Science and Research Committee on June 9th, 2022

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Okay, great.

[Edouard Saab]

We mentor and we also sponsor students in the program.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Is that located in Durham?

[Edouard Saab]

Yes, that's right. It's in Whitby.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Whitby, right. That's great.

I know there is a great shortage of medical isotopes. It was critical a year or so ago, I think because Chalk River was down for a bit.

What is your role in that, and can you elaborate a bit on where you are and how you can contribute?

[Edouard Saab]

Sure.

My role is secondary for now, in supporting Bruce Power and OPG. Bruce Power and OPG provide cobalt-60 to Nordion, which is the global leader in cobalt-60. In fact, I think Nordion supports 80% of the global needs for cobalt-60, and about two-thirds of that comes from CANDU plants.

Pretty much every medical device that's been sterilized is thanks to cobalt-60 and what Bruce Power and OPG are doing for the program there.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

What kind of research is your company engaging in, besides R and D, that focuses on improving SMR marketability? There have been some witnesses who have indicated that there's a market for these. So can you tell us what your focus is in that area?

[Edouard Saab]

We are looking at what the market needs are. What we're hearing and what we're seeing—we're also using third parties, so it's not just our telling ourselves that there's a market there—is that there is a need for industry to find ways to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel.

As we know, if we're going to meet the Canadian 2050 net-zero requirements, they're going to have to scale off fossil fuels. We're seeing heavy industry look for replacements for backup diesel generators, for example. We're also seeing that communities, customers and industry on edge-of-grid applications where they aren't heavily serviced by T and D, or transmission and distribution, lines. They also require some high source of reliable power.

We're also looking at how the eVinci microreactor can be used for research. Coming back to your isotope question, there might be an opportunity for us to develop our microreactor to also look at being able to do other isotopes beyond just cobalt-60.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

That's interesting. Thank you.

Dr. Edwards, many people do feel that there is a role for nuclear power in helping to address our carbon emissions target. I know that you have an awful lot of concerns, as many people do, about the issue of nuclear waste. I don't have much time left, but are you aware of any promising research that addresses the issue of nuclear waste? I know that it's been a concern and a focus of yours.

Dr. Edwards...?

[Dr. Gordon Edwards]

Really, the technology for dealing with nuclear waste has not even been implemented for high-level waste. Also, as of now, Canada does not even have a policy for dealing with post-fission intermediate-level waste. We're really still at the dawn of the age of nuclear waste, and we don't know—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Dr. Edwards, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Perhaps one of our colleagues will follow up.

Thank you very much, Ms. Bradford, for your questions.

With that, we go to Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I’d like to welcome the witnesses joining us this evening.

My questions are for Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Edwards, I’ll ask you to continue along those lines and tell us about radioactive waste management, particularly its associated costs.

My other question is also on waste management. After a ten-year environmental assessment process, the Seaborn Commission unanimously recommended creating a nuclear waste management and decommissioning agency, independent from industry and organizations that promote it, such as Natural Resources Canada.

Could you tell us about that?

[Dr. Gordon Edwards]

Yes. This is a real problem. The unanimous recommendation of the Seaborn panel, way back in 1998, was that there should be a fully independent nuclear waste agency with a board of directors that represents various stakeholders. Instead what we have is a radioactive waste management organization that represents the waste producers. There is kind of a conflict of interest there that could become very serious when things start going wrong.

In Germany, for example, they had an underground waste repository. For 10 years the people in charge did not reveal that it was leaking into the groundwater and into the surface waters. Now they're spending over $5 billion in Canadian equivalent to take that waste out of that underground repository. It will take 30 years and it will cost a lot of money, and it's quite dangerous.

We need to have people who are independent of the industry and who do not see the necessity to cover up problems because it's bad PR for the industry.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Edwards.

Can you tell us more about the cost of managing radioactive waste? We’re talking about a cost of over $100 billion Canadian. I have other examples, including negligence affecting the Chalk River and Port Hope projects.

What’s your opinion on it?

[Dr. Gordon Edwards]

Well, I think $100 billion is more than I have heard. I've heard that it's about a $16-billion federal legacy of radioactive waste disposal.

The difficulty is that we don't know how to eliminate or neutralize these wastes, so all we can do is stabilize them. The Port Hope waste, for example, consists of about two million cubic metres of radioactive waste materials. After eight years of trying to find a home for these wastes all over Ontario, they came up empty-handed. This was called the “siting task force” of the federal government.

Now, as a kind of booby prize, they have two large mounds right near Port Hope that will hold about one million cubic metres each. They're now using that temporary facility at Port Hope, which was never the goal in the first place. They're now using that model at Chalk River to have a giant mound of post-fission radioactive waste right beside the Ottawa River, about a kilometre away, with half-lives in it. Half of the radioactive materials in that mound have half-lives of over 100,000 years.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Edwards.

You are right, I was mistaken. The $16 billion was for the Chalk River plant. Rather, I was referring to the $100 billion for cleaning up radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear site, in Washington state, and Sellafield, in England.

I’d like to hear from you on the proposal that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization should not report to the minister of natural resources, but rather to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

What can you tell us about that?

[Dr. Gordon Edwards]

When we come to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, this organization will be spending an anticipated $26 billion to dispose of Canada's high-level radioactive waste from the commercial nuclear power plants. However, if they, for example, were to choose a site and emplace the waste, as they did in Germany, and then discovered that the site was unsuitable, they would be faced with a tremendous dilemma, because if they have to take the waste out again and start all over again, obviously the costs mount greatly. That's what happened in other countries, as you said.

In Hanford, Washington, for example, and at Sellafield in northern England, the costs of cleanup have amounted to the equivalent of $100 billion. That's just to deal with the cleanup of that waste. Remember that cleanup doesn't mean that we're eliminating it, simply that we're storing it in a better condition.

This is a problem that is going to plague our grandchildren's grandchildren, whether we like it or not. It's not something that we can rid of by snapping our fingers.

When you reprocess the waste to recover plutonium, many studies have shown that, in fact, you generate even more complicated waste. You do not reduce the volume of the repository, nor do you reduce the overall volume of the actual waste, because you add to the volume of waste with contaminated equipment, etc. Reprocessing is not a solution to the waste problem, although the industry portrays it as such.

One of the things I'm concerned about is that the industry is looking for government funding in order to help their industry survive and to help Canadians. However, I think this committee should recommend research that is specifically aimed at protecting the health and safety of Canadians from the by-products of this industry.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

I’m done, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Blanchette‑Joncas.

We will now go to Mr. Cannings for six minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I'm sorry. I missed the presentations, so I'm hoping that Ms. Zarrillo is still there and can take the questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Cannings.

Ms. Zarrillo is indeed here. Thank you, Ms. Zarrillo.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you very much.

I will carry on with a question to Mr. Edwards and then I will have a question for Mr. Saab.

Mr. Edwards, I wanted to ask again about the proliferation concern. We heard some testimony today about what's being marketed as a nuclear battery. I wanted to get your thoughts on whether a layperson could realistically handle nuclear batteries, if we call them that.

[Dr. Gordon Edwards]

Generally speaking, these kinds of devices can be handled by a layperson over the short term. It's really a question of what happens afterwards. Cobalt-60 was mentioned earlier. We in Canada—OPG and Bruce Power—send cobalt-60 sources all over the world. Eighty per cent of the market is from Canada.

What they don't mention, however, is that all of that cobalt-60 comes back to us as radioactive waste. In fact, the largest component that's going into the radioactive waste mound at Chalk River—99% of it—is cobalt-60. That's the problem with these radioactive materials. Radioactivity cannot be shut off. That's why nuclear reactors melt down, even after they're shut off, because the radioactivity generates so much heat that it will melt the core of the reactor.

It's this long-term legacy waste that is left behind that constitutes an enormous burden on future generations.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Saab, I want to carry on in that vein. We talk about abandoned oil wells right now in the Prairies. There's this idea that private corporations took all of the profits and left the taxpayer and the environment with the cleanup, I would say. Even in municipalities, we know that they are left with empty pipelines as new pipelines get built.

I wanted to hear your thoughts about what kinds of upfront protections there are for cleanup on the back end. I guess that relates to the idea of these nuclear batteries, so my second question is about the lifespan of those nuclear batteries and what the disposal plan might be.

[Edouard Saab]

It's a great question.

Maybe I can answer it in a couple of different ways.

First, when we look at the eVinci microreactor technology, for context—I did provide some information and I'll follow up with the committee to ensure that they have their questions answered about the technology itself—it is a five-megawatt nuclear reactor about the size of one sea container for the reactor itself, and then there are one sea container for the I and C equipment and one sea container for the power conversion unit.

The flexibility and luxury we have with the sea container is that it is mobile, so we can take it to sites, leave it at sites and power sites for eight years with 100% non-emitting energy, whether it's electricity or for heat. At the end of the eight years, should they not require another one, the whole unit as is can be taken back, leaving no legacy waste or legacy damage. The eVinci microreactor does not use external water, and the only output there would be would be heat.

To answer your question on the proliferation, I think there was a question there, too, about the fuel itself. The luxury that we have with the eVinci microreactor is that it uses TRISO fuel: tiny pellets encapsulated by a protection barrier. First, that makes it nearly impossible to do anything damaging with it, but the luxury of a microreactor is that the amount of fuel and uranium required is incredibly small, so in terms of any bad actors trying to do something with microreactors or our nuclear battery, they would require thousands of these microreactor sea containers to be able to put it together, and it would be physically and technically impossible to do so.