Fission until Fusion
Let's get building, again.
The Holy Grail of energy, which is renewable, is nuclear fusion. There is remarkable progress happening on that front. Fusion can yield four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fission and millions of times more energy per kilogram of fuel than burning coal or oil. It should tell you just how much more efficient fission is as well.
Since we are not there able to produce more energy than it takes to create the reaction with fusion and sustain it - yet, we need to focus on its opposite. The opposite of fusion is fission which is how our existing nuclear power plants work.
Canada is no stranger to nuclear energy production. We have been producing nuclear energy since the 1960s and have 4 plants with 19 reactors. 15% of our electricity is produced with nuclear power and even pioneered our technology in the field called Canadian Deuterium-Uranium reactors.
Once again we are blessed with a resource, Uranium, which allows us to build a closed-loop supply chain to become self-reliant and squander it. Canada, depending on the year, is in the top three of Uranium producers and we are actually a low-cost producer of tri-uranium octoxide.
Most of our operating plants started construction in the 1970s and connected to the grid in the 1970s and ‘80s with a few in the early 1990s. While some new plans for plants are being explored in Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick the ball has been dropped for decades.
We are entering a golden age for the industry. OECD members have a signed a Declaration to Triple Nuclear at the COP28 which will see the world’s nuclear capacity triple by 2050. Fourteen of the largest banks in the world pledged to support this investment and corporations are directly heading into this field by themselves.
Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal with the Three Mile Island plant which will reopen in 2028. Amazon Web Services purchased a data center campus by a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and Google is on the lookout. Bill Gates even founded a small modular reactor startup.
While Canada is still thinking about it and creating its own red tape, the countries that want to be competitive tomorrow are taking action.
The current conversation and strategy around energy is to create a baseload for wind and solar and touted how many “green” jobs these will generate. It is shortsighted. To be competitive in the economies of tomorrow we need to create cheap, sustainable, and reliable energy. Also showing that we can build with speed and efficiency again is such a selling feature for Canada. It will help recover our reputation from the colossal embarrassment that TMX expansion was.
Microsoft now estimates they will use six times the energy they thought they would use just a few years ago by 2030. Many tech companies now have nuclear departments. AI, robotics, crypto, quantum computing, electric transportation, data centres, and just the overall computation growth demand an incredible amount of energy and they need it 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
We can’t afford to play politics with our energy anymore. This is the foundation of the growth industries and the well-being of our country. It will help us manufacture things again. This is such low-hanging fruit for us.
What we do today will dictate our economy tomorrow. Falling behind here means an obsolete and inefficient economy. Let’s get building today to have a robust, ready for innovation and its growth economy tomorrow.