Dear Member of Parliament,
Re: Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Did you know that the government is planning to unroll a plan to pay millions of dollars to research and development of a technology that was abandoned forty years ago for safety reasons?
Did you realize that they are promoting it as part of a "green plan"?
Did you know that they have exempted these nuclear reactors from environmental assessment?
Are you going to let this happen without a parliamentary debate?
Nuclear energy, even if the nuclear power plants are small, is still not "green", not "emissions free" and not available. The industry admits it will take ten or fifteen years to build and test a single SMNR, much less the two or three most likely candidates.
Doesn't nuclear operate without adding to the carbon load? Not counting mining, milling, transportation, enrichment, construction and then eventually the waste for which no one in the world has a solution. Enrichment itself requires the energy of a small city. An energy source that operates for three to five years and then leaves waste for hundreds of years is definitely not "green". The Canadian government should know, having put over a billion dollars into searching for a waste repository and coming up empty handed.
Don't be a rubber stamp this plan - make it part of a debate that puts more money into sustainable energy sources. Intermittent energy - wind and solar - can be "stored" in batteries or, even more sustainably as hydrogen, another emissions-free technology. The nuclear industry is derelict - it has not received private investment for over thirty years.
