Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 29th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here on this beautiful November day.

We have three witnesses in the first hour, and we'll get right into it. We have with us Mr. Michael Delage from General Fusion; Simon Irish from Terrestrial Energy Inc.; and Dale Austin from Cameco, who is a familiar face around here.

Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us today.

Mr. Austin, you know the procedure.

For the benefit of the other two, I'll explain that I'll give each of you up to 10 minutes to make a presentation, and then we'll open the floor to questions from the committee members. We have an hour.

Mr. Austin, why don't we start with you, since you're a veteran of these things?

[Dale Austin, Manager, Government Relations, Cameco Corporation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It is my pleasure to be here today, to appear before the committee on behalf of Cameco once again, as your study examines the important role of the Canadian nuclear sector and the role it plays in our economy through trade, manufacturing and processing, and high-quality employment; addressing climate change and the transition to cleaner energy; and the advancement of nuclear science and technology, innovation, and research and development.

Cameco firmly believes that a strong natural resource sector that includes a strong and growing nuclear sector will continue to provide a stable foundation for ongoing growth and prosperity for all Canadians. As one of the country's leading sustainable resource developers, Canada's largest industrial employer of aboriginal people, and a major contributor to low-carbon technologies that address climate change, Cameco is proud to be a leader in Canada's nuclear sector.

Based in Saskatoon, Cameco is a significant player in the global uranium market and accounts for just under 20% of total global uranium production. Our portfolio in northern Saskatchewan includes the top two uranium-producing mines in the world, at McArthur River and Cigar Lake. We also maintain production sites in the United States and Kazakhstan, and development opportunities in Australia.

However, Cameco is much more than a mining company. We operate all along the nuclear value chain. Cameco owns uranium refining, conversion, and fuel fabrication facilities in Blind River, Port Hope, and Cobourg, Ontario. We're the sole provider of uranium conversion services for Canadian CANDU reactors, and our manufacturing facilities provide nuclear components for power reactors around the world.

I've been following the testimony of a number of other witnesses before the committee who have done an excellent job highlighting the important and significant contribution that the nuclear sector makes to the Canadian economy and our energy system—60,000 skilled jobs; 16% of Canada's total electricity mix, 60% here in Ontario; a $5-billion industry; and innovation and research and development. Today, then, I would like to focus most of my remarks on the impact that the nuclear sector has in northern Saskatchewan and our approach to community partnerships.

During previous testimony, I believe it was Mr. Harvey—who I see is not here today—who implored our sector to do a better job of telling our story. Mr. Strahl asked a number of questions about public confidence in our nuclear sector. This morning I would like to tell the story of Cameco's approach to indigenous and community relations in northern Saskatchewan and around the world, and the impact that approach has had on public confidence in Cameco's operations.

Indigenous engagement and employment has been a priority for Cameco since our inception in 1988. Our success as a company is directly linked to the long-term, positive partnerships that we have built with first nations, Métis, and other aboriginal communities where we operate. Nearly one third of Cameco's total Canadian workforce is comprised of individuals of first nations or Métis heritage. However, employment opportunities are only one element of Cameco's relationship with our partner communities. This year alone, Cameco, with our partner Areva, has signed two significant partnership agreements in northern Saskatchewan.

In June the “lands of north”—in Dene, “Ya’Thi Néné”—partnership collaboration agreement was signed with three first nation and four northern community partners, based on Cameco's five-pillar approach to community partnerships.

The first pillar is workforce development, with hiring preferences for people from local communities and career awareness so that people who are in elementary and secondary school have the opportunity to move on to post-secondary education, with the understanding that there may be a career available to them in the mining or nuclear sectors.

Second is business development, with a preference for community-owned businesses. It's a significant part of our supply chain, our work with community and aboriginal-owned businesses in northern Saskatchewan.

Third is community engagement, with new structures for engagement and consultation.

Fourth is environment stewardship, with ongoing community-based environmental monitoring of our operations.

The final pillar is community investment, with production-based payments paid to a community trust that the community can use in ways that it sees fit.

This comprehensive and unique agreement builds on an enduring partnership for the development of uranium resources in the Athabasca basin of northern Saskatchewan.

In addition to the lands of the north partnership, Cameco and Areva also announced the Six Rivers Fund, a unique legacy trust fund managed by an independent board of directors focused on youth education, sports, recreation, and health and wellness. The Six Rivers Fund will be supported from the profits of uranium recovery projects at our Key Lake operations.

These projects will be supported using the interest earned on the trust fund investments. In the decades ahead, we hope the Six Rivers Fund will reach a total of roughly $50 million. In its first year of operation, $100,000 was available for community projects in northern Saskatchewan.

We believe we have some of the most advanced and innovative collaborative agreements in the country, and possibly in the world, with our indigenous partner communities. We have moved beyond the approaches of the philanthropic “we should do this” and the risk mitigation “we have to do this” to the value-added “we want to do this”, because it makes our company better.

I have a short story to illustrate this point. Cameco once purchased an exploration property in Australia from a competitor that had spent many years unsuccessfully negotiating with local indigenous communities. Cameco, employing the same approach we use here in Canada, entered into discussions with local leaders and invited them to Saskatchewan to see first-hand how we operate. When we arrived in northern Saskatchewan, we arranged for this Australian delegation to live in our partner communities for a couple of days to ask their own questions and discover on their own how we operate and the relationships we've built with our local partner communities. Shortly after the visit, we were able to enter into a partnership agreement with those aboriginal communities in Australia.

One of the ways our approach to indigenous partnerships benefits our company, besides excellent employees and community businesses that serve our operations, is how we are viewed by our partner communities. Public confidence in Cameco's operations in northern Saskatchewan is very high. This confidence extends to other locations where we operate.

Our latest polling numbers, completed earlier this year, peg our province-wide support in Saskatchewan at roughly 81%. That 81% number also translates into northern Saskatchewan when it is taken as a unique polling sector. In Port Hope, Ontario, roughly the same amount, 89% of residents in the community, support the continuation of Cameco's operations.

While these results are encouraging, they are not surprising. Unlike other forms of energy and electricity generation, polling typically shows that support for the nuclear industry is often strongest where nuclear operations exist; and that the more individuals know and understand about the nuclear sector, the more supportive they tend to be. This, combined with Cameco's ongoing efforts to improve community partnerships, puts us in good stead everywhere we operate.

Canada's uranium mining industry, and the nuclear industry as a whole, is positioned to be a world leader for decades to come in both domestic and international markets. Current political, policy, economic, and environmental drivers are pointing at nuclear energy as a key element of a global shift to low-carbon energy and to a low-carbon economy.

Canada is one of the few countries in the world that can boast of a competitive advantage all along the nuclear value chain. We have the highest-quality uranium deposits and the ability to mine, mill, and refine uranium into fuel for nuclear power plants. Our CANDU reactor technology is deployed around the world. We manufacture reactor components. Our nuclear expertise as it relates to science, operations, technology, and regulation is in demand and recognized as world-class. We have a highly skilled, innovative workforce, including indigenous professionals, capable of making it all happen. With these tremendous strengths, Canada's nuclear sector is poised to take advantage of the opportunities for growth in the international nuclear marketplace.

Here is what we know about nuclear technologies and nuclear energy. Nuclear technology is proven and the long-term economic benefits of nuclear energy are clear. Comparing nuclear to other energy sources, I believe we can conclude that nuclear energy produces very low greenhouse gas emissions from a very small footprint. Our waste is managed in an effective manner, with new technologies emerging all the time to recycle and reuse that waste. A strong nuclear sector catalyses technological and other advances in medicine, material science, advanced manufacturing, and food safety.

Getting back to the point about telling our story, we as a sector do need to tell our story better, but we also need the support of Canadian governments—federal, provincial, and municipal—to help us tell our story. Rarely is the word “nuclear” mentioned by governments when they speak of clean energy or a low-carbon energy future, despite the significant role that nuclear energy could play in that type of future and the role it is already playing today to reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Canadian policy-makers and political representatives should be proud of these contributions by our country and of Canada's leadership in such an important sector.

Canada holds a competitive advantage in the nuclear energy industry. We need to nurture that advantage and capitalize on the opportunities it presents. Invest in the sector. Support the work that is already under way, small modular reactor development as an example, and the basic research required to maintain that competitive advantage long into the future.

Make sure there are places for nuclear engineers and scientists to live and work in Canada by supporting the entire nuclear value chain. Help Canadian companies gain access to international markets for their products and employ more Canadians as a result of their success.

Thank you to the committee for taking the time to study a significant contributor to Canada's economy, the natural resources sector. As a global champion in both the uranium mining and nuclear sectors, Cameco sees tremendous potential in these markets over the next few decades.

I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Austin.

Go ahead, Mr. Delage.

[Michael Delage, Vice-President of Technology and Corporate Strategy, General Fusion]

Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here today.

I would like to thank the members of the committee for the opportunity to discuss fusion energy.

I've provided a set of slides, which I am going to speak to. I wanted to start by just reminding people what fusion is.

The first slide talks about the fusion technology. Fusion is the energy source that the universe really runs on. It's the energy source of the stars and the sun. It's a process where, at very high temperatures and pressures, atoms are forced together and fused into other atoms. And on earth, what we would be doing to create energy from fusion is to fuse atoms of hydrogen. Now, that takes a temperature of about 150 million degrees. These are extreme conditions, and so this is a very difficult technology. The benefit is that a tremendous amount of energy can be produced. From those atoms of hydrogen, one kilogram of fusion fuel produces the same amount of energy as roughly 10,000 tonnes of coal. You could imagine building a power plant and putting the fuel source in a small room onsite and allowing it to run for 30 years.

Not only that, but it's a zero C02 source of energy. The reactors would run on demand, and the fuel source is abundant. We can extract the fuel source from sea-water, and there's enough on earth to run for hundreds of millions of years. This is an energy source that really will last for all of humanity.

Fusion R and D has been going on around the world for decades now, a lot of that led by national governments. More recently there's been a tremendous amount of progress, and I wanted to highlight some of that on the next slide. Not only is a multinational project called Iter under construction in the south of France, but we've also seen major facilities either under construction or commissioned or hitting important results in Japan; in Germany with the Wendelstein stellarator that was recently commissioned; in the United States at the national labs in Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There are big investments being made around the world in this sector. I haven't even talked about the Chinese, who actually have fusion as a core element of their energy road map.

More importantly, what's new in fusion is the advent of private sector companies like my own, which is General Fusion. Science magazine, a science journal, a couple of years ago called us “Fusion's restless pioneers”, in that this is a group of entrepreneurs that have come together to look for more practical paths to fusion, not only more practical but more economically viable, and most importantly, that will achieve fusion energy commercially sooner.

In the United States, in Europe, and in the U.K., we've seen these companies attract tens of, even hundreds of, millions of dollars in private capital. Here in Canada, General Fusion is actually the second largest of these companies in the world. I'm proud about what we've done.

Here's a little bit about General Fusion. We're 65 people based in Burnaby, British Columbia. We've secured over $100 million in private capital since 2009. Investors in General Fusion include venture capital firms in Canada, in the United States, and in Europe and a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia. Also highlighted are technology leaders such as Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon and a member of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition; and Cenovus Energy, Canada's oil and gas company, which has invested in General Fusion because of the opportunities that fusion energy could provide not only in terms of an energy source for the world but also as a heat source in the long run in Canada's oil and gas industry.

We're also proud to be supported by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. I would highlight that we are 65 employees, more than 50 of whom are in R and D. General Fusion is one of Canada's largest, if not the largest, R and D investor from the private sector in the nuclear industry in Canada.

Questions have been asked in previous sessions about what we have been doing to build awareness about what this technology is, and I wanted to highlight some of the recognition that General Fusion has received.

In the last few years, General Fusion has been highlighted everywhere from the cover of Time magazine, to this most recent month's Scientific American, to a TED talk that has received over a million views to date, to BBC World Service, to the Vancouver Sun, to The New York Times, and so on. And in the last two years, General Fusion has been named to the Global Cleantech 100. This is the first time that any nuclear company was named to the Global Cleantech 100, and we are one of the few Canadian companies on that list.

I also wanted to talk to you today about a document that we in the fusion research community in Canada have put together. This “Fusion 2030” document has been submitted to the committee. I understand it's being translated. It's a joint initiative of the fusion research community across Canada.

Not only General Fusion but also research groups in Alberta and Saskatchewan have been important leaders, and we've had contributions from people in Ontario and Quebec as well.

It's an initiative that proposes how we can position Canada to support the development and deployment of a demonstration fusion power plant by 2030. It proposes a staged program, the first part of which is an investment in renewing Canada's research capacity.

Unfortunately, Canada is the only industrialized country without a national fusion program, and we haven't had one for about 20 years. In that period of time, what we've seen is a decay of the research infrastructure in fusion R and D in Canada. Programs such as the plasma physics program at the University of British Columbia, from which our founder got his Ph.D., no longer exists. That means we're not training the graduates that a company like General Fusion needs. It means the research partners within Canada that a company like General Fusion needs don't exist, so we turn to recruit internationally and to partner internationally. That's a missed opportunity for Canada. Not only that; when there are successes in this technology around the world, we don't have the domestic researchers who can collaborate with those people externally and bring and take advantage of that technology.

The reason everybody else is investing around the world is not only because this is a game-changing energy source that could make a massive difference when it comes to global climate change and energy poverty, but it's also because fusion R and D impacts many fields. The superconducting technology that was developed for fusion research is what is in your MRI machines. Plasma physics has a tremendous impact on the semiconductor industry. Fusion has been one of the leaders in the development of scientific computing, a field that is touching everything now, from computational biology, to material science, to physics, to chemistry. Advances in fusion are pushing lasers, photonics, nanotechnology sensors, and robotics.

The reason other countries make big investments in fusion is also because it's a cornerstone of their R and D and innovation strategy. Again, this is something that we feel strongly needs to be a part of Canada's strategy.

I'd be happy to answer questions from you about what we've put together as a community, and I look forward to the discussion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Mr. Irish.

[Simon Irish, Chief Executive, Director, Terrestrial Energy Inc.]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the committee. Thank you for providing this opportunity for Terrestrial Energy to contribute to your important examination of the future of Canada's nuclear sector, with a view to considering its innovation, sustainable solutions, and economic opportunities.

I'm here today to make the case that Canada urgently needs to renew its commitment to nuclear innovation. To be clear, this is not simply about renewing our commitment to the conventional reactor systems of the last 50 years, although that is important too. I'm saying that the tapestry of nuclear technology is far richer, and that we can do so much better.

The case I make is to renew Canada's commitment to nuclear innovation and specifically its commitment to advanced reactors being developed here in Canada by the private sector today. Providing industry with a clean, sustainable, and cost-competitive energy substitute to fossil fuel combustion in the time frame that we have set ourselves, by 2050, is the great challenge and opportunity of the age. Advanced reactors are uniquely capable of meeting this great challenge.

While there are sound economic reasons to re-license and refurbish existing nuclear plants to extend their productive lives, the conventional reactor technologies these plants employ are not the future of nuclear energy. After 50 years of development, conventional reactors are still too expensive, whether used in a small modular reactor or new, large nuclear plower plants. Different technology choices are needed.

The future of nuclear, and in fact the future of industrial energy provision, belongs to advanced reactors, the products of true nuclear innovation. These reactors will be smaller, far less expensive, quicker and simpler to build, and have many more industrial uses. Advanced reactors promise to provide the pathways to increase industrial competitiveness and support economic growth around advanced technologies. They promise to make our 2050 climate goals feasible by filling the enormous gap that current renewable solutions cannot fill. Renewables such as wind and solar show little ability to develop the product needed to drive deep decarbonization—clean, cost-competitive, reliable, sustainable, scalable: heat.

Advanced reactors can deliver this heat because they embrace true innovation in an industry that has seen little fundamental change in 50 years. They can do this because they employ fundamentally different technology choices. As market, industrial, and national needs change, we should look with fresh eyes on old problems, specifically on the merits of different nuclear technologies and the benefits that private sector-led nuclear innovation can bring today.

This is what Terrestrial Energy has done, the company of which I am chief executive. Others have done this as well. Terrestrial Energy is a developer of an advanced reactor called the “integral molten salt reactor”, or IMSR. We are among the first advanced reactor vendors to be formally engaged in the regulatory process, in our case with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

The IMSR employs molten salt technology. It uses a liquid fuel, a molten salt instead of a traditional solid fuel. This is a fundamentally different approach and typifies the true innovation of advanced reactors.

With the IMSR, we as a company are on track with our plans to license, construct, and commission the first commercial advanced nuclear power plant in the world. It will be here in Canada and it will be operating in the next decade.

I expect it will just take four years to build our next IMSR power plants. They will be cost-competitive with coal or natural gas plants, yet unlike coal or natural gas plants, ours will produce no greenhouse gases. The IMSR promises to give industry a better product, industrial heat that is not tethered to grid or pipeline. It is not simply about electricity. IMSR power plants can be used, for example, to fuel clean natural resource extraction, clean petrochemical and chemical production, desalination, or to back up wind and solar power in place of natural gas—all this in Canadian and international markets. These markets are currently served by fossil fuels and are valued in trillions of dollars per year today.

This is not pie in the sky. It is the proven product of national laboratory development programs undertaken principally in the United States during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. We as a company have successfully made the IMSR innovation case to many in the nuclear industry in Canada, and abroad as well, where the IMSR is receiving significant international attention. It has been made to Sustainable Technology Development Canada, and it is being made today to the U.S. Department of Energy. I have been invited to meetings at the White House on two occasions in the past year to provide briefings on the capability of IMSR technology. Our U.S. affiliate is right now moving forward with its application to the U.S. Department of Energy for a $1.2-billion to $1.5-billion loan guarantee to support the construction of the first United States IMSR power plant.

IMSR development is receiving interest from many large industrial companies. It is supported by peer engineers and executives in the international nuclear community. They too recognize that the future of the nuclear industry lies with true innovation driven by the needs of this age, and therefore with advanced reactors. I believe the IMSR promises to be truly transformative.

Internationally, the nuclear energy option is today firmly in public political discourse, particularly as it relates to industrial competitiveness and achieving the towering ambitions of COP 21 climate targets. In Canada, by contrast, we appear embarrassed to mention nuclear technology despite our great tradition. We are in danger of being out of sync with change at a pivotal time and watching a great opportunity pass by.

Canada has the opportunity today, but perhaps not tomorrow, to establish itself as a leading nation in the race to commercialize advanced reactors. Foreign companies today are coming to Canadian shores to develop their advanced reactors because they recognize Canada's historic capabilities and, importantly, the openness of our regulator, the CNSC, to new technologies. Canada must make them welcome and give them a home. If it does, it stands to recapture its leadership position in a technology critical to a clean, competitive, industrial future for all of us. It stands to reap enormous economic benefits from helping the world meet its future energy needs and to continue Canada's position as a G7 net energy exporter.

I make the case for Canada to commit urgently to the nuclear innovation led by the private sector today, and to ask respectfully that the members of this committee embrace this opportunity and kick-start a new conversation about nuclear energy, nuclear innovation, and advanced reactors in our country, a conversation based on optimism, opportunity, and the promise of a much better world. This is an opportunity that cannot be missed.

I would be very pleased now, Mr. Chairman, to respond to any questions from your colleagues.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much, Mr. Irish.

Mr. Lemieux, I think you're first up.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all three witnesses for their fine presentations.

My first question is for Mr. Delage.

Your plan to develop energy through nuclear fusion is an unexpected but ideal method of producing energy, in other words, in limitless quantities without any CO2 emissions or toxic waste. I realize, however, that tremendous technical challenges remain. Given my basic technical experience and my background as an engineer, creating a mechanism that can operate at 150 million degrees Celsius strikes me as an insurmountable challenge. Therefore, there is something I need to understand. What is your development strategy for the years ahead? What kind of funding do you have access to in order to reach your objectives?

[Michael Delage]

Thank you very much for the question.

I'm going to answer in English.

You're right, 150 million degrees is a tremendous challenge, and no material can maintain or withstand those temperatures. What fusion systems have done for a long time is take advantage of magnetic fields. At those temperatures, every material becomes a plasma, as an ionized gas that can be manipulated with magnetic fields, and so magnetic fields can be used to hold that hot gas, that plasma, away from solid walls, or in our case liquid walls, and in that way contain this super-heated gas without it damaging the materials and the structure around it.

People have done this for a long time. In fact, fusion, I think, doesn't get enough credit for the progress it has made. If you were to look back a few decades, you would see the advancements in fusion, comparing the 1970s to today, have come along by about a factor of 10,000 in terms of energy produced. We're within a factor of two now of producing net positive energy for the grid, so this is why you're seeing this advance of private sector companies into the field.

On your question about the funding required, it really depends on the technology that you're talking about. All of the private companies, including General Fusion, are proposing ways that are much less expensive, that lend themselves toward something that can be a more practical power plant.

The $100 million we have secured to date has meant major advances in our technology, and we're looking at moving ahead toward the creation of a larger full-scale fusion system that again will be in the range of a $100-million sort of investment. We expect that we will secure most of that funding from the private sector.

Elsewhere in Canada, on the research and development proposal that we're looking to renew our capacity, we're starting small. We want to see something grow to the level of perhaps $20 million a year, to put the faculty positions back in place in Canadian universities so that we can graduate the talent we need to participate in this sector.

Those are the sorts of investments we're talking about.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

What type of financial support are you currently getting from the federal and provincial governments?

[Michael Delage]

Today the majority of our public funding comes from federal programs. We've had some early-stage assistance at the provincial level, but since then it's been federal. The biggest contribution there is through Sustainable Development Technology Canada. General Fusion is one of the larger recipients of funding support from SDTC.

We've also benefited, to a smaller degree, from programs such as the NRC IRAP. We've used NSERC programs to help fund collaborative research at Canadian universities.

Those are the leading programs we've taken advantage of.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Could our government do more to speed up the pace of your research and development projects?

[Michael Delage]

Certainly.

Yes, absolutely, the government could do more. There are a variety of things that we've talked about with representatives. Investing in research and development at the university sector is one of the key things we've proposed. There are opportunities for direct investment in General Fusion to help us as we move forward with the construction of larger facilities. There are also opportunities for in-kind or collaborative work. We are going to need siting; we are going to need access to technologies that exist in Canada's national laboratories, such as at Chalk River; and the support for working with those national labs. It would be great to see programs like we have with NSERC, where there is collaborative research and development support for working with the national lab programs, because a lot of the cost of working with the national labs right now is fully loaded cost.

That's often prohibitive for smaller companies to be able to pay for that sort of research. I don't know if other colleagues here have had that same experience.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Delage. I took note of what you told us.

I have a question for Mr. Austin.

I'm pleased to see that you are helping to train first nations youth. Right now, do you have any first nations students working on their master's degrees or Ph.D.'s in your field with a view to becoming scientists?

[Dale Austin]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, we do. We have young people from our communities training in post-secondary education across the country. One of the challenges we face is that currently those people need to leave their home communities in order to study post-secondary education. For the most part, they do make their way back to their home communities and work for Cameco in very technical positions.

One of the areas where we're looking for further support is increased broadband access in northern communities so that there is access to university-level courses, post-secondary courses, through online learning. We expect, and certainly it's our belief, that if students were able to take some university-level courses in their communities, we would have even more success than we already have.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

My next question is for you, as well, Mr. Austin.

You said something that really caught my attention. You talked about recycling nuclear waste. Could you tell us a bit more about your nuclear waste recycling strategy?

[Dale Austin]

I can try, although it's a little beyond my expertise. As you know, when we capture nuclear fuel in CANDU reactors, uranium in this case, we use a limited amount of the energy in that uranium. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10% to 15% of the energy is all we use.

There is currently work under way at SNC-Lavalin and other companies on advanced reactor design that can take the currently spent reactor fuel and run it again through new types of reactors so that the spent reactor fuel existing today can be recaptured, recycled, and reused through new reactor types. That technology is in development now. We expect to see it working in the next few years. Beyond the uranium capacity we already have and new uranium developments in Canada, there is a significant amount of spent reactor fuel around the world that could be recycled.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mrs. Gallant, go ahead.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

While we are on that thread, we discussed at the last meeting the potential for recycling the used fuel rods, because only 1% is used in a CANDU reactor. Comparing that to the total cost of the second deep geological repository, do you think that, with the billions of dollars that are already set aside for the repository, it would be worthwhile to take some of that allocated money and put it toward the research and development to recycle used fuel rods?

[Dale Austin]

That's an interesting question. I won't comment on the redistribution of funding from one program to another, but I think you've heard across the panel today of the desire and the need for further investment in nuclear innovation across the board. Where that money comes from I will leave in your capable hands to decide, but it's apparent that if there isn't further investment in nuclear innovation, R and D, and technology development, the competitive advantage that Canada currently has all across the nuclear value chain is not going to be there in the years to come.

As Mr. Irish and Mr. Delage have said, certainly, as we look out, nuclear energy and nuclear power—different forms, new systems, new technologies—have a significant role to play in the energy future of the planet if we are looking to move to a low-carbon economy and low-carbon energy systems.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Do you have any idea of the estimated funding that would be required to get this research and development into the prototype stage?

[Dale Austin]

I'm going to let my colleagues handle that, because they are more engaged in the R and D side of nuclear technology.

[Simon Irish]

I'll comment on the question on the capital requirement to develop these technologies.

On the advanced reactor technology, I think you have to appreciate that this exists in the new paradigm. The old paradigm of nuclear development was a state-led, enormous project. That is not the paradigm that we see today, which is private-sector-led. We expect that we will continue to receive significant private sector support. Our approach is that we are going to take that support, that clear private sector leadership, to the Canadian government and say, “There is leadership here. The private sector would like to commercialize these systems in Canada, and what we'd like at this point is assistance in getting over the development of the first plant.”

But the first plant in this whole project is not a $10-billion, $12-billion, or $15-billion project. This is a $1-billion to $2-billion project, because the technologies that we are looking at are on a rich tapestry. On that rich tapestry are the technologies that have accumulated over 50 years—a tremendous amount of national-lab-level investment already. All we are doing as a private sector company is looking at those technologies through the lens of today's market needs and national needs and asking if we should be developing these technologies now.

We believe that with our reactor, the IMSR, we should absolutely be commercializing this reactor, taking the last step, the engineering step, to bring this reactor to market. This is a $1-billion to $2-billion project for the first reactor—actually, I should probably say $2 billion from a Canadian-dollar perspective—and it's not a moon mission. It is not part of the old paradigm of state-led projects in the nuclear space.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

The NWMO was instituted in 2002, so we've had 14 years of research and development lending towards recycling this fuel. The deep geological repository combined—I think there are two of them, the low and medium waste and the high—is estimated to be $22 billion. A mere $1 billion or $2 billion to avoid having to watch over the spent fuel for hundreds of years seems to be cost-effective.

[Simon Irish]

Sorry, I think we may be talking at cross-purposes. I was talking about the $2 billion to develop the advanced reactors, but it's those advanced reactors that have the capability of consuming the additional energy and the spent nuclear fuel. Those advanced reactors offer a paradigm, an opportunity for the civilian nuclear industry in the future to be leaving a waste footprint that's 5%, even 1%, of the waste footprint it leaves today. That's the opportunity.