Natural Resources committee  Hello everybody. It's wonderful to be here in person with you. My name is Chris Keefer. I'm an ER physician and also the president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy. We are a non-profit made up of scientists, doctors, engineers, environmentalists and tradespeople, who believe that

Natural Resources committee  Just to follow on that, we have the SMR Action Plan in place, which is excellent. I think the scale of what's required, the staggering scale truly of the number of power plants we need to build, really means that we cannot abandon our CANDU technology, which, in the words of Seam

Natural Resources committee  In one word, yes.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. There's a big taboo to talk in negative terms about wind and solar technology. This is not punching down. Of global electricity spending, it's about $800 billion. Wind and solar are using about $300 billion of that investment. This is a critical issue. I'm not paid by the i

Natural Resources committee  I'm learning the etiquette here. Through the chair, you're right, uranium is a critical mineral. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on this. Uranium actually offsets one-third of Canada's national annual emissions. We put out 730 megatonnes. The uranium that we contrib

Natural Resources committee  What I could quickly add is that we have a number of sites, particularly old, retired coal plants like Nanticoke here in Ontario, that are sitting there with a transmission capacity ready to go. Building nuclear on retired coal sites is a great way to justly transition those work

Natural Resources committee  Like I said, this is an issue that does definitely merit a response. We've been storing spent civilian nuclear waste for 70 years now. In the world's history of storing spent civilian nuclear waste there's not been a single death associated with that. We know how to shield radi

Natural Resources committee  I'm going to pass the question.

Natural Resources committee  No, no, I'm happy to answer part of that, but I'm not a nuclear engineer. Regarding this issue of nuclear energy leading to nuclear weapons, we have some interesting examples. Look at South Korea and North Korea. North Korea, a country with no civilian nuclear program, has nucle

Natural Resources committee  Plutonium is created as part of neutrons bombarding uranium-238 inside of reactors around the world. It is incredibly difficult to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. I'm going to leave that to my—

Natural Resources committee  You mentioned biomass. Biomass is a terrible source of energy. We're taking land that could be used to grow food, and turning it into fuel. We're turning woodchips into power.

Natural Resources committee  Currently, the largest plant in the U.K. burns four gigawatts of woodchips from South Carolina. To say that biomass is a solution...The SMR we're pursuing here is based on existing technology. It's just a scaled-down version of a larger power plant. This isn't a bogeyman. We've

Natural Resources committee  —boiling water reactors around the world since the 1960s.

Natural Resources committee  You're misquoting me, Charlie. I did not say that.

Natural Resources committee  That is true.