Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise and speak in favour of Bill C-27, an act respecting the long-term management of nuclear fuel waste. I welcome the opportunity to speak to the bill because this debate is long overdue.
It is time to take a hard look at sustainable development and what that means. I believe that the nuclear industry has been unfairly singled out when it comes to waste management. When I say unfairly singled out, I do not mean that there should not be responsible waste management. I mean that in the other ways we generate electricity we have not been as responsible as a country, particularly when one considers the long term effects on the environment.
In fact, the nuclear industry has been very responsible when it comes to waste management. The waste from the nuclear industry is confined to an enclosed area, to be dealt with in a responsible manner.
It is time that we looked at waste management when it comes to all forms of energy.
In Canada uranium fuel bundles spend on average 15 months producing energy inside a Candu reactor before they are used up and replaced with fresh fuel bundles. The radioactive bundles are then transferred to large pools of water on site for storage. Under 18 metres of water, the spent fuel is perfectly safe and harmless, even to the workers doing the maintenance work inside the pool area.
As a measure of the extraordinary efficiency and sustainability of nuclear energy, the entire inventory of spent fuel from 30 years of nuclear electricity generation in Ontario, about 27,000 tonnes, would fill little more than one Olympic size swimming pool.
After 25 years of operation, pools at some nuclear stations, Bruce nuclear generating station in particular, are nearly full and an alternative site or method of storage is necessary.
Bill C-27 calls for the power utilities to establish a trust fund to finance long term nuclear fuel waste management activities and pay a levy for this fund. The waste management organization would then be required by the bill to examine three options: deep geological disposal; on site storage; or central long term storage. The bill would not preclude the opportunity to examine other methods of handling the spent fuel bundles either.
It is certainly in the public interest to have an effective means for waste management from nuclear power plants. Hopefully, a publicly accountable and fully transparent process for dealing with the waste would allay the public concerns about the handling and disposal of this hazardous waste.
As I now understand, planning for permanent disposal is under way and station storage facilities will be adequate at least until the year 2010.
Ontario Hydro is proposing a system of interim dry storage in concrete containers until a more permanent solution is found.
After six years out of the reactor, the radioactivity and heat in spent fuel bundles have sufficiently diminished to where they can be removed from the holding pools then taken to dry storage. Dry storage is not new in Canada and has been in use for over 45 years.
In the Canadian nuclear fuel cycle, storage by definition is a temporary measure. The term used to describe the permanent handling of spent nuclear fuel is disposal. The concept that currently is being proposed for disposal is deep, underground burial at a site yet to be determined.
The disposal concept involves a completely different technology from that proposed for temporary storage. Disposal involves deep burial inside a granite pluton, one of the solid, relatively fault free masses of granite found throughout the Canadian Shield.
The nuclear fuel cycle refers to the entire progress of nuclear fuel from the time the uranium is mined from the ground, through the refining process and fabrication of the ore pellets for fuel bundles, through the time it spends in a reactor producing its energy and until its eventual disposal.
Uranium pellets are about the size of a one-inch or 2.5 centimetre stack of dimes. Seven such pellets produce enough electricity to supply the annual electricity requirements of the average Canadian household. The pellets are loaded into zircaloy tubes about 50 centimetres long. These tubes are in turn held together in bundles by small plates welded to the end.
A fuel bundle weighs about 25 kilograms. Canada, being the world's largest producer of uranium, supplies about 30% of the world's demand from high grade mines located in Saskatchewan's Athabasca basin. We use about 15% to 20% of what we mine. The remaining 80% is for export.
Canadian nuclear technology is the most advanced in the world with the Candu reactor being the most state of the art in the industry. Canada is the only nation in the world that is a world leader in all three areas of the application of nuclear science and technology: uranium mining and milling; medical and industrial isotopes; and nuclear reactor design and construction.
The Candu's advanced heavy water design allows it to use 28% less natural uranium than light water designs found in the United States and in Russia and produces much less waste which has to be disposed of.
The Candu fuel bundles only become highly radioactive after they have been in a nuclear reactor and can be handled safely prior to this by wearing only protective gloves to protect the fuel bundle from dirt and moisture. The bundles are loaded into the reactor by hand during its initial start-up. Once the reactor is operating, bundles are loaded automatically by fueling machines, which is superior to the U.S.-Russia light water design that cannot be refueled while in operation but must shut down for the refuelling to take place. The 28% greater efficiency also means that the Candu reactor is able to recycle spent fuel from light water reactors to produce additional electricity.
In my riding of Renfrew--Nipissing--Pembroke I have the honour and privilege of representing the men and women who work at Chalk River laboratories, Canada's premier sight for nuclear research.
Society does not develop methods of bulk electricity production every decade or even every quarter century. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, most of the world and much of Canada make their electricity in exactly the same way we were making it at the end of the 19th century, by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to boil water for steam that in turn is used to turn turbines.
The concept of nuclear energy, although advanced, is only partly so. Only the water, the boiling part, is different. Nuclear reactors boil water in a cleaner, vastly more economical way. The turbine part of a nuclear station is exactly the same as in a fossil fuelled station.
In the future, where protecting our environment may become even more critical than it is today, where global warming may compel us to alter many of our traditional industrial technologies, nuclear energy will be an important part of our global electrical power generation. It offers perhaps the only safe transition between the older methods of bulk electricity production and newer technologies yet to be developed.
Contrary to the opinions of certain interest groups in our society, the nuclear industry and the public's perception of the industry are changing. I would like to draw the attention of the House to the definition of sustainable development as found in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland and entitled, “Our Common Future”.
The report is widely referred to as the Brundtland report. The definition referred to in the report is that sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
For greater clarity, we can further state that from the report on sustainable development, at a minimum, development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on earth, the atmosphere, the waters, the soils and the living beings. We need to start a dialogue about these issues because for too long we have been living on borrowed time when it comes to these issues. The generation of electricity and the impact that will have on the world is quickly coming to the fore. What recently happened in California is a prime example.
While on one hand, here and abroad consumers have been urged to conserve their power consumption and certainly industry has responded by producing more energy efficient appliances, on the other hand demand continues to rise.
I quote from a recent publication that identifies how new technologies like Internet and e-mail, online shopping and electronic banking are driving up the demand for electricity. It refers to a single warehouse in the Silicon Valley used to store such electronic data, consuming as much as 100,000 ohms according to energy analysts.
The United Nations projects a 50% increase in the global population by the middle of this century. Worldwide globalization is paving the way for the emergence of a global middle income class of four billion to five billion who have the same aspirations as we have for comfortable homes, imported foods, foreign travel, automobiles and all of the other comforts of modern society that rely on one thing, an abundant source of energy.
If the rest of the world were to have the same current energy standard of consumption as the developed world, energy production would have to be increased by a factor of 30. These are challenges we will all have to face. How will that demand for energy be met?
Let us first look at fossil fuels, the fuels largely responsible for the greenhouse effect that scientists believe is contributing to our global warming.
Many experts expect the fossil fuel production to peak. If it turns out that the ultimate resource of recoverable barrels of oil is 2,200 billion barrels, production will peak by the year 2013, just 12 years away.
What role may energy conservation play in delaying the time until the decline? Certainly alternative sources of energy can be developed, but at what contribution to the basic energy needs?
In order to provide the city of Toronto with its present power needs, about 40,000 one megawatt wind generators would be required. They would have to cover an area three times the size of Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island, some 5,656 square kilometres. The windmills would also have to rely on a wind that is always blowing, just like solar power depends on a sun that is always shining. We know that does not happen. Storage from these sources adds another level to the problem of alternative forms of energy.
In the discussion about global warming, the biggest culprit when it comes to the greenhouse gases and the consumption of fossil fuels is the automobile. In the U.S. motor vehicles make up about 53% of oil consumption. Early planning, our best hope of reducing the impact of declining oil reserves and reducing the demand for oil, particularly with non-carbon sources, are needed to fulfill our national and international obligation to slow global climate change.
Two especially promising energy forms to replace oil in transportation are stored electricity, especially in batteries, and hydrogen. Hydrogen can be burned in combustible engines virtually pollution free or it can be efficiently converted without pollution to electricity using fuel cells.
The use of electricity and hydrogen would reduce greenhouse gas emissions along with oil consumption. The use of clean Candu generated electricity to run hydrogen producing plants would ensure that the full cycle of hydrogen production is emission free. Recent developments in fuel technology are beginning to allow efficient, cost effective conversion of hydrogen into electricity as an onboard source for transportation.
More important is the tie between hydrogen production and the generation of heavy water which is needed to sustain the chain reaction in Candu reactors.
While producing an industrial stream of hydrogen from electrolysis would be the main objective of a hydrogen plant, a side stream generation of heavy water could also be produced with little or no extra energy expenditure.
Using advanced Canadian technology in a production setting, this would earn additional revenue for the hydrogen production process, making it cost effective while at the same time producing heavy water for the Candu reactors.
Canada has a significant opportunity and it all starts with a healthy nuclear industry. A healthy nuclear industry starts with effective waste management.
I commend the government for the legislation it has brought to the House today. I look forward to further investments in Canada's nuclear industry with a long awaited funding announcement for the Canadian neutron facility at Chalk River Laboratories.