Why is the federal government funding new nuclear power reactors?
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Susan O'Donnell October 15, 2020
In its September throne speech, the federal government signalled its intention to fund the development of new nuclear reactors (SMRs) as part of its climate action plan.
Today, the government made its first SMR funding announcement: $20 million from ISED's Strategic Innovation Fund for the company Terrestrial Energy to develop its prototype SMR in Ontario.
Anyone interested in evidence-based policy is wondering: Why are they doing this? There is no evidence that nuclear power will achieve carbon reduction targets, while there is considerable research indicating the contrary.
In fact, in today's funding announcement, federal Natural Resources Minister Seamus O'Regan confirmed that the new reactor will take more than a decade to develop and will contribute nothing to Canada's 2030 target for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The same week as the throne speech, the release of the 2020 World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) confirmed, as did its previous reports, that developing new nuclear energy is too slow and uneconomical to address the climate crisis compared to deploying renewable energy technologies.
Last week, research based on data from 123 countries over a 25-year period made a similar finding. December 2019 research from Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson refutes claims that nuclear energy is zero-carbon. A November 2019 article in the American business magazine Forbes argues that building new nuclear reactors instead of investing in more climate-effective energy resources actually makes climate change worse.
SMRs, the nuclear reactors promoted by the federal government, are in particular over-hyped as a climate crisis solution. SMRs have been proposed as a solution for remote communities and mining sites currently relying on diesel fuel but new research has found the potential market is too small to be viable.
SMRs exist only as computer models and nobody knows for sure if they will work. Last month, the Canadian energy watchdog The Energy Mix interviewed WNISR lead author Mycle Schneider, who called SMRs "PowerPoint reactors, not detailed engineering."
Given all the research evidence pointing away from funding nuclear energy in a climate action plan, why is the federal government proposing to do it?
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