Do the research and end the nuclear hype in New Brunswick

[Oscar]

Do the research and end the nuclear hype in New Brunswick

[ https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/06/29/do-t ... brunswick/ ]

NB Media Co-op - Commentary - by Susan O'Donnell June 29, 2024

New Brunswick’s ARC nuclear project is in trouble. This situation highlights the lack of critical knowledge about nuclear reactor designs within NB Power and the New Brunswick government.

The ARC project goal is to design and build a nuclear reactor cooled with liquid sodium metal at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy. NB Power also plans a second reactor at the site, the Moltex reactor design cooled with molten salt.

If NB Power and the provincial government reviewed available research, they would learn that both sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors have never operated successfully on a commercial electricity grid.

For sodium-cooled reactors like the ARC design, billions of dollars have been spent over decades trying to make them work in a commercial setting, by companies in other countries with considerable experience building nuclear reactors. The failures are well-documented.

Liquid sodium metal is reactive and burns when exposed to air or water. The first commercial sodium-cooled reactor in the U.S. had a partial meltdown and was quickly scrapped.

In other countries, sodium fires and unpredictable performances led to sodium-cooled reactors being abandoned in France (the Superphénix), Japan (the Monju breeder), Germany (the Kalkar plant), and Scotland (the Dounreay reactor).

All these shut-down sodium-cooled reactors cost far more to decommission than they did to build, partly due to the expense of removing the sodium from the reactors’ radioactive waste material so it could be safely disposed without causing underground explosions due to sodium-water reactions, as happened for Scotland’s Dounreay reactor.

An expert report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated that inherent problems with sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors means new builds will have difficulty reaching commercial viability by the year 2050, far later than the federal 2035 deadline for utilities to transition to a net-zero electricity grid.

The ARC sodium-cooled design is in its preliminary stage. Bill Labbe, the ARC CEO who suddenly left the company recently, said in 2023 that $500 million is needed to develop the ARC reactor design, and a further $600 million in power purchase agreements to move the project forward. The money raised to date for the ARC project is only a tiny fraction of that.

Since 2018 the provincial government has handed $25 million to ARC and $10 million to Moltex, as ‘seed’ funding to attract private investment. The federal government gave Moltex $50.5 million in 2021 and ARC $7 million in 2023.

However, six years of trying to entice private investors to the ARC and Moltex projects has not yielded results. Globally, private investment in the energy sector is going into renewable – not nuclear – energy.

Despite the ARC company’s financial difficulties, according to news reports both NB Power and the New Brunswick government continue to support the ARC project.

Since the two start-up companies arrived in Canada and landed in Saint John in 2018, the government’s hype around the ARC and Moltex projects at times has been intense, surprisingly so, given that neither company has ever built a nuclear reactor.

In the past, Energy Minister Mike Holland has been the biggest booster of the ARC and Moltex “advanced” reactor designs.

However, in a curious coincidence, Holland quit the cabinet and gave up his MLA seat just days before the troubles at the ARC company hit the news, after previously announcing he would not stand in the upcoming election.

NB Power wants to build the ARC reactor near its existing Point Lepreau nuclear reactor, a consistent money loser for the utility.

According to the NB Auditor General, about three-quarters of NB Power’s $5 billion debt is from cost over-runs on the original CANDU reactor build 40 years ago and the re-build more than a dozen years ago.

At the recent Energy and Utility Board hearings, it was clear that the ongoing poor performance of the Lepreau plant is contributing to the utility’s financial difficulties and its request for an unprecedented rate hike.

New Brunswick’s abysmal prior experience with nuclear reactors raises an obvious question: why is the province intent on trying to develop experimental nuclear reactors as part of its energy transition plans?

Nuclear power is a more expensive way to generate electricity than renewable energy with storage. Nuclear plants take much longer to build than solar or wind farms. These facts are well-known.

Even the right-wing magazine The Economist recognizes the global trend toward renewables and away from nuclear energy, stating in its most recent issue that: “the next ten-fold increase (in solar energy) will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less than the time it typically takes to build one of them.”

The challenge for New Brunswick is that our public utility NB Power is stuck, along with Ontario Power Generation, in the Jurassic era, feeding their nuclear dinosaurs while the rest of the utility world is getting on with their renewables and storage rollouts.

Across the globe, countries are focused on technological revolutions in energy efficiency and productivity, building smart grids with demand management and response and distributed renewable energy and storage resources. These offer lower-cost, lower-risk, faster and more flexible pathways for decarbonized electricity grids without large centralized nuclear systems.

Building more nuclear reactors and increasing power rates is not compatible with what many commentators in the province want in our shared economic, social and cultural future. It’s time for New Brunswick to end the nuclear hype.

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Susan O’Donnell is the principal investigator with teammates of the CEDAR project, St. Thomas University in Fredericton.

[Oscar]

Where will New Brunswick’s small modular nuclear waste go?

[ https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/06/30/wher ... -waste-go/ ]

Emma Fackenthall - June 30, 2024

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), an industry organization charged with finding a home for all of Canada’s used nuclear fuel, might have their work cut out for them if New Brunswick goes forward with deeply flawed plans for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors.

A representative from the industry’s waste management group has stated that communities willing to host a so-called Deep Geological Repository for radioactive spent-fuel have the right to refuse new types of wastes, like those from New Brunswick’s proposed Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (also called SMRs). But if there’s no place for SMR waste in the proposed repository, is there a viable future for SMRs?

On April 22, during an event hosted by the Assembly of First Nations in Fredericton, NWMO senior transportation engineer Ulf Stahmer stated that communities willing to host a Deep Geological Repository are only agreeing to store the waste we currently have. When asked about waste from proposed SMRs, Stahmer said that it is within the rights of the host community to deny any new waste or different kinds of waste. He further posits that it “is a discussion yet to be had if SMR waste is compatible in repositories or if willing communities want it.”

An “informed and willing host community” is one of the most important considerations when it comes to choosing a site for the waste repository, according to Martin Badley, assistant technical officer with the NWMO.

“That said, we cannot expect members of the two remaining potential host communities to be sufficiently informed on SMR spent fuel in time to have it included in our site selection process at the end of 2024,” he said in an email.

As such, Badley concludes that “the spent fuel from SMRs would be a topic of future discussion once a single site has been selected.”

What about New Brunswick’s radioactive waste?

The province is hoping to develop SMR technology – with the private companies ARC Clean Technology and Moltex Energy – on the Point Lepreau site (the home of the current CANDU reactor). The provincial government has already provided lots of funding and enthusiasm for these proposals has even gone as far as including SMRs in its energy transition strategy.

SMRs are not yet a viable technology and are still in development. The types and forms of waste from these reactors are yet undetermined. However, some studies have shown that while SMRs are being advertised as low-waste technologies, the different and complicated waste streams prove a huge hassle. A Stanford-led study from 2022 found that the establishment of SMRs will only exacerbate the challenges of nuclear waste management.

The proposed SMRs for New Brunswick would create a greater volume of waste, and the material would be more complex in nature than the used-fuel bundles that already occupy hundreds of concrete silos in a large fenced-off block of pavement at Point Lepreau, shrouded by our biodiverse Wabanaki Forest.

SMRs: New & complicated wastes

There’s another issue: Moltex’s proposed stable salt reactor design will use existing spent fuel from Lepreau’s CANDU reactor, but the reprocessing required to extract the plutonium to fuel a new reactor will create many new waste streams, and these too would need adequate storage.

“There are two waste streams to consider: the waste produced from reprocessing and the spent fuel from the reactor,” Badley stated.

Will Motlex’s reprocessed CANDU waste be stored in the proposed Deep Geological Repository, or will host communities be able to refuse that waste too?

And if these waste materials can’t find a home in the proposed repository, where will New Brunswick house all its radioactive refuse?

Badley writes: “Both waste streams [reprocessing and SMR spent fuel] would be considered high-level waste and, therefore, the NWMO would be responsible for their long-term management.”

“Though Moltex would be utilizing spent CANDU fuel, which has been extensively studied and characterized, the waste produced by Moltex would be significantly different from a chemical and radiological point of view,” he added.

“These new waste forms would require a new safety assessment to provide confidence in safety that they could be stored in a [Deep Geological Repository],” he said.

Should the host community refuse any sort of SMR waste, “a second DGR would be required,” he stated.

This proposed second repository — which Badley said is supported by the federal Minister of Energy and Natural Resources — would dispose of materials known as intermediate-level waste and non-fuel high-level waste.

I reached out to the office of Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, for comment, but I didn’t receive a reply by the deadline.

When will a site be chosen for this second proposed Deep Geological Repository and in whose backyard will it be this time? Are we to expect a repository in New Brunswick, since all the unaccepted radioactive wastes would be concentrated here?

‘The NWMO is creating an illusion,’ says environmentalist

Northwatch, a public interest organization based in North Bay, Ont. has been working to inform residents about a proposed nuclear waste repository in northwestern Ontario.

Brennain Lloyd, an environmentalist and critic from Northwatch, suggested that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is misleading the public about their ability to choose.

“The NWMO is creating an illusion when they tell you that communities who agree to ‘host’ a DGR will later be able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to different kinds of wastes, or even different activities,” she said.

Lloyd said that in the hosting agreement for the Township of Ignace, Ont., one of the contenders for a proposed repository, there’s “a condition that the NWMO can modify the scope of the project and that nothing in the agreement restricts the NWMO’s right to modify the project. The Agreement also gives the NWMO the right to ‘emplace used nuclear fuel in the DGR from sources other than ‘Accepted Fuel Sources.’”

Free, prior and informed consent

The two communities in Ontario scouted for the proposed first Deep Geological Repository are on the territories of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, in the South Bruce area, and on the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, east of the town of Ignace. If either of these sites is selected, then free, prior, and informed consent from the Indigenous communities must be secured, according to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

However, as Lloyd states, the NWMO does not seem to be giving communities this right. Already, the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, an organization representing 49 First Nations in Northern Ontario, has opposed the construction of a Deep Geological Repository in the North, claiming potential dangers to watersheds going into the Hudson Bay.

Closer to home, the Wolastoq Grand Council’s Resolution on nuclear energy and nuclear waste on traditional Wolastoq territory has demanded that “the Governments of New Brunswick and Canada and the nuclear industry respect the desires of First Nations in Ontario to stop the development of the Deep Geological Repository on Indigenous territory in Ontario, and to assume responsibility for the radioactive material created by nuclear reactors in New Brunswick.”

In an era of extreme uncertainty, New Brunswickers are left wondering where a proposed new Deep Geological Repository will go, what environmental consequences will come of its deployment, and whether communities truly have the right to say no to new waste after agreeing to host.

New Brunswickers must also be aware of the precarious situation we are in: should SMRs come to fruition at Point Lepreau, all our current and new nuclear waste might be denied storage in a Deep Geological Repository in Ontario.

Both proposed sites in Ontario are thousands of kilometres away from Point Lepreau in New Brunswick (2,900 km to Ignace and 1,725 km to Bruce, to be exact). If host communities accept our province’s waste, what about the consent of the hundreds of communities in New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario that trucks carrying volatile wastes will drive through every day for decades? Is it really the time to invest in new nuclear technologies when our current waste is already troublesome enough?

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Emma Fackenthall is a research assistant with the CEDAR project and an undergraduate student at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.


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[Oscar]

Unable to effectively operate its lone existing nuclear reactor, New Brunswick is betting on advanced options

[ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/busines ... ex-energy/ ]

The Globe & Mail - MATTHEW MCCLEARN - PUBLISHED July 2, 2024

Mike Holland was among Canada’s leading evangelists for small modular nuclear reactors. During his tenure as New Brunswick’s energy minister, from 2018 to when he stepped down on June 20, he vigorously supported plans by the province’s Crown utility, NB Power, to construct two different small reactor designs from startup companies: U.S.-based ARC Clean Technology and Britain’s Moltex Energy. This represents Canada’s most ambitious – and perhaps riskiest – foray into bleeding-edge nuclear technology.

In an interview shortly before he resigned to pursue an opportunity in the private sector, Mr. Holland recalled how SMRs arrived on his agenda soon after he assumed office. He began exploring what advanced reactors could mean for decarbonizing the province’s electricity sector and growing its economy, and concluded New Brunswick could become a hub for nuclear design and manufacturing, and export reactors around the world.

“I saw the opportunity for New Brunswick to not just participate, but be a leader in this,” he said. “I am someone that loves to be on the cutting edge.”

His enthusiasm and risk tolerance proved a boon for ARC and Moltex, two tiny startups that have neither licensed nor constructed a commercial reactor. Under Mr. Holland’s leadership, New Brunswick became an incubator and helped the companies attract government funds to continue their work.

But NB Power is already struggling with persistent problems at its lone existing reactor at Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. It has been negotiating a partnership with Ontario Power Generation that could see the latter assume partial ownership and help fix the ailing plant.

If NB Power needs outside assistance with a conventional reactor it has owned and operated for more than 40 years, one might question the wisdom of building two more featuring untested designs. Mr. Holland’s replacement as energy minister, Hugh Flemming, must now decide how comfortable he is with the province’s SMR ambitions.

Unconventional thinking
Nearly all of the more than 400 nuclear reactors operating today use water to cool their highly radioactive cores. Water also acts as a “moderator,” slowing down the high-energy neutrons produced by nuclear fission. Though water-cooled reactors have dominated for decades, they cost huge sums to build and produce waste that remains hazardous for countless human lifetimes. They’re vulnerable to severe (albeit rare) accidents that can render surrounding areas uninhabitable.

Virtually every SMR is marketed as addressing these and other shortcomings – and most have ditched water as coolant and moderator.

According to documents released by New Brunswick’s energy ministry through the province’s freedom of information legislation to researcher Susan O’Donnell, and provided to The Globe and Mail, in 2017 NB Power reviewed dozens of SMRs it read about in nuclear industry publications. It came up with a short list of five, which it later narrowed to ARC and Moltex, and enticed both companies to set up headquarters in Saint John.

ARC and Moltex are pursuing what the industry calls “fast” neutron reactors, so named because they lack a moderator. The ARC-100 reactor would be cooled using liquid sodium metal and consume enriched uranium metal fuel. Moltex’s Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner (SSR-W), meanwhile, would use molten salt fuel placed in fuel assemblies similar to those in conventional reactors.

The SSR-W would require its own fuel reprocessing plant called WATSS (short for Waste to Stable Salt), which would convert Point Lepreau’s spent fuel into new fuel. For NB Power, that’s a major attraction: As of last summer, Point Lepreau had more than 170,000 Candu spent fuel bundles. Moltex says that’s enough to power its reactor for 60 years.

In May, 2019, NB Power sent a letter to Mr. Holland and Premier Blaine Higgs urging them to support fast reactors. The utility told its government masters that there was enough room at Point Lepreau for both reactors and that they could be up and running by 2030.

“These two technologies have different market applications and there is no downside to letting both of them work through the process,” the letter stated.

New Brunswick’s latest energy plan suggests electricity consumption will nearly double in the next few decades. NB Power’s challenge is to satisfy that demand while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions; Lori Clark, its chief executive, has cast SMRs as playing an important role in the utility’s efforts to reach net zero by 2035.

What New Brunswick covets most, however, is a shot of economic adrenalin.

Even optimists expect that SMR demonstration units will be too expensive to be economically attractive. Multiple units must be built to exploit economies of scale and reduce costs.

NB Power is counting on that. According to documents released under the federal Access to Information Act, the utility expects the first ARC-100 would be followed by 11 more units by mid-century. By then, up to 24 would be built in Canada, and the same number in other countries. And the first SSR-W would lead to 11 more built across Canada and two dozen more in the United States, Britain and Eastern Europe. If that happened, they’d be among the most successful models in history.

NB Power thought more than half of the components would be manufactured in New Brunswick. It also enthused about royalty payments on reactor sales, “potentially worth billions of dollars.”

Technical risks
But to realize any of that, New Brunswick’s SMR program must overcome technical challenges that have plagued the nuclear industry from its earliest days.

Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has warned policy makers about the pitfalls of betting on “advanced” reactor designs, which he has studied over many years. “Developing new designs that are clearly superior to light water reactors overall is a formidable challenge, as improvements in one respect can create or exacerbate problems in another,” he wrote in a 2021 report.

Fast reactors, which originated in the earliest years of the nuclear age, bear this out. The U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Japan and India all pursued so-called “fast breeder” reactors that could produce more plutonium fuel than they consumed. A report that examined the history of those reactors, produced in 2010 by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of arms control and non-proliferation experts, found member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development collectively invested about US$50-billion researching breeder reactors. Outside the OECD, Russia and India also spent heavily.

They didn’t have much to show for it. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are only two fast reactors currently generating electricity – both in Russia. The International Panel found that sodium-cooled reactors proved expensive to build, complex to operate, prone to malfunctions, and difficult and expensive to repair. Sodium reacts violently with water and burns if exposed to air. Major sodium fires have occurred in previous reactors, often leading to lengthy shutdowns.

As for molten salt reactors, there have only been two experimental exemplars, the most recent of which operated in the 1960s. Mr. Lyman’s 2021 report said molten salts were highly corrosive to many materials typically used in reactor construction. Moreover, “liquid nuclear fuels introduce numerous additional safety, environmental and proliferation risks.” Molten salt reactors likely couldn’t be built before the 2040s at the earliest, he concluded.

In addition to confronting such technical challenges, New Brunswick’s strategy also presupposes that reprocessing of spent fuel will be permitted and affordable. But a report published last year by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, the industry-controlled organization tasked with disposing of Canada’s reactor waste, was skeptical on both counts.

NB Power is also counting on circumstances that are beyond its control. According to a letter signed by former CEO Keith Cronkhite in 2020 and released under the Access to Information Act, New Brunswick’s plan hinges on Ontario and other provinces building multiple BWRX-300s. (The letter was sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.) If they do not, “SMR companies based in New Brunswick will not be able to attract private investment necessary to ever deploy a new reactor,” Mr. Cronkhite’s letter predicted.

The SMR plan is already falling behind schedule. At a rate hearing in June before the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board, Brad Coady, vice-president of strategic partnerships and business development, said NB Power believes it is no longer possible to have SMRs operating by 2030; the earliest date for the first unit has been pushed back to 2032 or 2033.

Delays will have consequences, because NB Power needs options to replace its coal-fired generation while at the same time satisfying growing demand for electricity. The utility, he said, has been studying alternative scenarios “if we don’t have them in time.”

Paying for it
Perhaps the most fundamental risk to New Brunswick’s SMR push is that the province can’t afford it.

Last year, ARC and Moltex each estimated that developing their reactors would cost around $500-million per company. NB Power is Canada’s most heavily indebted utility, and its budgets must be approved by the province’s Energy and Utilities Board. It has limited ability to pay for crucial early steps such as studies necessary to establish what the environmental consequences of the SMRs might be. In published reports, NB Power has acknowledged that its research and development efforts might have to be sacrificed to meet debt-reduction targets.

David Coon, leader of New Brunswick’s Green Party, said NB Power faces huge capital spending to retire its Belledune coal-fired generating plant and refurbish its Mactaquac hydroelectric dam and transmission lines.

“That is why they’re really not putting much into this,” he said. “Their approach has been, well, if we get a new nuclear plant out of this that that doesn’t really cost us much of anything, then bonus!”

ARC and Moltex also don’t have the money. In late June, ARC parted ways with CEO William Labbe and laid off an undisclosed number of staff – a move some observers said was likely due to a shortage of funds. Mr. Chronkite’s 2020 letter warned that the two SMR developers were small startups that couldn’t afford to do work using their own resources, and were at immediate risk of insolvency.

“Without federal support this year to the SMR developers in New Brunswick, one or both companies are expected to close their offices in the next year,” Mr. Cronkhite’s letter stated.

Indeed, New Brunswick officials have counted on continuing and generous support from Canadian taxpayers. In his letter, Mr. Cronkhite called on the federal government to provide $70.5-million that year to ARC and Moltex – and more than $100-million the following year – to “keep the SMR development option in New Brunswick viable.” In 2022, the two companies would need another $91-million.

Ottawa obliged, but only partly. It gave Moltex $50.5-million in 2021. The federal government also provided ARC $7-million last year. The lobbying efforts continue: When NB Power board vice-chair Andrew MacGillivray received his mandate letter in May, 2023, it instructed him to “support efforts to acquire federal funding” for the SMRs.

New Brunswick’s own history suggests the risks inherent in counting on boundless federal support.

Andrew Secord, an economics professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, has studied decision-making in the 1970s that led to the construction of the original Point Lepreau reactor. In a 2020 paper, he detailed how Point Lepreau arose in part from an export-led strategy under which multiple large reactors would be built and their electricity exported to New England. NB Power (then known as the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission, or NBEPC) first focused on building interconnections with New England and then pivoted to building reactors.

This strategy failed by 1972, but by that point NBEPC was unwilling to change course. Over the next three years, it assumed ever greater risks as potential partners failed to materialize.

“NBEPC managers continued along the nuclear path, exhibiting higher risk behaviour in the process,” Mr. Secord wrote. “As NBEPC executives spent more time and resources on the nuclear option, their personal attachment and the associated institutional commitment increased.”

Mr. Coon said New Brunswick’s SMR plan so far has cost the provincial and federal governments only around $100-million. But it could start costing taxpayers and ratepayers “much more money” if things progress further.

“It seems like we haven’t learned our lesson in New Brunswick,” he said.




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