Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-4, the reincarnation of Bill C-57, an act to amend the Nuclear Safety and Control Act. The bill is necessary to correct a clause that prevents a debt financing by the private sector for the nuclear industry.
Lenders such as banks and other financial institutions are refusing to consider approval for loans to the nuclear industry because the section in the current act makes the lenders liable in the instance of a nuclear spill.
The passage of Bill C-4 is critical to addressing concerns over greenhouse gas emissions, that is if the concern on the part of the NDP and Bloc are genuine.
Opposition to the nuclear energy system stems largely from the lack of understanding of how it works. I shall do my best to demystify the technology.
In 1905 the great physicist, Albert Einstein, showed theoretically that mass and energy were equivalent. It was more than 30 years however before scientists discovered the immense energy that could be released by transforming matter into the fission process. A Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, took out a patent on a device that would develop enormous energy from the nucleus from a chain reaction based on a neutron capture process involving the release of more than two neutrons. Although he had no idea of whether this would work in practice, the concept was exactly how a nuclear reactor works.
Next came the discovery of the fission process itself. In 1938 two Germans, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, reported the puzzling result that when they bombarded uranium with neutrons, barium and crypton were always produced.
Shortly after, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Firsch noted that barium has 56 protons and crypton has 36, yielding a total of 92 protons, the same as uranium. This clue led them to deduce that the uranium atom had been split or had undergone a process known today as fission.
However there was something even more astonishing. In splitting the uranium atom, there was an enormous release of energy.