Musings of the Technical Bard

This could be a very good plan, depending on how it plays out.   Here are the reasons:

• The world wants to build more nuclear plants, but there is a problem – the availability of fuel (uranium) and enrichment capabilities may not grow as fast as demand, which could drive up the cost of nuclear power.  This could make it unattractive, but also creates opportunities.
• One solution to the uranium enrichment problem is to use natural uranium – which is only done commercial in Canadian designed nuclear power plants.
• Another solution to the nuclear fuel problem is to switch uranium reactors to plutonium cycle.  This has already been done using decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel.  The problem is that there is concern about the availability of this fuel past 2013.
• The CANDU technology can be easily modified into a fast-breeder reactor, whereby non-fissile U-238 (the bulk of natural uranium) is converted to Pu-239/240.  This plutonium can be extracted from the spent fuel chemically, rather than via expensive centrifuge plants that separate U-235 from U-238.  Additionally, fast breeders produce U-233 that can be used again as fuel.  This modification was first done by India in the early 1970s, which produced the plutonium for their nuclear weapon test in 1974.
• India has recently produced an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor technology (son of CANDU?) that runs on the thorium cycle instead of uranium.  The possibility of running thorium cycle expands the nuclear fuel supply significantly, which makes nuclear more attractive in the future.

What Canada needs to do is figure out how to make AECL, in conjunction with the Indians, more competitive.  This is going to require an investment of public money to further develop the technology, but I’d rather we spend money on that than on subsidizing windmills.