Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for appearing.
I want to start off by just talking a bit about some of the things that were said. I know there was a concern expressed by Dr. Charbonneau about radioactive waste and the dangers of that, and I want to be clear that we have 32 radioactive waste storage facilities in Ontario. Since their inception there has never been a single incident, so I think that is certainly not a fact-based observation.
The other thing I would like to say is that there was a comment that all of the SMRs are being exempted from environmental assessment. We have had testimony at this committee from people involved in the Westinghouse project and multiple SMR projects, complaining about the amount of time and the delay of three years that is being imposed on them by the environmental assessment process. I just wanted to provide that information.
I have a question for Dr. Ramana. If I look at competitive sources of energy, hydro is 6¢ to 8¢ a kilowatt hour. In solar and wind, unfortunately in Ontario contracts sold for 40¢ a kilowatt hour—very bad—and typically large nuclear is 8¢ a kilowatt hour but these SMRs are probably 15¢ a kilowatt hour. It looks to me like the niche for these is in places where you would avoid having to put infrastructure costs in in order to use this electricity.
In terms of the north, we see that in the Nunavut area we have mining initiatives that are going on and greenhouse initiatives for food security. Do you believe that these technologies have a place if we could prove the technology here in Canada that might boost this platform for use?