Thank you very much, it's a great pleasure to be here this evening.
My name is Jeremy Rayner, I'm a political scientist by training and a professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. My research on the public policy implications of SMRs has been supported over the years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Sylvia Fedoruk Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation.
As an aside, I would say that I was distressed to hear the suggestion earlier this evening that all funding for research on SMRs be routed through NSERC. There are very many important questions, perhaps the most important questions, about SMRs that actually fall within the purview of the social sciences and the humanities in terms of their success or failure.
I've been fortunate to be on sabbatical leave this year, and I spent some of that time at the Dalton Nuclear Institute at University of Manchester in the United Kingdom researching SMR developments in the U.K. and Europe. I have submitted some written evidence in the form of a peer-reviewed publication for the committee.
I'd like to start by saying that in the U.K. and Europe, anecdotally Canada is regarded as a world leader in SMR policy and governance. We are admired for the extent of collaboration between the provinces and the federal government; for bipartisan support for SMRs that provides confidence for investors; the relatively transparent processes for choosing SMR designs; and the clear responsibilities and timelines set out in the SMR road map, the action plan and this year's strategic plan. The challenge is to maintain our position as leaders and translate that leadership into the development of a technology that actually contributes to meeting our clean energy goals. My question has always been what should be the approach of policy and governance that would build on this successful start?
There are currently two issues that SMR advocates are trying to put on the federal policy agenda, and you've heard both of them this evening and at prior meetings of your committee: subsidies and regulation. You're unsurprised, I'm sure, to learn that advocates think SMRs should attract more of the former and less of the latter. On subsidies, there's a general principle of policy design that it's better to provide support for solutions to a problem rather than to specific technologies or industries. To some extent, of course, Canada has followed that path through the various clean energy funding initiatives. I draw your attention to the European Union's recent decision to include nuclear energy under some circumstances as a sustainable investment for funding purposes. I'd urge that this approach be continued.
Regulation raises the critical issue of public confidence in small nuclear reactors. If SMRs are really to be a transformational technology, rather than just a useful addition to our power generation options—and that's a good enough target to start with—then they must be built closer to where people live and work than traditional large reactors have been. This will only happen if we can raise public confidence in nuclear safety to new levels. The reputation of the CNSC for evidence-based regulation needs to be protected and efforts to rush the licensing of new designs, I think, be regarded with extreme caution.
There's also an issue that advocates are studiously avoiding or, at best, responding to with platitudes, and that is public engagement. Engagement is going to test federal-provincial collaboration and require some innovative thinking in science communication and knowledge translation. There is a strong temptation to place the responsibility for engagement on proponents—usually in this case a utility—and that’s how the engagement requirements of project-based environmental assessment works. As in other cases involving infrastructure and natural resources, placing the responsibility for engagement on the proponent may seem logical, but it raises a well-known problem that will likely be experienced very strongly in the case of SMRs, which you've seen already this evening. The problem is that members of the public will want to raise broad questions of public policy and regulation around nuclear issues that are beyond the scope of a project-based assessment and outside the competence of a proponent to address. Examples are general questions about uranium mining or the disposal of nuclear fuel. Simply telling them that they can’t raise such questions at an assessment is not going to help the deployment of SMRs, and I think we need to find some way of including those broader questions in public engagement processes in Canada.
In addition, it can be confidently asserted that there is no future for SMRs in Canada beyond a handful of first-of-a-kind demonstration projects taking place on sites already licensed for nuclear facilities without prior, informed and meaningful consent of indigenous peoples. Quite apart from new sites that need to be proposed on treaty land, or land over which unextinguished rights are asserted, SMRs may involve the transportation of modules, some of which may be already fuelled, and the disposal of waste that will not be concentrated—