Led by Ontario, Canada is looking to fill their looming energy supply gap, and address climate change, by building a fleet of the new super-safe small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) over the next 20 years.
Ontario Power Generation
Darlington Nuclear Generating Station is one of the top performing nuclear stations in the world, producing over 25 billion kWhs per year.
Ontario’s electricity supply is quite low-carbon already, with about 60% nuclear and 20% hydropower, with gas about 10%. Canada overall is about 60% hydropower and 16% nuclear, with the rest spread out among coal, gas and wind. At 50 grams of CO2 per kWh, Canada is one of the cleanest grids in the world.
Aggressive targets for further reducing carbon emissions from Ontario resulted in 7 GW of coal-fired generation closing between 2005 and 2014. The province’s largest utility, Ontario Power Generation, replaced all its coal with renewable energy backed-up by natural gas, plus life extensions of almost 7 GW of existing nuclear.
In October 2016, Ontario Power Generation started a US$9.6 billion refurbishment project at its 3.5 GW Darlington nuclear plant to extend the lifespan by 30 years. Bruce Power has also begun a US$10 billion life-extension project for its 6.3 GW nuclear plant northwest of Toronto.
The utility plans to close its 3 GW Pickering nuclear plant in 2024, so it needs new carbon-free power to ensure Ontario meets its 2030 goal to cut carbon emissions by 37% below 1990 levels, and its even more ambitious 2050 goal of being 80% below 1990 levels.
As Nicolle Butcher, Vice President of Strategy & Acquisitions at Ontario Power Generation, told the 2017 International SMR and Advanced Reactor Summit in Atlanta, Georgia last month, “Ontario Power Generation forecasts a significant gap in its power generation mix after 2030, and it intends to fill this gap with nuclear power.”
Butcher added that long-term economic uncertainties and a lack of long-term political stability favor SMR plants with short lead times rather than large-scale nuclear projects.
Ontario Power Generation has maintained the option to build new nuclear plants by obtaining a 10-year site preparation license in 2012 at its Darlington nuclear plant near Toronto.
Canada is a pioneer in nuclear power. The CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) reactor was designed in the 1950s – a heavy water reactor that can make the most of Canada's uranium supplies without the need to enrich. All 19 of Canada's nuclear reactors are CANDU and there are 31 CANDU reactors around the world.
A number of advanced nuclear reactor developers are targeting the Canadian market, where a risk-informed regulatory framework is considered more flexible and conducive to licensing new designs than in the United States, and where numerous remote communities and industrial facilities represent captive electricity consumers. Canada even has a fusion reactor design company, General Fusion.
Ontario has most of the large-scale nuclear power plants in the country, but several Canadian provinces are seen as potential markets for SMRs, making for a Pan-Canadian nuclear approach with standardized designs. Saskatchewan is a global uranium producer that could easily supply all these reactors with nuclear fuel for centuries.
Terrestrial Energy
The general facility layout for Terrestrial Energy’s new Integral Integrated Molten Salt Reactor, showing the IMSR core-unit within its below-ground containment cavity, overhead office and control areas, storage silos, separate steam generator and turbine areas, and delivery-removal area for new and used core units. The reactor is flexible, redundant, passive and replaceable. After seven years just pop out the core and replace it with another unit.
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and Advanced Reactor Concepts are jointly developing and licensing a sodium-cooled advanced small modular reactor (aSMR) based on their reactor technologies, and plan to enter the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's Vendor Design Review process.
In January, NuScale Power out of Oregon announced their submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the first design certification application for any SMR in the United States. It is expected to be built in the early 2020s. ThorCon has a molten salt design that uses thorium as well as uranium.
But Canada’s own new SMR company, Terrestrial Energy Inc. (TEI), has a new small modular Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) design that is ideal for this future, that is, a nuclear reactor that:
- is cheaper than coal and can last for decades longer
- is a 400 MWt (190 MWe) modular design, one able to be adapted to needs for both on and off-grid heat and power
- is small and modular enough to allow simple construction in under 4 years, and trucking of modules to the site
- operates at normal pressures, removing those safety issues, and at higher temperatures, providing more energy for the same amount of fuel
- it does not require water for cooling and has the type of passive safety systems that make it walk-away safe
- can load-follow rapidly to buffer the intermittency of renewables
- generates less waste that is also more easily managed
Terrestrial Energy’s reactor uses the natural convection of the molten salt to remove the heat to the vessel walls passively where its containment silo simply adsorbs the heat decay and conducts it away – this is passive cooling at its simplest.
The Canadian Power Workers Union is all for expanding nuclear. They understand safe, secure, high-paying jobs. Nuclear is the foundation of Ontario’s and New Brunswick’s electricity systems and nuclear will be providing large volumes of affordable, baseload, low-carbon electricity, week in and week out, for decades to come.
Besides, nuclear power shrugs off a Polar Vortex like it’s a summer’s day.
Dr. James Conca is an expert on energy, nuclear and dirty bombs, a planetary geologist, and a professional speaker. Follow him on Twitter @jimconca and see his book at Amazon.com