Evidence of meeting #39 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was workers.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Gordon Edwards  President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
Shawn-Patrick Stensil  Nuclear Analyst, Greenpeace Canada
Steven Schumann  Canadian Government Affairs Director, International Union of Operating Engineers

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Good morning, everybody. We'll get started.

Before we get started, Mr. Cannings has a letter he wants to bring up.

I think, Richard, if it's okay, we'll do it in camera at the end. We'll have some time at the end, if that's okay.

December 8th, 2016 / 8:45 a.m.

NDP

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

Could I just do it now quickly?

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

You're not going to be controversial in anything, are you?

8:45 a.m.

NDP

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

No, I'm not going to be controversial. I'm never controversial.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Okay.

We'll give Mr. Cannings the floor first, before we start.

8:45 a.m.

NDP

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

I just want to let the committee know that I received a letter yesterday that had been sent to Mr. Maloney, the chair, and I was copied on it. It's from Dr. Sunil Nijhawan, who is a nuclear engineer from Toronto. I won't go into the details, but he disputes quite strongly an answer that Dr. Binder gave me to the CNSC's assessment of off-site consequences of a Fukushima-scale radioactive release.

I wanted to make sure this got into the record, the testimony for the study, and also I think we should.... Ideally, and I don't know if it's possible, I'd like to maybe call Dr. Nijhawan before us to give more details and to allow Dr. Binder some opportunity to respond to this. Perhaps we could do that by correspondence, but I think we should do both those things.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Mr. Strahl.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC

I don't think I have a copy of that. If the committee agrees, I'd like to have it tabled, translated, and sent to the committee. That would be helpful.

8:45 a.m.

NDP

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

Yes, we've just sent it to the clerk.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC

Okay, thank you.

8:45 a.m.

NDP

Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC

It's a serious matter, I think.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Yes, I don't think there's a problem with submitting the letter to the committee as part of the testimony for the nuclear study. I don't think we have time to add another witness. We finish next Tuesday, which is probably our last committee meeting. I don't think we have an opportunity to have him here in time as a witness for this study, but he's certainly welcome—unless I hear concerns from anyone else—to submit that letter as part of the nuclear study.

8:45 a.m.

Liberal

TJ Harvey Liberal Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

I have no issue with submitting the letter. I do agree that it's highly unlikely that we're going to have time to call him as a witness, but we can accept the letter, and then, if either one of them wants to add additional information, they can submit that to the clerk, as long as it's in a timely manner before we finalize the study.

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Richard. We'll get that through translation and submitted to the clerk and the analysts.

I'd like to welcome Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and Shawn-Patrick Stensil, a nuclear analyst from Greenpeace Canada.

In case you haven't done this before, you will each be given 10 minutes to make your presentation, and then there will be questions from the committee.

Maybe we'll start with Mr. Edwards, if you would like to go first. You have 10 minutes, please.

8:50 a.m.

Dr. Gordon Edwards President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm honoured to be invited to address the committee members today. My name is Gordon Edwards. I am president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, a not-for-profit organization. I have also served as a consultant on nuclear issues for governmental and non-governmental organizations for the last 40 years. For example, I was retained by the Office of the Auditor General last year to serve on an external advisory committee in connection with a performance audit of the CNSC.

I graduated from the University of Toronto in 1961 with a gold medal in mathematics and physics. In the ensuing years, I earned two master's degrees and a doctorate. In 1974 I coordinated a study on the role of mathematical sciences in Canadian business, finance, industry, government, and policy planning for the Science Council of Canada. This study was published in eight volumes, and copies were placed in all Canadian university libraries.

The greatest challenge facing the nuclear industry today is the question of nuclear waste, including the dismantling of radioactive structures and the decontamination of radioactive sites. Going forward, parliamentarians need to play a much more active oversight role. The industry is making plans to abandon these dangerous wastes right beside major bodies of water, such as the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and the Winnipeg River.

Important matters of public policy are being decided by default, by the nuclear industry and its regulator, based on technical considerations buttressed with scientific extrapolations, but these decisions are not wholly technical in nature, as they will implicate society as a whole. For example, right now there is a plan to ship 23,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid waste over a period of four years from Chalk River, Ontario, down to Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This type of material, containing a witch's brew of fission products and actinides, has never before been shipped anywhere in North America in liquid form. Nevertheless, there has been no environmental impact statement, nor have there been any public hearings having to do with this proposal. I believe Parliament should be intervening in this and saying, “Wait a minute. What's going on here?”

There are other questions here. Should the radioactive internals of the nuclear power demonstration reactor and the Whiteshell WR-1 reactor in Manitoba simply be entombed right beside the rivers where they were built, where they will remain dangerous for many thousands of years? Or should all the nuclear waste from all of Ontario's reactors, except the irradiated nuclear fuel, be placed in a deep geological repository less than one mile from the waters of Lake Huron?

Surely these are societal decisions and should involve our elected representatives. This is especially so when two DGRs, deep geological repositories, in Germany, expressly built for the permanent disposal of non-fuel nuclear waste, have failed spectacularly. They figure it'll take 30 years to get the radioactive waste back out of the Asse II repository and the Morsleben repository. The German government has declared that what is happening now is unacceptable. As well, the DGR in Carlsbad, New Mexico, underwent a major failure in 2014, costing billions to set straight.

It would be beneficial to Canadians if the various agencies of the nuclear establishment, such as AECL, the CNSC, and the NWMO, were called upon to report regularly to a parliamentary committee at least once per session. This would allow parliamentarians to gain a better understanding of why the spending estimates for AECL have tripled from last year to this, going from $327 million to $969 million, or why the estimated radioactive cleanup costs for the town of Port Hope increased overnight from $800 million to $1.2 billion. That, by the way, is a federal program.

The safe, long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste is one of the world's major unsolved problems. There we're talking about the irradiated fuel, which is much more radioactive than the Port Hope waste or other waste.

In 1978 the Porter commission, the Ontario Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning, recommended a moratorium on any new nuclear power plants in Canada if the solutions to the nuclear waste problem were not forthcoming by 1985. We have surpassed that deadline by more than 30 years.

After 10 years of intense deliberations and public hearings in five provinces, the Seaborn panel unanimously recommended, in 1998, the formation of a nuclear fuel waste management agency that is independent of the nuclear industry, whose board includes representation from the stakeholders and indigenous peoples, and that reports directly to Parliament.

Instead, the Government of Canada created the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, an agency that is totally owned and operated by the nuclear industry, in particular by the nuclear fuel waste producers. There is a built-in conflict of interest in such an arrangement that may seriously undermine the public trust that is needed for a successful long-term nuclear fuel waste program.

In order to dramatize the scope of the nuclear fuel waste program, the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning published a graph in 1978 showing the radiotoxicity of irradiated nuclear fuel over a period of 10 million years. The graph shows the radiotoxicity declining for the first 50,000 years or so and then going back up again, not to the top: it becomes more toxic after that 50,000-year period. So it doesn't just simply go down and down. The radiotoxicity begins to increase again due to internal radiological changes in the fuel waste, which I could elaborate on, if you like.

For purposes of illustration, the graph also shows how much water would be required to dilute the irradiated nuclear fuel from one CANDU reactor produced in one year to the maximum allowed concentration of radioactive contamination for drinking water. For one year's worth of irradiated fuel from one CANDU reactor, the amount of water needed would be almost exactly equal to the volume of Lake Superior. By this calculation, if Ontario were considering 20 reactors operating for 30 years, we'd be talking something in the neighbourhood of 600 Lake Superiors.

Now, this is a totally theoretical calculation, but the purpose of it is to highlight the extreme toxicity of this material and the reason why it simply cannot be treated the way even other very long-lived, highly dangerous materials are treated. It has to be stored with virtual perfection, which is something humans are not so good at.

This brings me back to the question of siting. At the present time, the NWMO is looking for a willing host community in the vicinity of Lake Huron. Given the extraordinary radiotoxicity of irradiated nuclear fuel, and given the fact that these wastes will remain highly radiotoxic for literally millions of years, is it wise to store them right beside the Great Lakes, the source of drinking water for tens of millions of people?

The industry and the regulator plan to abandon these nuclear wastes after a certain finite period of time. In other words, monitoring and retrievability of the waste will not last forever. The intention is to cut the industry's liability and to terminate the regulator's obligations vis-à-vis the highly toxic material. Abandonment implies that amnesia will set in. At some point in the not-so-distant future, the dangerous nature of this waste will be forgotten. If it does start to leak after abandonment, people will be ill prepared to deal with the situation.

The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility believes it is essential to have parliamentary oversight of the nuclear industry, especially in matters of nuclear waste. Without a proper mechanism of accountability, monumental mistakes can be made. In the continental U.S.A., there have been eight separate attempts to locate a deep geological repository for irradiated nuclear fuel, and all of these attempts have ended in failure.

On a more positive note, there's going to be a multi-billion dollar industry in the field of nuclear demolition, particularly the dismantling of defunct nuclear power plants at a cost of about $1 billion each. The expense of decommissioning is due to the high levels of radioactivity found in the primary cooling system of the reactor due to contamination in the pipes spread from defective fuel bundles. In addition, there are radioactive activation products, such as cobalt-60 and many others, that build up in the entire core area of the reactor. The structural materials themselves become radioactive waste.

At one time it was believed that it would be better to wait 40 years or more after a reactor is shut down to begin the dismantling of a structure. However, European authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency are now recommending immediate dismantling to take advantage of the expertise and experience of those workers who know the plant inside out as a result of years of working there. Besides, there are potential contamination dangers that will not be alleviated by waiting 40 years. For example, carbon-14 dust, which contaminated a lot of Pickering workers at one point in time—

9 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Mr. Edwards, you're at your 10 minutes. Could you wrap it up quickly?

9 a.m.

President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Dr. Gordon Edwards

Okay.

Workers can learn the skills of nuclear demolition by taking these smaller prototype reactors apart—the Douglas Point and Gentilly-1 reactors—and this will give them experience in nuclear demolition, which will be big business in the future.

I'll just wind up there. Thank you.

9 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Thank you very much, Mr. Edwards. I know that 10 minutes can go quickly.

9 a.m.

President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

9 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Mr. Stensil, you have the floor for 10 minutes, please.

9 a.m.

Shawn-Patrick Stensil Nuclear Analyst, Greenpeace Canada

Thank you very much.

Thank you for this opportunity to present to you today. My name is Shawn-Patrick Stensil. I'm a senior energy analyst with Greenpeace Canada. I also work as a radiation protection adviser for Greenpeace International and have done field work in such contaminated such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Palomares in Spain.

My presentation today will be in English. Although I have lost some of my French since I have been in Toronto, I will be pleased to answer your questions in French if you wish.

For the past month, you have been hearing from witnesses and seeking perspectives on the potential for innovation and economic opportunities in the nuclear sector. You've heard from a long line of industry witnesses who have claimed there is a huge potential for innovation and significant economic opportunities in the industry, but with more often than not a request for policy or financial support from the federal government. In my presentation today, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm going to give you a skeptical view.

I've observed this industry, in Canada and internationally, for over 15 years now. I encourage the committee in its deliberations to also be skeptical about what you've heard, because, well, the nuclear industry has always been a “promising” industry. Its promises have caused the federal government to spend significant taxpayer dollars over the past several decades. In your deliberations I encourage you to weigh the future conditional promises you've heard over the past month against the industry's delivery in the past. This is necessary to not only protect taxpayers, but in light of climate change, we don't have the time or funds to let ourselves be distracted by false promises.

The challenges facing the Canadian nuclear industry are more or less the same as they've always been—specifically, technological complexity, escalating costs, and a lack of social acceptance. This lack of social acceptance is reasonable given that this industry has the capacity to displace large populations and burdens future generations with radioactive waste.

But today there's a new challenge: the competition. Rapid innovation and growth in the renewable and clean tech sector is making both existing and future conditional nuclear technologies irrelevant.

Today, I don't think there can be any credible assessment of the opportunities in the nuclear sector that doesn't consider the increasing challenge renewables and clean tech pose to the sector. So I have two main takeaway messages for the committee today. First, in light of the magnitude of past government support, the federal government should not provide any additional financial or significant policy support towards the development of new reactor designs, such as small modular reactors. Second, this committee should study innovation in the renewable and clean tech sector, and specifically whether the federal government and the Department of Natural Resources are properly tooled and focused to support the transition towards renewable-powered energy systems we're witnessing internationally.

I provided a briefing note to the committee. The first section of the briefing note is entitled “CANDU: A Technological Dead-End”. I think this is a good starting point for your deliberations. Despite significant policy support and $25 billion in taxpayer subsidies, the CANDU nuclear technology has failed to significantly innovate and evolve since the 1970s. The main focus of possible future reactor sales is the CANDU 6, a reactor that was first developed, with federal support, in the early 1970s.

Here I would like to point you to the story of the advanced CANDU reactor. Fifteen years ago, in front of this committee, we would have been discussing the promise of the advanced CANDU. At the time, parliamentarians and the public were being promised that the Canadian nuclear industry could design and build a cheaper and safer reactor that would find significant markets in both Canada and internationally. Believing these promises, Parliament approved over $400 million to support the design of this reactor that will never be built.

The Canadian nuclear industry was unable to innovate, overcome market barriers, and find markets. That $400 million was wasted and diverted from other energy options. There's a lesson in this. In short, despite what I would take as sincere promises, the Canadian nuclear industry was not able to innovate, reduce costs, increase safety, or develop viable new markets. That should be considered by this committee.

In fact, the Canadian nuclear industry is now in decline. Ontario, New Brunswick, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, who were all talking about building this advanced CANDU 10 years ago, have all abandoned those plans. By 2025, nine of Canada's 22 operating CANDUs will be closed due to the prohibitive cost of keeping them operating. That's almost half of the CANDU fleet in Canada, so the industry is clearly in decline.

I've raised the point about the failure of the advanced CANDU because the narrative that supported it gaining government support is very similar to what the committee has been hearing about small modular reactors. These are also promised to be cheaper, cleaner, and safer, but as I point out in the briefing note, the designs are purely conceptual at this point, and in most cases not much more than a power point presentation. There is no proven SMR design. Industry will probably look for government backstopping to build a demonstration plant. There's talk of doing this at Chalk River. I encourage this committee to advise against this.

This leads me to the major challenge I see for this industry and what should be the focus of this committee, in my view: the competition. While the Ontario government study on SMRs thought it would be possible to use small modular reactors in some communities to displace diesel, it did not consider other alternatives, such as renewable-based micro-grids, even though the technologies exist and are being used in other off-grid communities. This is an obvious blind spot in light of the declining cost of renewables and other clean technologies.

Put yourself in the shoes of a community that would be offered an SMR. Would you want to trust some big company from Toronto coming in with a nuclear reactor, given all the history that's surrounded it? There's not a market for these. Energy systems worldwide are being transformed by innovation in the clean tech and renewable sector. While nuclear costs have only ever risen, renewable costs are declining rapidly. That's called innovation. For this reason, more and more communities and countries are committing to go 100% renewable to fight climate change. In Canada, Vancouver, Victoria, and Oxford County—where, I would note, I am proud to have grown up—have all committed to go 100% renewable by 2050. They're doing this because the technology is already viable and becoming more viable, it brings local economic and social benefits, and it fights climate change.

I urge the committee to acknowledge this fact in your study. The declining cost of renewables, along with safety issues, and the waste issue that Dr. Edwards described so well, in my mind are an insurmountable challenge for the nuclear industry. The federal government should not waste additional financial resources or policy support on propping up this stagnant industry. Indeed, Greenpeace recommends that this committee turn its focus to study whether the federal government is properly tooled to enable the already innovative renewable and clean tech sector. That's where the change is actually happening and what Canada needs to be part of.

With that, I'd like to conclude my remarks. Thank you for listening to my comments. I'm happy to take questions.

9:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Vice-Chair Conservative John Barlow

Thank you very much, Mr. Stensil. I appreciate that.

We will now go to Mr. Harvey for seven minutes, please.

9:10 a.m.

Liberal

TJ Harvey Liberal Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank both of you for coming.

My home province is New Brunswick. I'm from the western part of New Brunswick, which is probably one of the only landlocked ridings in the east coast. I don't have access to tidal, of course, but tidal is going to play a very large contributing factor to our renewable sector on the east coast. I understand the challenges that we face in New Brunswick, and right now we have a significant challenge with building a generating station. We're looking at where we're going in the future, and the select committee on climate change in New Brunswick identified an action plan that would see us off coal in New Brunswick by 2030, or 2040 at the very latest, but that would have to be under a very stringent set of guidelines that would guide that.

From the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, Lois Corbett and Louise Comeau, two people from my riding who are very passionate about renewables, have endorsed that plan. I think Louise Comeau has even said that she feels that it's one of the most proactive prospective plans that she has seen so far across the country. They've both identified Point Lepreau in New Brunswick as playing a contributing factor at this point to getting where we need to go in the short term, just as they have agreed that hydroelectricity plays a role in where we need to go in the short term.

I have the Mactaquac generating station in my riding. I understand the challenges around Mactaquac and in the refurbishment of it as well, which makes the refurbishment costs at Point Lepreau look minute because of the large scale. I have been in favour there of an option that hasn't been really touted too much, which is the idea of an in situ refurbishment at Mactaquac. That would extend the life of that generating station by up to 40 years. I've been in favour of that because I believe that our energy spectrum could look significantly different 40 years from now than it does right today. I recognize that, and when you talk about SMRs, I'm open to just about everything right now. I agree that we need to have increased investment in renewables and clean tech.

Actually, Mr. Stensil, you'll be happy to know that we are fully intending to do a clean tech study, I think, in the new part of the year, which will give greater focus to that.

At the same time, I'm open to looking at the SMR option. The reason I'm open to looking at it—and I'm not saying that I'm sold on it or not sold on it—is that when you talk about rural northern communities, especially ones that are isolated, and you talk about an integrated renewal grid in those areas, I think that's great, and it's definitely going to take into account solar, and wind, and possibly submersible hydroelectricity. In the north it's quite cold, so I'm assuming we won't have a lot of conventional hydroelectricity generation, but we could have submersible generators, which we've seen used in Europe some, that would provide that generation load for those communities.

I think the reason you've heard so much talk about SMRs is that potentially we're still going to need baseload generation, no matter what, and you're going to need baseload generation in those communities. I'm not saying they're a viable alternative to diesel generation, and I'm not saying they're not a viable alternative to diesel generation. I'm just saying that I'm not discounting them based on the history of a different design of reactor, and I'm not discounting them based on the belief that renewables will 100% eclipse traditional generation. I do believe the future is in renewables, and I do believe we're going to get there. I just don't believe it's going to happen overnight, and that's the issue I have.

I want to ask you, Mr. Edwards, about the 23,000 litres of, I'm assuming, spent fuel that they're talking about transferring to the United States. Isn't that part of a....not a decommissioning, but they're going to reuse that fuel and blend it down so that it's not nuclear grade? Isn't that the idea? I thought the reason they couldn't ship it as solid was that you can't do anything with it once you encapsulate it.

9:15 a.m.

President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Dr. Gordon Edwards

They have 21 tanks of liquid waste at Chalk River, which they are in the process of solidifying. The plan was always to solidify the contents of the FISS tank also, which is the 23,000 litres we're talking about.

9:15 a.m.

Liberal

TJ Harvey Liberal Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Right.