Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses.
Mr. Harvel, you mentioned the social licence. Coming from British Columbia, I think it's more a lack of awareness of nuclear technology. If you ask most of my constituents what they think of when they think of nuclear they would probably list The Simpsons and then go down to some of the more unfortunate incidents that have happened across the last number of decades with nuclear accidents. I think that's the challenge the industry faces.
The industry was mentioned this weekend. There was a release of Canada's mid-century, long-term, low greenhouse-gas development strategy, a very catchy title. It didn't mention the oil and gas sector at all, but it did mention nuclear energy. We had talked in previous meetings about how this had not even come up as a clean technology, so that's positive for nuclear development. We heard in our mining study, which we just finished up, about small modular reactors.
You mentioned it in your presentation, but how close are we to actually having that technology commercialized and available? If we're 20 years off from that—or 10 or five, I don't know—I think we need to have an honest discussion, and government needs to be honest. If they're going to promote this as a way to get remote communities off diesel-generated power or to power large industrial development in remote regions, but it's not actually commercially available and it's a theoretical thing that maybe some day someone can come up with, that's disingenuous and doesn't serve the discussion well on greenhouse gas emissions.
Can you give me your best guess, or your best idea as to how far away Canada or the world is from actually having something in the window that can be utilized in the Canadian setting?