As the chair said, my name is Daniel Banks, and I'm here to testify as an individual, and more specifically, as an individual who is part of a grassroots group of volunteers known as CREATE. With me today is Gord Tapp, who's also a member of CREATE.
First, let me tell you what CREATE is. CREATE stands for Chalk River Employees Ad-hoc TaskforcE for a national laboratory. Some call it an awkward acronym, but I prefer to call it a creative one.
CREATE is, as I said, a grassroots, non-partisan group of volunteers. It includes current and former employees at Chalk River. I emphasize that each one speaks for himself and not for his employer. In May, Natural Resources Canada announced that AECL would be restructured. A few months later, CREATE was established as a grassroots effort to propose a vision for the future of Chalk River as a national laboratory that would include a new multi-purpose research reactor.
In the fall, CREATE developed and proposed its concept for the future mission of Chalk River, and we solicited support for our concept through consultations with other staff at Chalk River and vetted it with experts. We revised our vision as a result of those consultations and the feedback we received from the community and from staff. The results of this work are presented in our report, which is available on our website, “www.futurecrl.ca”. We've given some copies of the report to the committee clerk.
I would like to briefly present that vision.
The future Chalk River National Laboratory, or CRNL as I will call it, would be a vehicle for mobilizing science and technology to Canada's advantage by greatly broadening its scope. As a national laboratory, it would serve Canada, rather than serving one corporation as a company laboratory. We envision that CRNL would be Canada's premier laboratory for nuclear and related sciences.
Incidentally, I want to interrupt my presentation to comment that TRIUMF, which is also represented here today, is Canada's national laboratory for nuclear physics and particle physics, and although that may sound a lot like what we're presenting, it's quite different in practice. Chalk River and TRIUMF are complementary facilities rather than redundant ones. I just wanted to be clear on that.
Back to Chalk River National Laboratory—it would be a resource for researchers from across a broad spectrum, from fundamental sciences to industrial applications, including but not limited to research in development that supports the nuclear energy sector in Canada. Compared to the Chalk River of today, CRNL would be much more outward-looking by partnering and impacting at all levels of Canadian society. That outward focus includes several new functions—new to Chalk River—which includes leading diverse research programs beyond nuclear energy; partnering broadly with universities, industries, and government; as well as commercializing knowledge through high-tech spinoff companies incubated at Chalk River, or knowledge that is commercialized through transfer to industry partners and encouraging entrepreneurial investment in that sense.
In addition, by partnering with post-secondary education, CRNL will serve as a training ground for Canada's future generation of scientists and engineers by providing them with a creative research environment as well as world-class research equipment.
Such a national laboratory will also be a powerful tool for encouraging young people to seek science-based careers and for fostering a science and technology culture.
In summary, CRNL will be a major player in a greater mosaic of institutions across Canada that will help to build a sustainable national competitive advantage based on science and technology.
We see that the opportunity has arrived to begin a transition of Chalk River into this Chalk River national laboratory by establishing a future direction, such as we have proposed, with a suitable governance and business model to go along with that, in consultation with potential partners and clients.
In parallel to all of this, we also believe it's important to begin detailed planning for a new multi-purpose research reactor for research and isotope production that can take over and expand the functions of the aging NRU reactor over the long term. We believe the question of that new multi-purpose reactor is very closely related to the question of the future of Chalk River as a whole. It's difficult to consider those concepts in isolation.
Now that I have set out CREATE's vision, I want to emphasize a few points.
First, as a national laboratory, Chalk River would require baseline federal funding, but it would also attract revenue from various streams. Sources of revenue would include research partnerships with industries, including the commercial CANDU business that would result from the restructuring of AECL. It would also include full cost-recovery fees for access to its resources for proprietary research, waste management, or isotope production. We think this is indeed an important change. The practice of recovering full costs for proprietary access to the facilities would be a major step towards ensuring sustainability in a global supply network based on sound economics for isotope production.
Secondly, the future of Chalk River is a much larger question than the question of isotope supply. Of course, medical isotope supply is important to Canada, but it's only one of the issues. This was in effect recognized by the NRCan expert panel on medical isotopes, when it stated that “a multi-purpose research reactor represents the best primary option to create a sustainable source of Mo-99, recognizing that the reactor's other missions would also play a role in justifying the costs”.
Let me talk about the business model a bit more, because CREATE believes the other missions justify the costs.
Nuclear energy research and development will remain a key area. Canada's investment in the NRU reactor has been paid back significantly by spawning the Canadian nuclear energy industry, which is currently an enterprise of $6 billion per year, with significant room for growth. But even if no nuclear power reactors are built in Canada, R and D is needed to support the existing fleet of CANDU power reactors around the world.
For example, a research reactor would be used to obtain more precise knowledge of the conditions of materials inside nuclear power reactors that cannot be obtained by other means. It is likely the increased precision of that knowledge could allow Canada to safely extend the life of its reactors. Life extension of the fleet for even a few years would likely save Canada billions of dollars in electricity generation costs.
However, nuclear power is likely to be an even greater part of Canada's energy portfolio in the future than it is today, in part because we need clean sources of energy to replace depleting supplies of conventional fuels. In that case, nuclear R and D will be essential to take advantage of the energy available in our uranium deposits.
There are then all the other benefits of research in other areas, from biotechnology and nanotechnology to improving the reliability of aircraft components and bridges. There are also benefits in attracting and training highly skilled people. These benefits are more than the substantial economic impacts. They're also in health, energy, security, education, the environment, and the general well-being of Canada and the world.