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Natural Resources committee  Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. It's the first time I've been in front of such a committee. I worked in the nuclear industry for 11 years as an engineer and also as a manager, mostly supporting the CANDU product, and then later the smaller reactor technology, such as MAPLE and NRU.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Professor Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  I was part of the trade mission to China in April, and at that time there were several Chinese universities that were very interested in the Canadian technology. We're currently having very preliminary discussions about memorandums of understanding between our university and the Chinese universities, mostly in the area of student exchange.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  For a small modular reactor...?

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  It's a very good question because it's almost impossible to answer. The problem is that all of the companies that are doing this are keeping their cards very close to their chests. For several years now I've been going to conferences and I see wonderful three-dimensional graphics that my students could do in a day.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  The SCWR technology can probably go to a low funding level because it is still a technology that is going to be 15 or 20 years away with what's happening there. There's still a lot of debate about how exactly you make that device work. In the SMRs at the moment, I would either concentrate on Terrestrial Energy's technology, because it's going to be strongly Canadian and very interesting and unique, or collaborate with one of the integral PWRs like NuScale, or something along those lines, and concentrate just there.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  I agree with your comment. When you look at the Darlington refurbishment, the fourth unit to the refurbishment is going to go very well because they will have learned everything from the first unit. We have to keep in mind that first unit may be delayed, it may have some issues associated with it, because it's the first time that group of people are trying to do that.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  Okay. There's some good R and D that could be done in universities in the mechatronics and robotics areas, where we could start developing tools to shorten the human time involved in some of this work. That also helps with the repeatability of it, because now you have a device that's actually going to do the job the same way every single time it's used.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  They're all fascinating from a professor's point of view, which is “fund them all, please”, but that's impractical.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  It's all about the day-to-day work we have to do. If we have to sit there and change a seal on a pump, etc., or we have to change a pressure tube or some other component.... It's the maintenance work. A lot of that maintenance work is still done in a very time-consuming manner. Doing the development so that we can do that work faster, with machines, turning it more into an nth-of-a-kind approach so that it's being repeated constantly, and shortening the amount of time it takes people to [Technical difficulty—Editor].

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  At the university we've already started to try to work toward dealing with this. We started off in an easy way. We deal with the students first. We have forums and debates to get them introduced and excited about it. We've created a new course on nuclear security, and we have plans to bring emergency planning courses into the programs for the graduate-level students.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  I agree. Just invite us and we'll come. We talk about that in my class when we're talking about the design of a nuclear power plant and understanding how to site a plant, where to site it, and everything. One of the interesting questions I raise, if you look at Pickering specifically, was that when they first started building the plant there, there was no city.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  It was the countryside. Now a city has developed around it and that's changed the whole nature of the relationship between the plant and the city.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  This is something we are teaching the students, that when they're doing the design work they have to think about this and they have to plan for this. It's not necessarily a site for 150 years if this is going to change the community. We will gladly come to any council or committee.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel

Natural Resources committee  The only one that I know of was an attempt by a mining group to put a small modular reactor in the Arctic for mining support. They had approached the indigenous communities of the north, and they got a rather lukewarm response to that. They were quite happy with the fact that they would not have to pay $20 a litre for diesel, but they were still quite concerned about the nuclear aspect, and we didn't have a chance to follow up and have a good discussion on what the risks were.

November 22nd, 2016Committee meeting

Prof. Glenn Harvel