Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. It's the first time I've been in front of such a committee.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 11 years as an engineer and also as a manager, mostly supporting the CANDU product, and then later the smaller reactor technology, such as MAPLE and NRU. I have some knowledge of that aspect of the work cycle.
I then went to the University of Ontario Institute of Technology for 10 years as a professor in research. If you ask a professor to come before a committee about R and D funding, of course they're going to say they want more money. That kind of goes without saying.
I find that in Canada, we cover the entire spectrum of the nuclear industry, right from digging it up out of the ground, and milling it and mining it, to the work that Cameco does, to the designing of nuclear power plants and facilities, processing the construction, operations, maintenance, and decommissioning. We have it all.
In the beginning, in the 1950s and 1960s, that was great and wonderful. We had strong support for that. Nowadays, it's too much. There's so much scope to it, it's hard to fund every single piece of it. The R and D funding at the university level ends up being spread out, trying to cover every bit of area. We end up with marginal improvements in each area, as opposed to significant advancements in maybe some key focus areas. That may be something worth considering, to see where would we like to focus the research at the university level, so that we can start making the major significant advances that we would like to make.
One of the advantages that we have is in our personnel. Our university, alone, has produced over 500 nuclear engineering undergraduates in the past 10 years, which is a significant increase in the workforce. That said, that means the oldest of them is about 10 years active in the service. We have many people who are very close to retiring, and we are at risk of losing that knowledge skill set.
We need the programs at the graduate level, the UNENE programs that Jerry Hopwood talked about, and perhaps some other R and D focused programs at universities, to strengthen the skill set of our core workforce to maintain the strength that Canada currently has. We need to maintain those strengths, not only for our own industry but because this is a major exportable skill set.
If you look at the United Arab Emirates, they're hiring Canadians to help construct a nuclear power plant designed by Korea that doesn't use Canadian technology. Why are they using Canadians? Because they like working with Canadians. They're good people to work with. They have the skill set and knowledge to be able to work on almost any reactor design around the world. They're very good at project management, very good at construction work. This is a skill set we need to maintain in our country, because we can export it around the world and have a strong economic impact to our country.
The other aspect that we should consider developing, at least to some extent, is the nature of the social licence in dealing with the public. In the nuclear industry, we've had pretty much a hands-off affair. We've developed the programs to educate the public through the regulator. Each utility has its own responsible areas for their information centres, and we have programs in high schools to help with the education.
However, by and large, we are not making major efforts at explaining this technology to Canadians. Therefore, they still don't necessarily understand it. If you don't understand the technology, then it's hard to make informed decisions about what the risks are and whether or not we should be proceeding with new builds, etc. We always run into this resistance. That is another area where I'd like to see some focus or effort going forward.
In terms of supporting the current CANDU fleet, the main focus is on finding ways to do it safer, faster, and cheaper. We don't have to sit there and design a new CANDU 6. We already have one of the best machines in the world. We know how to build it. We know how to run it. It works very well in New Brunswick. It works very well in China, in Argentina, in Romania. Countries that do not have strong nuclear backgrounds can run this machine and run it very well. The technology is good, but we need to find ways to make it cheaper to build, make the maintenance cheaper to do, and get the costs down, so it can be even more economical, especially going forward.
With respect to new designs, such as the supercritical water reactors or small modular reactors, basically, I believe we need to focus on one. Canada needs to decide what it is it wants to do.
Do you want to develop a supercritical water reactor? Then we should put money into it and focus on that one design and not worry about the rest. If you want to go toward a small modular reactor, then that's where we should be concentrating the funds. If we try to do it all, what will end up happening is that other countries will develop that technology before we will, and we will end up in a support role as opposed to a lead role.
Anyway, I have answers to your questions, but I think it's better if I let you ask the questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.
Thank you.