with natural resources and I have seen that a lot of money is being spent on the management of nuclear waste. Who is financially responsible for the management of waste?

You and Mr. St. Armand feel that development of nuclear energy in Canada is a viable option. What is the projected cost of managing the waste in the long term? How much is this going to cost Canadian taxpayers?

[Murray Elston]

Let me begin with the fact that we have three, I would guess, classes of nuclear waste, if you would describe it as that. One is the so-called “heritage waste”, which has actually come from the days when the federal government was responsible for and was managing the extraction and the shipment of all the uranium that was mined. There are sites, historically, that have fallen to the federal government to renovate.

Some of the first announcements made by this Minister of Natural Resources were around the funding, I think, of about $540 million towards dealing with the “legacy waste”, as it's called. It is in fact restoration work around transportation lines in northern Saskatchewan and other parts of the country. It is dealing with low-level waste at Port Hope, where there was a uranium facility, which probably most of you have read about. And there was, in fact, an office in Montreal that was dealing with the historic waste from the original sites where a lot of work was done.

That classification of material, which is left over from the heritage development of the industry, resides with the federal government and has, I think, in most cases, been the same for places such as the United States or Great Britain, or otherwise. In fact, when Great Britain sold their operations, their nuclear state-owned operations, they obviously retained the liability to deal with the historic waste, and I think that has been the model that has most effectively been seen to be fair for all of the people in the societies where those choices have been made.

The second classification of waste is the low and intermediate level of waste, which really represents the tools, coveralls, and clothing that people wear when they are inside the units. Tools used to do actual work are probably also intermediate waste, as opposed to low. Those are contained in a single facility in Ontario, and probably also at site in Quebec, and also at Point Lepreau, where the materials are compacted. They are treated in many ways just like regular garbage, if I can describe it that way. So it is contained in a special way, but likewise, by the people who are operating the facilities.

The third batch—actually I guess there's a fourth—is really the spent fuel bundles, and those I've described in my remarks to Mr. St. Amand. The material goes into water first, and then from the water into the dry storage and moves forward.

The siting, which is what the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is now waiting for permission to proceed with, is seen to take upwards of 30 years, to find a site that is appropriate. The process is, I think—

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Who pays for that, Mr. Elston? What are the projections? Who pays at each stage? You have just talked about a historical legacy of $540 million being paid by taxpayers. Who pays for the two other stages?

[Murray Elston]

The heritage, by the taxpayers. The intermediate and the low-level are paid for on site by each of the operators. The NWMO is mandated to be paid for by the operators of the nuclear sites, the owners of the nuclear sites. So Ontario Power Generation, Hydro-Québec, and New Brunswick Power are responsible for funding the operation of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization and for putting aside the money, through their operations, to set up a fund that will pay for the development of the repository and for the long-term management of that. There is already an amount that is assigned by each of those operators towards the future management of that material.

As I said, we looked at it in the beginning as being a waste stream, which meant that we would only have costs associated with its long-term containment. We now look at it as a very valuable resource, and there will be, in my view, a revenue stream coming from the material that we have in the repository.

I think Mr. Henuset also identified a very important element that is about to be considered, and that is the reworking of the material. At the current time, because of the value of the deposits in northern Saskatchewan, we have been able to use only new fuel. But there will come a time, I think, because the prices now have moved considerably higher in uranium because of worldwide demand, that there will be an economic case made for us reworking that. So our reprocessing plant would probably go along with the geological repository, and the people who buy that fuel would pay for it.

So right now the ratepayers in Quebec, in New Brunswick, and in Ontario are the ones who will be paying for the material that is to be managed into the future.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Do you want to respond to the question? I have another one for you .

[Wayne Henuset]

Okay. I just wanted to add to that a little bit, and that was that we actually have to put money aside for management of the waste. So we actually, in our financial modelling, put money aside to manage the waste ongoing.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Henuset, you seem dissatisfied with the regulatory framework. You consider that it takes too long for you to put your business plan into effect, and to achieve your goal of building your reactor in Alberta.

I am no environmental expert, but I assume that if five years are needed, it is for good reason. There are important stages to observe.

You are asking us to rationalize. Is that another word for reduce? What frightens me is that in your haste to build the reactor in Alberta, you are pressuring the government to reduce its environmental requirements. If five years are needed, it must be for good reason.

Tell me exactly what the steps are. Can you tell me what takes too long? Which environmental requirements would you like to see removed?