I'm learning the etiquette here. Through the chair, you're right, uranium is a critical mineral.
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on this. Uranium actually offsets one-third of Canada's national annual emissions. We put out 730 megatonnes. The uranium that we contribute domestically and internationally to the global reactor fleet, which creates the.... This is definitive now. In terms of the life-cycle analysis of CO2 emissions, nuclear is rock bottom: five grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. That uranium displaces one twenty-fifth of all of humanity's global emissions, and again, one-third of Canada's national emissions.
Uranium is something we should be very proud of. Uranium mining has come a long way. It is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, and we're doing a very good job of that now.
In regard to the waste, I think this is a really important question, and I'm glad that it came up. You mentioned having really good geology for a potential repository. What really put me at ease was talking with a number of geologists. The thing is that you're saying the rock is so good, right? The rock is the barrier. The mechanism for waste to get out of a repository and accumulate in a dose that could be harmful to anybody is that water needs to get through all of these engineered barriers, it needs to dissolve a ceramic, which doesn't happen very easily, and then it has to carry those radioisotopes in solution through the rock.
For the rocks we're looking at in South Bruce, it takes a million years for water to move one metre. After about a thousand years, the only way for nuclear waste to harm you is if you eat it—pulverize it and eat it. I'm saying this as a physician who has looked into this in some detail. I'm not trying to brush off concerns here, but we have made such a mountain out of a molehill with the waste. All of the waste that Canada has produced in 70 years would fit in one hockey rink, piled one telephone pole high; just to give you a sense of that volume, it's this room, maybe, with a ceiling twice as high.
Uranium is so incredibly energy dense. That's the secret to why it is such an environmentally friendly form of energy generation. You do the least mining. You need the fewest materials. A nuclear power plant might look big and ominous, but the Pickering Nuclear power plant, on a footprint the size of Costco, provides all of the baseload needs for the GTA. It's staggering.
That's why I have come to be passionate about it. I have no ties to this industry. Having looked at the evidence and how serious climate change is and in starting to evaluate what the potential solutions are, this is where I have been steered towards.
I'm sorry if I'm taking up too much time—cut the mike.