Kanada erwägt Einstieg in Atomenergie
Thu Mar 1, 2007 4:00 PM ET
By Randall Palmer
OTTAWA, March 1 (Reuters) - Concern over global warming has breathed new life into Canada\'s nuclear industry, which is eyeing the possibility of its first new plants in the country in a quarter century, industry officials said on Thursday.
"The climate change driver is so compelling a case that the nuclear file becomes a critical part of the solution," Duncan Hawthorne, chairman of the Canadian Nuclear Association and chief executive of Bruce Power, told Reuters.
Though atomic energy always raises the question of what to do with nuclear waste, its attraction in terms of the climate change debate is that it emits none of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.
Officials said Canada\'s "nuclear renaissance" had created a challenge for companies and regulators to hire enough qualified workers, particularly as the workforce ages.
Bruce Power as well as Ontario Power Generation, which is owned by the Ontario government, have begun the applications process or new power plants on separate sites in Ontario.
The head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Linda Keen, told a nuclear conference on Thursday that her regulatory body had accepted Bruce Power\'s project description in just five months, at the end of January, and was now looking at a way of speeding up its environmental assessment.
Keen said she would recommend to federal Environment Minister John Baird that the project go straight to a public panel rather than first going through an eight-month process to determine if an environmental assessment panel was necessary.
She said the Ontario Power Generation project description, for a new site at Darlington, about 70 km (45 miles) east of Toronto, should also be dealt with expeditiously.
In addition, the federal government and the private firm Energy Alberta are promoting the idea of using nuclear energy to develop Alberta\'s massive oil sands reserves.
"If you\'re going to tackle climate change, you\'ve got to do everything," Hawthorne said. "That includes energy efficiency and conservation, but it also includes a pretty significant investment in nuclear."
He said that as Canada\'s government moves to limit greenhouse gas emissions, industries which want to continue to grow will have a natural incentive to turn to nuclear energy.
In the case of Alberta\'s oil sands, he envisaged industry using a combination of carbon sequestration, whereby carbon dioxide is buried, and nuclear energy.
Bruce Power operates six nuclear reactors on Lake Huron, about 250 km (155 miles) northwest of Toronto, and is refurbishing two more, which are due to come on line in 2009. Bruce will then have more than 6,000 megawatts of capacity.
The major partners in the operation are uranium miner Cameco Corp. and pipeline company TransCanada Corp. .
The power plants are divided into Bruce A and Bruce B stations, with four reactors each. All four Bruce B units and one in Bruce A will need to be refurbished or replaced between 2015 and 2020.
Hawthorne said it was possible, if Ontario authorities call for more power, for the company to both refurbish the Bruce B reactors as well as build the new units for which it has started seeking regulatory approval.
However, Bruce is limited by transmission capacity to get its power to market. Transmission upgrades are planned at least to take the extra electricity that will be made by the two refurbished Bruce A units starting in 2009.
The company hopes that if it does decide to build some or all of the new 1,000-MW units it will start within three years and finish five years later -- by 2015 or 2016 -- just as the first Bruce B units are due to be retired or refurbished.
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