Thank you.
I have a brief, 10-page deck that I'll try to go through very quickly just to provide members with an overview of the role of nuclear in Canada. First I would like to outline the role and the potential role for nuclear in Canada, what the role of the federal government is, a bit of a broad overview of the policy framework, and then some important developments in the last few years.
Nuclear energy is really part of our history, and we've had really sixty years of leadership and scientific excellence. Nuclear meets about 15% of Canada's electricity supply, and over 50% in Ontario. The industry is very much concentrated in Ontario, as I think members will be aware--at least the power reactor side of the industry--with 22 CANDU reactors in Canada, 20 in Ontario, and one each in Quebec and New Brunswick. The estimates of greenhouse gases displaced annually range from 40 megatonnes to 80 megatonnes, depending on whether you assume coal or natural gas would have been otherwise constructed.
We have six reactors constructed in China, Korea, Romania, and Argentina, and we are a very important supplier of medical isotopes to the world. We have 50% of the world's market, and we're the world's largest uranium producer.
The next slide just shows the three nuclear reactor provinces and the percentage of mix. You can see nuclear represents a big portion in Ontario; a fairly small percentage, with the one reactor in Quebec--which is of course a hydro-dominated province--and then almost 30% of New Brunswick's electricity.
The map shows the concentration of the industry across Canada. Of course the uranium industry is very much concentrated in Saskatchewan. There are very high-quality resources. Ontario is, as I mentioned, the home to 20 of our nuclear plants: eight in the Bruce Peninsula, eight at Pickering, and four at Darlington. Then there are two other reactors: one in Gentilly, Quebec, and one in Point Lepreau.
Our major research facilities are in Whiteshell and Chalk River, but the Whiteshell facility is in the process of being decommissioned, with its activities being transferred to Chalk River as a result of a decision made some years ago.
We see that nuclear power will be an important part of our energy mix for decades to come. It's virtually an emissions-free source of electricity. At the plant, there are emissions associated with uranium mining, which people will point out, but in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, there is virtually zero at the plant. It does enhance our energy security and help to add to a more diverse supply. It's increasingly critical to meeting Ontario's electricity challenges, in particular as the existing fleet ages.
Additional opportunities in western Canada haven't come to fruition yet. It's been talked about on and off in Saskatchewan as a possibility, but the size of the grid in Saskatchewan is such that it's difficult to make nuclear economical without integrating the system more with adjacent provinces. Increasingly there is interest in its possibilities for the Alberta oil sands.
New Brunswick has already made a decision to refurbish one reactor and is now undertaking a feasibility study of the possibility of constructing another one. A lot of that will depend on market opportunities, particularly in the New England market.
Of course, there are major opportunities for uranium production in Saskatchewan with the very recent escalation in prices.
The federal government has quite a dominant role in nuclear, not one that it exercises alone. We establish policies for the nuclear sector. We regulate all activities to ensure health, safety, security, and environmental protection. We support our economic and environmental objectives by advancing nuclear science, and of course we're the sole shareholder of AECL.
The next chart gives you a bit of a picture of the complexity of the industry and how the federal government needs to really work with provincial governments to make it all happen.
The Government of Canada, of course, owns essentially the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and AECL. The blue lines are really regulatory lines. The CNSC regulates a broad spectrum of the nuclear industry, and AECL in turn has contractual relations with many of the same entities. The provincial governments, of course, own the universities and hospitals and the public power utilities, and the public power utilities in turn own the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which has the management and funding responsibilities for dealing with nuclear fuel waste.
So I think you can see that to make all this fairly complex array of relationships work requires a lot of federal-provincial cooperation. It's sort of endemic to nuclear.
Our policy framework is not really written down in one document that says, “This is Canada's nuclear policy”, but it can be distilled, I think, from a series of some formal policy statements, and others can be distilled from observed behaviour.
On the formal side, we do have a very strict non-proliferation policy and sanction nuclear cooperation only with countries that have made a binding commitment to non-proliferation. We have strict and independent regulations through the CNSC. The CNSC reports through our minister to Parliament, and that is in the legislation basically to give the CNSC a degree of independence from the government.
We have a very well-articulated nuclear waste management policy that really is an embodiment of, I guess, polluter pays. It's a policy under which the federal government is responsible for setting the policy and the regulation, but the funding and the management of the solution are the responsibility of the industry that generates the waste. That concept is embodied in pieces of legislation like the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, which requires the utilities to set up the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to propose options to the government for the long-term management of nuclear fuel waste, once the government makes the decision to get on with the job of funding and managing the solution.
We have a uranium ownership and control policy that reserves new developments for ventures that are 51% Canadian owned or Canadian controlled. Of course, we've supported nuclear research since the inception of nuclear energy through Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. We've historically championed CANDU technology, both in Canada and abroad. Our whole program is developed in cooperation with provincial governments. However, we currently do not have any policies in place to provide direct support for nuclear stations, whether they be refurbished or new builds. In the early days, to get the industry going, we did provide loans for half the cost of the first reactors in a province, but that policy is no longer in existence.
To conclude, there's been a lot of talk about nuclear renaissance recently, both internationally and increasingly in Canada, and there have been some major developments over the last couple of years. First is that the existing CANDU fleet is aging. It's nearing the end of what I would call its half-life. So what we've seen in the past two or three years are a significant number of new major refurbishment contracts. Pickering A was the first, in the last year or year and a half; and in New Brunswick, Point Lepreau and Bruce units 1 and 2, there have been decisions made to refurbish. There are studies under way on Gentilly 2 and Pickering B.
So there's a major wave of investments happening on the refurbishment side.
The second sort of newsworthy event in the last couple of years has been Ontario's decision to set the stage for at least 1,000 megawatts of new nuclear. Pursuant to that policy, the environmental assessments have been launched by Bruce Power and Ontario Power Generation. None of those proponents have yet made a decision on technology.
Finally, one recent development is the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, set up under federal legislation, as I mentioned, to investigate long-term options for the management of nuclear fuel waste. They were required by legislation to study at least continuous storage at the reactor sites, centralized storage, or long-term geological disposal.
In November 2005 they submitted a report to the government, as required by legislation. It's a concept called adaptive phased management, which is essentially a hybrid of the three concepts in the legislation: storage at reactor sites; optional centralized storage, if that makes sense, some decades down the road for either technology reasons or social reasons or economic reasons; and ultimate disposal in a deep geological repository in a willing host community.
There's a lot of activity on the international side. I could probably go on and on, but I thought the committee would find it useful to have just a bit of an overview of the policy framework, the role that nuclear plays and is likely to continue to play, and some of the most important developments in the past couple of years.
Thank you very much.