:
Perhaps I'll move through these slides pretty quickly and have a little bit longer for questions, if you find someplace where I've gone too quickly for everyone. There are two handouts, actually. One is the hard copy of the slide show, and then a little handbook, which is really a detail of facts about the nuclear industry, which could be helpful as well when you're considering other issues.
Let me just say, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me here. I represent the Canadian Nuclear Association, which is made up of a series of members; I think it's about 72 or 73. Our numbers are growing now. It's not like the old days, when we were losing members because nothing was happening in the industry. We're extremely busy now. We represent people from private consultants all the way through academia to nuclear generators of electricity, the designers of technology, the processors, and mining companies. So we represent the entire industry, although not all the companies in it. We're very pleased to be here today to speak to you a little bit about the greening of electricity consumption, and certainly that is happening with nuclear.
I'll move through these very quickly. Everybody knows that the pressure of the need for energy, and including in that electricity, and the need for hydrogen and for safe water has pushed the methods of finding those quantities of those entities to consider nuclear, which is extremely good in producing mass amounts of energy, which can then be incorporated into finding new ways of releasing fuels in Alberta oilsands, for instance, or in helping with desalination projects around the world. We're very, very pleased that our technology is being considered in that.
The driver of that, obviously, is the development of the population growth in developing countries. A good part of the world is still without electricity. Some of you have probably heard that several times, but for those of us who have had electricity, and at relatively inexpensive prices for a long period of time, it seems almost unimaginable that there are people who have never had electricity.
That growing need, whether it's in India or in China or in other parts of the developing world, means that they're looking for large producers of electricity, and nuclear is being considered in all of those. Climate change, carbon issues, Kyoto, challenges of energy gap, all of those things, including energy security, are the things that are driving people to look towards nuclear.
I have included next a graph that indicates the interesting phenomenon occurring in this world, and that is that the OECD countries, which are shown as the red line on the graph, are about to be overtaken in the production of CO2 by China and the developing countries. That is an important element for all of us, and I think that for those of us who hadn't considered the types of impacts that are about to occur, that particular graph from IEA World Energy Outlook 2006 is enough to let us know what really is coming upon us.
The next page just cites for everyone the fact that if we're going to wrestle with any of these issues, we are going to have to use a diversification of techniques that will permit us to make the biggest impact. We are not going to be able to do it with one technology at all, but we should make special efforts to combine technologies so that we can get the best out of all of the technologies and permit them to work together so that we can have a symbiotic relationship among all of the technologies that you recognize on that page.
The next graph, again from our friends, talks about aggressive processes that are required if we're going to contain CO2 emissions. The first three lines on the left side of your graph indicate what happens if you have a base case for which no action is taken whatsoever. But as you move into the act scenarios, as they're described in English, to 2050, you will see that there are tremendous impacts to be had if we become aggressive in applying new technologies to the cause of carbon emissions.
Ultimately, if you go to that whole report, which was commissioned in response to the G-8 Gleneagles Summit, you will see the best approach they came up with. Going through all the scenarios was what was called a “TECH Plus” technology application. What that really meant was that there was an aggressive implementation of technology gains rights across the area. It not only includes, by the way, nuclear, but wind, solar, and any number of other options, including conservation and energy efficiency. We're pleased that the world bodies have seen nuclear as playing a particularly important part in that.
As I take a look at the next graph, again, it's a graph that comes from overseas, from the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, actually. It has accomplished something that not many organizations have. They have kept statistics about various kinds of industries for a long period of time, and they have been able to look at the internal and external costs of various types of generation.
Here you see a list, and there must be about 15 or 16 different types of generation, and they have brought together both internal and external costs associated with those generation types. You can see that nuclear fares very well when it comes to the types of externalities that are often measured.
When you take a look at that graph, what it really says is there are a number of advantages to using low-carbon emissions and other atmospheric emissions-free technologies, including nuclear power.
If you turn to the next table, it comes from the Japanese Centre Research Institute and was released in 2002. Again, it looks at the relative placement of various types of generation fuels. Included in that you will see wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric at the very bottom course of that table indicating that there are some real advantages to going with emissions-free generation for the production of electricity.
The next two slides basically have quotes from two eminent environmentalists, James Lovelock, who has spoken at our seminar, and Patrick Moore, who has also spoken at our seminar, which is held every year either at the end of February or beginning of March. Both of those people, who have been instrumental in doing a great deal of active work to save the planet have, after years of examining what the options are, come to the conclusion that if we are really to have an impact on saving the globe from the carbon emissions issue, nuclear is going to be a big part of that, and those two quotations are there to remind us.
Well, let's take a look in Canada. The next table shows hydroelectricity at 61.5% of electricity generation in the country, and nuclear at 15.5%. When we look at nuclear at 15.5%, only three provinces have nuclear generation at the moment: Ontario, where we are over 50% of the electricity generated; Quebec has one plant at Trois-Rivières, Bécancour; and Lepreau at New Brunswick is our final generating nuclear facility. The table shows coal at 19.6%. Obviously, Alberta has a huge amount of coal. I think it's about 60% coal-generated electricity. So it's very obvious that people have chosen technologies that take advantage of their resident resources. I guess the exception might be, in that sense, Ontario. Although there used to be mining of uranium in Ontario, that has now changed and the uranium for Ontario basically comes from northern Saskatchewan.
Mr. Trost knows a little bit about that wonderful deposit in Saskatchewan. I have never seen anything like it, I must say. Cameco and Ariva Resources have a marvellous deposit there, sometimes over 90% pure ore, unheard of around the rest of the world. I don't like extending invitations on behalf of companies, but I would recommend that if people have a chance, if you can, visit that wonderful source of energy, not just for us, but for around the world, because a great deal of that energy, of course, is exported for consumption outside Canada.
The next slide reviews the nuclear industry in Canada. I won't stop there, but I must just highlight one thing, which is extremely critical for us in the nuclear industry. We have won one Nobel Prize. Dr. Bertram Brockhouse won it for his work in the nuclear industry. We are at the stage of being leading experts in nuclear technology in this country.
We are now at a stage where we need to renew the types of scientific and research facilities that are important for us to continue to keep that lead, so that we can stay at the head of this very competitive field these days. As I say, again, there are about 150 firms, 30,000 jobs, and growing because of the extra activity we are involved in, but you can see we are important in Canada, not only from the point of view of the commercial side, but also the academic and international slide.
The next slide is a very important item. It only is a snapshot of the fact that there are costs associated with each type of energy source--nuclear, coal, gas, biomass. All of those are at the very low end of costs--large hydro, obviously. All of that indicates to you that whatever we choose, there will be a cost, and we have to be cautious about the options we choose, because we are in a highly competitive international trading world that requires every advantage to be taken so that we can make sure Canadians come out on top.
I will just quickly go through two or three things.
For the first time in Canada, we have a private operator of a nuclear facility, at Bruce Power. They are, with private capital, starting to refurbish four units, which have been down. Two of them have been restarted; they are refurbishing units 1 and 2 on bank A at Bruce.
This is a $4.25-billion private capital investment on nuclear facilities. It is looking forward to highlighting the return to service of units that were shut down in 1997. Two of the units in the bank have already been brought back to service and have been performing very highly.
The next slide talks about oil sands extraction. My colleague will be talking more specifically about that, so I won't stop on this, other than to say that while people shouldn't say it's impolite to have your cake and eat it too, if we're going to get close to being able to liberate the oil from that wonderful facility in Alberta and keep our emissions low, then it would seem that nuclear offers the best opportunity of getting very close to it. We're very pleased in the industry that there are considerations to permit us to compete on a commercial basis for the wonderful opportunities that are there.
The next table lists something about which we're extremely proud, and that is the high level of performance you will see outlined in green. Bruce unit 6, Darlington unit 2, and Darlington unit 4 are at 97%, 98%, and 98.8% capacity factor for the year 2006.
One of the questions about our facilities has been whether or not they are reliable. The new technology and the upgrades that have been applied to these plants, and the new operating performance guidelines that each of OPG and Bruce have implemented, have driven us to provide this type of facility improvement, to the point where we are now approaching what most people wanted to see many years ago, and that is an 80% capacity factor lifetime for these units.
As you can see, we're not done yet with those improvements, and we're looking at going even further as we go on.
Here are a couple of quick points I can talk about a bit later in much more detail. Our safety record is second to none. There have been no fatalities related to radiation exposure at any of our plants. We have effective regulation with our regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is headquartered here in Ottawa, but which has representatives on each of our sites and is there to see what is happening on all occasions.
Concerning long-term fuel handling, we have a report in front of the government, which came in 2005 and is still residing there for decision, with respect to long-term handling of our used fuel. The report was made by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization in, I think, November of 2005. We are awaiting the option they have identified, which is, of course, deep geological storage. It is not just, in the words of an infomercial, to “set it and forget it”, but to maintain it in such a way that it can be monitored long-term and even recovered for the purposes of reprocessing, if that is seen to be necessary.
Something not well known is the fact that when those fuel bundles come out of our calandria, we have used less than 1% of the available energy, so there is a huge amount of energy still available in that spent fuel. We are looking forward to not just dumping it someplace, but to keeping it available so that the tremendous amount of energy there is available for us in the future.
Here are a couple of points along the lines of the inquiry from Madame DeBellefeuille. Electricity generation around the globe sees nuclear at about 16%. I will just touch on the fact that there are new units being built in Finland. One is under construction now, and a second is being planned. There is one that has just been approved for France at Flamanville. There are several in China.
In fact, we had both the Chinese and the U.S. ambassadors at our seminar a couple of years ago. China was looking at building 31 new units, which would increase their total electricity generated from nuclear power from 2% to 4%. That's 31 units of nuclear capacity.
The United States is looking at roughly a 20-number addition, and who knows what will happen as we move further down the road. In addition to that, there are obviously changes happening in Russia. There are considerations about where nuclear goes in many other of the European countries, including Germany, Sweden, and others as they look at that energy crunch, particularly around electricity.
I must say one other thing in summary. Globally we have saved between two billion and three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year because of nuclear generation. We have 440 nuclear units operating around the world, and several more are being planned--over 200, in fact.
Here I should say that our member company, AECL, has just signed an agreement to investigate the prospect of working collaboratively again with the folks in Argentina.
So there are very many opportunities. I can say that in Canada, the CANDU reactors have avoided about 1.4 billion tonnes of emissions since 1972.
All of that in a package indicates that we can help with the greening of the environment here by avoiding these emissions. We're pleased to do it on the basis of performance, on the basis of commercial competitiveness, and on the basis of timely building of our projects.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for having me here again. I don't know if you remember, but I was here a couple of months ago, when I talked about nuclear power for the oil sands.
To date, we've moved along. I'll give you a quick overview of where we are today. If you remember who I am, it's Energy Alberta. This is a privately owned company. There are two shareholders to date, Hank Swartout and me, the owners of the company.
We have an exclusivity agreement with AECL, Atomic Energy of Canada, to build two reactors in Alberta. We're hoping to build the ACR-1000. We're actually putting in for our site licensing approval on June 15.
We're working with two communities as we speak. To give you an idea, tomorrow night I do my first open house at a town-hall meeting in Whitecourt. Not only are we doing the Whitecourt community, we will also do the first nations at three o'clock. We're having three meetings: we'll do the Rotary Club, the first nations, and the town-hall meeting, all in the same day, which is tomorrow. So my material for you is limited, because we're getting our material ready for the town-hall meetings.
I'm quite a firm believer in what Murray has just mentioned, which is what's happening in the world right now with the renaissance of nuclear power. We brought that power and that idea to Alberta. What has happened in Alberta that everybody here should be aware of is that Alberta does have some oil companies that are very concerned about the CO2 issues. So we have an off-taker in Alberta that wishes to buy nuclear power in Alberta and likes the idea of using Atomic Energy of Canada's nuclear generation system.
This is private business for a private company that wishes to use the clean technology that nuclear power has to offer. Not only is it clean technology, but we, as well as our off-taker, believe that it's reliable and has stability of pricing. Here's a company in the oil business that believes that it needs a stable energy source, and it's going to use nuclear power. You can bring up a whole bunch of questions or concerns about whether it is right or wrong. Well, you have a private oil company that wishes to take that much power, which is a substantial amount.
Just to give you a quick rundown, to date, council members from two communities wish to host our facility. We are working closely with Whitecourt and Peace River in Alberta. Whitecourt is where we're going tomorrow. We've talked to the council in Peace River, as well, and they're very interested. In Whitecourt, not only do we have the council interested, we have the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club interested. And the community hopefully will be interested tomorrow as well.
We actually have taken an approach that's a voluntary approach. So we're trying to inform the community about nuclear power to make them feel comfortable. We're asking them to host us. Tomorrow night, in both cases, we've been invited guests to the community. We did not go to the community.
Just to give you a little bit more of an idea of why I'm here today, I need government support on the regulatory side, as well. We're very concerned about what's happening on a regulatory basis in Canada today. They have a number of mining projects. They have a number of nuclear projects that are being planned. They have some upgrading facilities they're upgrading. We're concerned about their ability to look at our process in a timely fashion. That timely fashion comes from you people who give them the directions to make sure that not only do they have the resources, but they have a commitment from you people that you feel that this is the right thing to do for Canada today.
That timely review is important to us. Not only does it cost money, but you also have an off-taker that needs it in a timely fashion. If we don't meet that in a timely fashion, they won't take that power.
What's happening, what I'm hearing not only from yourselves but also from the community, is that they want us to clean up that CO2 issue. This is an opportunity that we have to clean up the CO2 issue, and we need you and the regulatory body to do that in a timely manner. If it's not done in a timely manner, we as a group fail. I think we as a group need to make sure that regulatory body does it in a timely manner.
That's what we're doing in Alberta, and I do need the help from the committee and from the government to make sure the regulatory body does their job in a timely fashion and they have the resources to do that job.
Thank you.
In fairness, people who have not had to live in close proximity to any major facility, any major industrial facility, I think understand less about the type of safety required of the people who work inside the plant gate. That's not only with nuclear, but it is particularly with nuclear an important one, because you've identified both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which were the two large events that everybody has been able to focus on.
In 1979, Three Mile Island, the interesting thing about this was that the vessel worked exactly as it was designed to do, there was total containment, and no loss of life. There was an incident inside the containment, but it was kept safely there. The big problem, obviously, was Chernobyl, which of course was designed without containment. That was in fact a weakness of that type of reactor going forward, and I think a lot of people knew that.
While accidents can always happen, and while we plan our safety systems in depth with respect to the Canadian technology, the type of accident that happened in Chernobyl cannot happen with our units.
That having been said, we spend all our time making sure the women and men who work inside our plant keep it safe. So we've now had I think probably fourth-generation people showing up at the gates of our facilities to work inside those places and we have host communities that are extremely supportive of the types of operations that go on there.
We do not just work inside the gate. We of course have very strong emergency measure planning, in conjunction with the communities, so we work with those communities at a very high level. But as you rightly identified, once you're a long way away from there and you don't understand all the things that happen, it's very hard to persuade people until they've actually become accustomed to the knowledge that comes from working with the technology over a series of years.
We have discovered over the last several months that the more we speak to people about the technology and the more they understand the record we have, there is an easing of the concern about safety. But there is no question that you've identified one of those issues. If we go to a brand-new community, as Mr. Henuset is, you start all over. You prime the community for questions and you show them what the technology can do, and then you demonstrate, through the 40-year history we have, that we can do it safely.
There are two stages now in the Canadian context, in the world context. As the material comes from the calandria, where it is generating the heat to generate the electricity, it is put in water sometimes called the swimming pool and it cools there between seven and ten years. Then it is moved into dry storage above ground in concrete designed facilities in Douglas Point, which was our first prototype commercial operation, a 200-megawatt unit at Bruce. Those are above-ground storage facilities that look like silos. At Becancoeur, they are what is called a “max store”, designed by AECL, which is a different shape, but they do the same thing. They contain in dry storage the spent fuel. And that is where it is now.
The third phase, which is what the NWMO has worked on, is then to take the material and introduce it into a deep geological repository with the prospect that there will be an intermediate step, slightly below-ground storage area, which would permit us not only to monitor the dry fuel storage area, but also to retrieve it, if we needed to reprocess it.
So I think the big thing is that when we first started taking the material from the calandrias, we theoretically had an understanding of what would happen. When I toured the Douglas Point facility, which was taken out of service in the mid-eighties, I asked if things were happening the way they were expected to with respect to the decommission that occurred there. And people identified that is exactly what's happening.
The interesting thing about physics is that it's physics, and once you know the properties of the materials you're dealing with, you can predict pretty well how this is going. What you can predict as well is how the man-made structures that are designed to contain and deal with them are working, and those structures are all working extremely well indeed.
So we've been very sophisticated. We've got a lot of science that goes into dealing with it. And I think the other thing that permits us some degree of comfort is that the deep geological repository option is one that is also well along the way in Finland as well as in Sweden as well as in France. Of course I think everybody has probably heard about the Yucca Mountain Program. So we're on the right track, a good strong record now of forty-plus years of storage. I think in the early days we thought we'd just be leaving it. I think now we're turning our minds to thinking about making sure we can get at that energy when we need it later.
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Some of all of that, obviously.
In Ontario, for instance, we're at about 12,006 now, I think it says in my notes. We were around closer to 14,000 before, and then we shut down a couple of the units. But 10% is not that much any more. They put in a 1,000-megawatt unit, the ACR-1000, which produces about 1,175 megawatts gross power. So it doesn't take much to increase your output by 10%.
Two units that are being discussed for Alberta would more than match that. And there is consideration in the Ontario Power Authority's report in Ontario to build a couple of units. Part of that would be, of course, to replace the two Pickering units that are not going to be reopened. But I think it is not too difficult to see our moving well beyond an increase of 10% in nuclear generating capacity as we see our population grow.
What is so startling for us is—taking a look at Ontario as an example again—when people believed that we were oversupplied with electricity. I have a slide that shows the gap in supply for Ontario, but unfortunately I didn't bring it to this because I thought that would be a bit too long. Through the 1990s, we thought we had all kinds of electricity. If you go from one side of this country to the other now, there is a very strong belief, a very strong reflection in major parts of this country, that we do not have enough electricity supply at the very time when we're anticipating, for Ontario again, seeing about 300,000 people arriving here each year, in addition to the population we have. That's just the province of Ontario, but that is happening right across the country.
So looking at supplying the energy needs of people with computers and televisions, production facilities with computerized and mechanized operations, it's not too far beyond the prospects of the 10% increase.
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I'd like to add to that.
As a businessman, my biggest challenge is the regulatory issues. It scares the living death out of me to take four to five years. So my business model is nine years to build a nuclear power facility. There's no reason for nine years for this to happen. For some reason, we have a regulatory body that takes four to five years to come up with a “Yes, it's okay”. If we can streamline that...we can get approval for a coal-fired power facility in Alberta in one year. For this process, I should be looking at anywhere between four and five years for that approval process.
For building a power facility.... This is a power facility, gentlemen. Yes, it's got nuclear attached to it, but that nuclear is quite similar in the sense that we do have coal facilities, we have gas facilities. Let's streamline that regulatory process, to make sure that Canadians are safe, yet we fix the CO2 issue and we make it economical for people to build nuclear facilities.
You asked a question about what the community responses are. In the communities where nuclear power is today, there's a 90% approval factor: “Build more right here in my community, come on.” Everybody is scared to death, saying that you can't build them in any other communities. I'm saying the opposite. I have everybody in that community, other than the general public, saying “Yes, come to my community”.
So that little question and that cloud over everybody's head who's worried about opening and going to a new community.... I was invited to two communities. Since then, I've been invited to three others. These are communities asking me to come, not me going to them. So some of that is misbelief.
The other thing is, if we can clean up our regulatory issues so that it doesn't take four to five years to get approval, we would have more nuclear facilities. Because they've got such a stellar track record after the last 40 years.... What industry has that kind of a track record? And you could bring the cost down if you just clean up the timelines, because the cost of my funds is ridiculous. So that's just good business.
:
Thank you very much for your presentations. Nuclear energy is back in the news. Last evening, a Radio-Canada radio feature dealt with the pressure on uranium prices caused by the construction of nuclear power stations in China. This is a subject that interests me greatly. We have to be able to weigh the pros and cons. In that sense, your presentations gave us food for thought.
On the other hand, Mr. Elston, I am a little surprised to hear you call nuclear energy clean energy. It is as if the fact of reducing CO2 earned the title “very clean”. The problem of the waste remains very real, even if solutions are possible. The management of nuclear waste is our greatest environmental problem at a moment, and we still have no clear solution to it. As a result, some environmentalists and members of the public are afraid of radioactive waste being transported and buried, and of radiation. The public is really wary of nuclear energy.
To be considered clean, it is not enough that nuclear energy does not emit CO2. The question of waste must also be considered appropriately and responsibly. After all, Canada has still not decided how and where the waste will be buried.
Quebeckers are particularly concerned because one of the potential sites under consideration is the Canadian Shield, which in part lies in Quebec territory. Since Quebec uses only 2% of the country's nuclear energy, it is certainly not interested in burying waste that comes from Alberta or from other provinces. This is one of the reasons why Quebeckers are very sensitive to the nuclear question and why they follow it so closely.
Mr. Henuset, you make me smile when you say that oil companies want to reduce CO2. Actually, they have been very honest and are not embarrassed to tell us that their main concern is to reduce their consumption of natural gas because that is one of their greatest expenses in oil sands development. Nuclear energy is an alternative that would allow them to use less natural gas, and, above all, to reduce their energy costs for extracting oil from the tar sands.
I have two questions. The first is directed to Mr. Elston. I have carefully looked at the government budget that deals with natural resources and I have seen that a lot of money is being spent on the management of nuclear waste. Who is financially responsible for the management of waste?
You and Mr. St. Armand feel that development of nuclear energy in Canada is a viable option. What is the projected cost of managing the waste in the long term? How much is this going to cost Canadian taxpayers?
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Let me begin with the fact that we have three, I would guess, classes of nuclear waste, if you would describe it as that. One is the so-called “heritage waste”, which has actually come from the days when the federal government was responsible for and was managing the extraction and the shipment of all the uranium that was mined. There are sites, historically, that have fallen to the federal government to renovate.
Some of the first announcements made by this Minister of Natural Resources were around the funding, I think, of about $540 million towards dealing with the “legacy waste”, as it's called. It is in fact restoration work around transportation lines in northern Saskatchewan and other parts of the country. It is dealing with low-level waste at Port Hope, where there was a uranium facility, which probably most of you have read about. And there was, in fact, an office in Montreal that was dealing with the historic waste from the original sites where a lot of work was done.
That classification of material, which is left over from the heritage development of the industry, resides with the federal government and has, I think, in most cases, been the same for places such as the United States or Great Britain, or otherwise. In fact, when Great Britain sold their operations, their nuclear state-owned operations, they obviously retained the liability to deal with the historic waste, and I think that has been the model that has most effectively been seen to be fair for all of the people in the societies where those choices have been made.
The second classification of waste is the low and intermediate level of waste, which really represents the tools, coveralls, and clothing that people wear when they are inside the units. Tools used to do actual work are probably also intermediate waste, as opposed to low. Those are contained in a single facility in Ontario, and probably also at site in Quebec, and also at Point Lepreau, where the materials are compacted. They are treated in many ways just like regular garbage, if I can describe it that way. So it is contained in a special way, but likewise, by the people who are operating the facilities.
The third batch—actually I guess there's a fourth—is really the spent fuel bundles, and those I've described in my remarks to Mr. St. Amand. The material goes into water first, and then from the water into the dry storage and moves forward.
The siting, which is what the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is now waiting for permission to proceed with, is seen to take upwards of 30 years, to find a site that is appropriate. The process is, I think—
There are a couple of things that are happening. The one important element that I didn't get to touch on was the movement of the technology into new areas of consideration. For us, thorium is not now seen to be an opportunity because we have such good and high-grade deposits of uranium.
Thorium is being actively considered in India, however, because they have big deposits of thorium. So there are considerations of using it, but under the current circumstances, we did a very quick calculation....
I'll step back one step. The biggest reserves that we know of right now, in order of the first three, are Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada. Those are the ones we know. We've got about 3.3 million tonnes of known reserves. There are another projected 7 million tonnes of expected reserves.
We think, overall, there are probably 14 million to 15 million tonnes of uranium available before we really have to start looking for other types of generators.
But if you take a look at how Canada produces electricity, people go to what is regionally available. So Alberta has lots of coal and they've been using coal. Water is abundant in Quebec, B.C., and Manitoba, so water is a chief resource. While we end up having a lot of access to uranium and for a long period of time, it doesn't preclude others from going to thorium.
Likewise, it hasn't precluded us from moving our technology. The ACR-1000, which is being designed by our friends at AECL, will probably get more output with a third less fuel than we're getting from our current reactors, which means that the reserves we know about in respect of the amount we're now consuming will be extended even further.
In addition to that, we've got the Generation IV International Forum on which the Canadian government has signed a treaty with international partners. There are 11 partners involved.
The folks at Natural Resources Canada are involved in looking at high-temperature reactors, which again will have efficiency quotients that will permit us to extend our fuel opportunities.
But the short answer is, we have lots of available material and at reasonably good prices compared to others.
And as I said before, we do it in an environmentally sensitive way. We're the only technology that knows exactly what goes into our units, when it went in, how long it was there, when it came out, and where it's been since it came out of the reactors. That very important containment chain, the unbroken carriage of that material, is what I think sets us aside from all other types of generating capabilities.
:
Part of it is. I think that with the re-launch of almost anything...and not to put too fine a point on it, but having been in campaigns, you know by the time you get to the end of a campaign you're doing pretty well, but the first couple of days on the road, you can have a couple of glitches. I think that we're experiencing this new plateau of activity, the type of hesitancy that will be well exercised away by the time we're in full swing.
We've found, as we've talked to the regulator, a willingness to look at opportunities to collaborate on ways of ensuring that there's greater transparency, more of a connection with the public. And Mr. Henuset, earlier on when he introduced his remarks, had already indicated that he has a very intensive on-the-ground campaign prior to his doing anything at all in the formal sense.
It seems to me that there are parts of things that will help us, but as we try to re-launch, there will be some stops and starts. I think all of us, though, would like to anticipate that the two primary issues that are of big concern are one, the timing of decisions to proceed, outside the regulatory, but then, two, the acquisition of the human resources to permit us to do all the work that is out there, in fact the capacity to do not only refurbishment but the new build and new projects, which Mr. Henuset has described are of some concern.
That, I think, forces people into positions where they reconsider what they used to do as a matter of course. So you will have seen, for instance, the regulator has released a couple of new editions of the status of the way processes are to work with new-build operations and with the way we're conducting our refurbishment operation.
It's not like we're not considering it. I think it's like, “once I get the applications, then I can really do it”, but government doesn't like to fund people who get ready for things that may not happen. So there has been that sort of tentativeness.
Now, instead of zero new-build requests, we have a request for an EA for a new build at Bruce, an EA at Ontario Power Generation Facilities at Darlington, and we have Mr. Henuset now out in Alberta. So we have three opportunities to build new, and we have a regulator that had none of that before.
I think it's understandable. That doesn't make it less anxious and stressful for people who are in the middle of it. I think by the time we get the first one under our belts, we'll be well exercised and able to get these things done pretty well.
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It's interesting. You can deal with processes, but you can't steal the engagement with the public, which is what Mr. Henuset's doing now.
The Finns engage with their public. They have four units, they're building a fifth, they're now considering a sixth. The interesting thing about Finland is that the unit they're building now is a 1,600 megawatt unit, far bigger than anything we have here, almost twice as big as our biggest at Darlington.
You cannot steal, beg, or borrow the engagement with the public. The engagement with the public is extremely critical. Being transparent, laying out what has to happen, whether it's greenfield or whether it's building on an existing site, is really important.
Then I think, following along with the questions from Mr. Bevington, Madame Faille, and Mr. St. Amand, there's the importance of what you're going to do next: managing safety, managing the stream of spent fuel and waste. All of that stuff has to be laid out for people, so that they can get to the point where Mr. Henuset wants to be in 40 years, knowing exactly what's going to result from these units.
So we do look around the world at what's happening. We're a much more transparent industry than we were in the 1960s or 1970s—actually, very much more transparent—and from my point of view, better off in terms of our own performance inside the gate as a result of our relationships with the people outside the gate.