Natural Resources Committee on May 28th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you, Mr. Wallace. As usual, you were concise. I'm sure you've answered a lot of the questions. I appreciate your anticipation.

We're going to go now to David Torgerson, senior vice-president of technology at Atomic Energy of Canada.

Ten minutes?

[David Torgerson, Senior Vice-President, Technology, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited]

Perfect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Great. Thank you, David.

[David Torgerson]

Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chairman and committee members, to talk about my favourite topic, nuclear energy.

I have prepared a deck, and the first slide is just an overview of how a nuclear reactor works. If you look at the upper left-hand corner, you will see a fuel bundle about the size of a log, which contains one million kilowatt hours of electricity. That's enough electricity for you and your family for about 100 years. So this is a very condensed form of energy. The fuel bundle is made up of rods, and these rods contain a solid ceramic material, uranium oxide, which gets burned in a nuclear reaction. That fuel is put into a fuel channel—which you can see in the upper right-hand corner. The fuel goes into a fuel channel, into a pressure tube. There are 12 of these bundles in each of the pressure tubes. Then at the bottom right-hand corner, you can see that these fuel channels are put into a large vessel we call the calandria.

The way it works is that the fuel heats up due to the nuclear reactions. The cooling water flows through the fuel, through the pipes. Hot water comes out of the pipes and goes into—as you can see on the left-hand side—some tall yellow structures. These are called steam generators; they're just large kettles. The heat from the nuclear reaction causes water in those kettles to boil, makes steam and turns the turbine. So that's as simple as it is; it's simply burning nuclear materials in order to create heat to make steam to make electricity. Of course, it does so without emissions from the fuel; the fuel looks the same when it comes out of the reactor as when it went into it.

This is all part of the CANDU evolution. On page 3, the generation II reactor, the CANDU 6, is now in operation in five countries. We have two of them here in Canada. The advanced CANDU reactor, which I am going to discuss, is a generation III+ reactor, the next step in innovation. Beyond that we have even further innovations, called the CANDU super critical water reactor, but I'm not here to describe that. I can only say this is a national program and an exciting new area of innovation for the young scientists and engineers coming out of our universities; speaking of which, we have hired about 900 of these young scientists and engineers from all over Canada over the past year. The nuclear business is really booming.

Let's move on to the ACR-1000. On page 5, I'd like to point out that nuclear power, as Mr. Wallace mentioned, has a large impact on emissions. Each twin station of the advanced CANDU reactor could prevent up to 15 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, by displacing coal. We also believe that the ACR is the least expensive and the only large-scale technology for avoiding large-scale carbon emissions for various applications.

On page 6, I indicate the heart of the reactor, the core. I'm again showing you all of the channels I showed you before for our flagship product, the CANDU 6. This is a 700-megawatt reactor. Over on the right-hand side is the ACR-1000, which is a 1,085-megawatt reactor. It's a lot larger, but it's hard to tell the difference between the two because the ACR is basically built on the CANDU 6. It's an evolution of the CANDU 6, but there's 57% more power. Everything we know from 50 years of nuclear research and development in Canada has gone into the design of this reactor.

The enhancements on page 7 are in safety, economics, and operability. On safety, if you address slide 9, there are many defence and in-depth safety features of this reactor. One of them is to surround the core with a lot of heat sinks so that if the cooling to the core is interrupted, there are many other ways of taking heat out of the core. This is a rather unique feature of CANDU, because the vessel in which those fuel channels fit is a large vessel called a calandria. That calandria vessel has to be full of water—in fact, heavy water—because when neutrons are born they're moving very fast, and you have to slow them down, so they're moving very slowly before they can be reabsorbed into the uranium.

It's done in the calandria vessel. In the vessel, 250 tonnes of water sit around the core. Heat can be transferred into the water if the normal cooling system and the emergency cooling systems are not available.

We have a large shield tank around the calandria vessel, which is shown at point number two, on page nine, and it is a 600-tonne body of water. It is again passively sitting there, waiting to take heat out of the core.

To back it all up, we have an even larger tank at the top of the reactor that is called the reserve water tank, which is shown at point number three. There are 2,500 tonnes of water that can flow by gravity down into any part of the core where it's required.

These are passive systems. You don't have to activate anything, and it just happens. Water flows downhill.

We've taken advantage of all those kinds of features in the design of this reactor. I've been in the reactor safety business for a long time, and this is an extremely advanced reactor with respect to safety enhancements.

We've also designed a very strong containment. This containment will withstand the largest airplane crashes. We haven't found anything that can penetrate this containment.

Constant improvements are very important. You can have the best reactor in the world, but if it's not economical, no one will build it.

First of all, there's delivery. On building on the CANDU 6 success, I'd like to point out that AECL and its Canadian partners in Team CANDU have a record that is second to none in terms of delivery. AECL has never built a reactor in Canada, but we have built all the CANDU 6 reactors outside Canada on time and on budget.

I said we've never built a reactor in Canada, but we've been a subcontractor to others. We would do the design of the nuclear island, but it was always built by others.

When we build these reactors, we bring them in on time and on budget. Our latest completed project, Qinshan, in fact came in at 10% below budget and four months ahead of schedule.

We know how to build these reactors because we spend as much time on product delivery and the technology for product delivery as we do on the technology itself. You need good technology, but you have to be able to deliver it. And the third thing is that you have to be able to operate it well. Those are the three keys for being successful in the nuclear game. I think some vendors concentrate an awful lot on the technology, but they forget about the delivery and the operability.

On the Cernavoda unit 2 in Romania, I'm pleased to say this reactor started to operate two weeks ago. It's in the process of being commissioned now and will be synchronized to the Romanian grid sometime near the end of the summer.

In the interests of time, Mr. Chairman, I'll skip over some of the technologies we've been developing in order to reduce the cost. I will move on to the third topic and the third thing that is important for a nuclear reactor, which is enhanced plant operations.

Our flagship product, the CANDU 6, compares very well to any other products out there today. On the lifetime capacity factor of the CANDU 6, it's operating in five different countries by large utilities that operate light water reactors, different types of reactors, as well as CANDU reactors, by utilities that only have one reactor, and by utilities that have many reactors and, of course, many different operating cultures. The lifetime capacity is nevertheless 86%.

There's not another single model of reactor that has a capacity factor as good as this one. It's partly attributable to the fact that we do not have to shut down the reactor to refuel. We can keep putting fuel into these channels and taking off the used fuel at the end of the channel.

We have 86% now, and we have set a goal for the ACR to be greater than 92% over its 60-year life. We think we can do this, and the way we're going to do it is partly shown on page 17.

The reactor itself sits around four divisions, and this is called a quadrant design. In order to operate the reactor, you only need to have three of the four parts of the reactor working at any one time. You can take one of them offline in order to do maintenance. These are all the auxiliary systems that take the power out of the reactor, but you only need to have three of those four operating. We can send crews to do maintenance, leaving the reactor on, rotating from quadrant to quadrant. In addition, we can get inside the reactor building itself, and as shown on the right-hand side, while the reactor is operating there are many areas of the plant that we can get into and actually do maintenance. The red areas you cannot get into. That's the reason you have to shut the reactor down once every three years to do maintenance.

The final thing I'd like to say is that we have put an awful lot of thought into advanced operations and the technology. One of the things that have been on my mind for a number of years is, seeing that the nuclear renaissance was going to take off and there were going to be many nuclear plants, how we get the expertise that is in the nuclear laboratories into the plants themselves, because there are simply not enough nuclear chemists, for example, to go around all the nuclear plants. You can't find them. So if you can't put the expert into the plant, can you bring the plant to the expert? That's what we've been doing.

Shown on this slide is an expert who knows all about steam generators and their performance. He can sit in the lab, and on his screen, using the smart CANDU technology, he can actually evaluate what is going on in the plant and assist the operator in keeping the plant operating very well.

So we have a number of these technologies, and we're going to use our content experts, sitting in our laboratories, to actually analyze these plants and anticipate ahead of time what preventive maintenance would have to be done to ensure that the plant is operating within its parameters. It's very exciting technology.

I would like to say here that there's a whole bunch of exciting technology going on in our national nuclear laboratory, which is only two and a half hours down the road. Mr. Chairman, I would invite any members of the committee to come and visit us. It's an exciting place to visit. Every lab you go into, you'll see some really wonderful innovative work by our scientists and engineers.

I would like to end with a comment on managing the waste. With the ACR-1000, the amount of nuclear fuel waste will be reduced by about two-thirds, because we'll get more energy out of every bundle by enriching the fuel and leaving it in the reactor for a longer period of time.

Mr. Wallace talked about the waste management process that is going on in Canada. I'd like to say that, to me, there's a very nice symmetry here. We take uranium out of the ground, a ceramic material; we put it into a fuel bundle; we then put it into a reactor, and we get huge amounts of energy out of it, without environmental emissions; it then comes out of the reactor and stays in water for about six years for cooling, but there's been sufficient radioactive decay over that period that you can then put it into dry storage, which is a passive way of storing it. Then, after some length of time--although dry storage would last for many, many decades--the plan would be to put it back into geologic formations where it came from.

So there's a nice cycle. You take it out of the ground, you extract lots of energy from it without emissions, and then eventually you put it back into the ground. If anything, you are putting it into an engineered state that is far more stable than the formations that the original ore came from. This ore has been stable for over a billion years in the deposits we have here in Canada.

Mr. Chairman, I apologize. I took a little bit longer, but I did try to give you a little sense of what a reactor is and some of the excitement that we have around our latest product, the ACR-1000.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you, Mr. Torgerson. Again, you were very thorough, and we appreciate it very much. The only difficulty is the lack of time we have to pursue this at length, so we're going to have to be pretty tough with the time.

Let's try to do five-minute questions and answers. I'll start with Mr. Holland, and we'll try to get through everybody.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

I'd like to start, if I may, on the issue of nuclear waste. I have within my community, obviously, the Pickering facility, which has a very good relationship with the community. I think they're doing a commendable job, although there have been some issues with cost overruns with refurbishment.

My concern is the fact that since November 2005 a report has gone to the minister from the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, submitting a plan for dealing with nuclear waste. As we're contemplating new facilities or continuing to use our existing facilities without that long-term solution in place, it creates some understandable concern.

If you know, can you tell me what the status is and when we can expect cabinet approval of that? Have you received any direction in that regard?

[Howard Brown]

The government is still studying that report. I think people are conscious that we have had it for a while, but when a response will be forthcoming, I really can't say.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

And you haven't been given any kind of timeline for it at all.

[Howard Brown]

We've had a number of discussions within government on it. So we're moving ahead with it as quickly as we can.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

At the risk of making a comment, I would just say that is key, because obviously we're looking at nuclear as a future option, and as part of a collection of things that are going to be the solution to our energy needs as we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have to know what we're doing with waste. Hopefully we're going to be hearing back from the government on that.

[Howard Brown]

If I could make a comment on your comment, I agree completely with that.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thanks.

I'm wondering if you could talk about nuclear versus clean coal, as an example, and some of the other emerging technologies that are going to be competing with the methods of producing energy. We have a lot of plants that are going to be turning over. Between 2012 and 2020 we have a lot of plants that will need to be replaced. We need to give clear direction on what we're going to be replacing it with. Can you give me a comparison both in terms of overall costs--and I'm talking about full life, right from creating the station to decommissioning it, versus something like clean coal and how it kind of compares in terms of greenhouse gas emissions as well as cost?

[Howard Brown]

That's a really difficult question to answer. I'm sorry if I sound evasive, but the reality is that there are no third-generation nuclear plants operating today. There's one under construction in Finland. I believe it's AREVA, the French company, that is working on that. It's behind schedule and over budget. Where the final cost will be is kind of hard to say.

Similarly, there isn't a lot of large-scale coal gasification infrastructure in place. I think the answer to that will be that there's room probably for both technologies, and it will depend to a large extent on the geology in the surrounding territory and the availability of the resource.

If you're in western Canada, particularly Alberta and Saskatchewan, there are a lot of opportunities for enhanced oil recovery, which makes the economics, as I'm sure you know, of clean coal better, and a lot of opportunities for storage. The geology is a little less favourable in Ontario for sequestration of carbon, and there you might see nuclear as maybe a more important source going forward.

The bottom line is that we're really waiting for these technologies to prove themselves and to show what the operating costs would be in a full-scale setting.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I know it's always difficult to comment on where commodities are going. I'm wondering if you can give us a quick overview of your sense of uranium deposits in Canada and the stability of uranium prices within the foreseeable future, because obviously that's going to impact the competitiveness of nuclear. I know that's speculative. I'm just asking for your best guess; it's nothing I'm going to hold you to.

[Howard Brown]

My track record on forecasting things like commodity prices is...maybe I should disclose that, and then you'd know how much weight to put on my comments.

There have been problems, as I think many people know, with production in Saskatchewan, and I think that's having an influence on prices in the short term. There hasn't been a lot of new development or exploration going on in the industry, because prices were quite depressed for a lengthy period of time. My own guess would be that prices would come down from where they are, and perhaps come down substantially. Nonetheless, I think the uranium industry has many years of exciting performance ahead of them.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I'm wondering if you could also give us an update on what the prospects are for the ACR-1000 technology, if there's any pickup in terms of interest in moving forward with the project either domestically or abroad.

[Howard Brown]

Dave Torgerson would be better placed to answer the question in terms of the specific discussions. I guess I'd say on behalf of the government that we're very excited by the technology. We think this is really the future of nuclear in Canada. We think it's worth the investment the taxpayers are making. We think there are really good prospects.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Mr. Torgerson, would you like to respond?

[David Torgerson]

I just wanted to mention that on the fuel supply it's important to understand that the fuel is a very small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. You can double the fuel cost and it doesn't have much impact on the cost of the power. Also, in terms of supply, in the much longer term we are looking at the possibility of burning thorium in CANDU reactors after uranium. We have three times as much thorium as we have uranium in this country. I do not see an end of the fuel for this particular technology.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Thank you.

Madame DeBellefeuille.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You told us, Mr. Wallace, that nuclear energy produces almost no GHG emissions. According to the information we have, it takes about 10 years to build a new nuclear power plant in Canada, because of all the tests that have to be done, and so on. So we could not actually use nuclear energy to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions until 2020. Building or refurbishing nuclear power plants has no immediate consequences; we're talking rather about the long-term impact. Using nuclear energy will not help us meet our Kyoto targets.

You spoke about the need for nuclear energy in Canada. Is the intention to increase the number of nuclear power stations or to modernize those we have already? I am not including the idea of using a reactor in the tar sands.

[Tom Wallace]

I think we probably have to do both. Certainly if you're talking about a new nuclear plant, you're right, with the regulatory process and the construction process, I think the earliest you could bring a new reactor on stream would be probably 2015 or 2016. The refurbishments are happening now, and of course, there's a much tighter timeframe on those projects. They are expected to come on stream in 2009, 2010, or 2011, that time period, which can be quite helpful in near-term reductions in greenhouse gases.

I guess the other dimension of this is just that in the day-to-day, to the extent we can keep the current plants operating efficiently, which has happened recently—the plants in Ontario, after some years of difficulty, are performing quite well now—the more juice you get out of your nuclear plants, the less you have to burn coal in provinces such as Ontario and New Brunswick. So that can be helpful as well.

The reason I say “both” is that if you look at Ontario, for example, which is the key market, they are certainly looking very seriously at refurbishments. There are already two done at Bruce and one at Pickering, and another two at Pickering that are under review. But even with all these refurbishments foreseen, Ontario believes it needs at least 1,000 megawatts of new nuclear, and I think some of the utilities actually think they're going to need more than that, which is why both Ontario Power Generation and Bruce have, on the drawing boards, construction of the four stations.

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

Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Wallace. You are talking about refurbishing and modernizing nuclear power plants that are no longer in operation. You want to reactivate them, but that is not increasing the number of new facilities.

[Howard Brown]

Perhaps I could take a stab at answering the question.

I think whether the solution is clean coal, new nuclear, large-scale hydro, or a combination of all those things, and more energy-efficient buildings, it takes time. That really was the key point behind the econometric analysis that was done by the government. In the short term, before you can build new nuclear plants, before you can build clean coal, before you can build large-scale hydro, the only thing you can do to really make a huge dent in emissions is reduce your level of output.

It takes time to build large-scale industrial facilities. You have to do the design, you have to do the engineering, and you have to do the environmental assessment. All those things take time.

So in the period between now and the end of Kyoto, 2012, our options are, frankly, very limited. If we'd started 10 years ago, it might be different, but we didn't.