Saskatchewan wants to buy small reactors 

The sparsely populated province thinks node balancing its far flung grid would work 

Brad Wall, the entrepreneurial provincial premier of Saskatchewan, (right) knows that mining 20% of the world’s uranium supply won’t fuel the region’s economy forever.  For years Wall has wanted to move up the value chain.  A few years ago he floated the idea of getting Canada into the uranium enrichment business.  Now Wall, and his energy minister Bill Boyd, want to develop a plan to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs), e.g., with less than 300 MW, across the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan.

Wall said at an energy conference last August he plans to push the province beyond uranium mining by investigating the possibility of developing a partnership with an as yet unnamed vendor of SMRs to produce electricity and also to support manufacturing of medical isotopes.  The second objective could be a deal maker because some SMRs, which use higher levels of enriched uranium, can perform double duty. Even conventional light water reactors, reduced to SMR scale, could do the job. In the U.S. two utilities are producing nuclear isotopes for medical uses with LWRs.

Canada currently produces between a third and a half of all nuclear medicine isotopes used in North America using a 50 year old reactor at Chalk River in Ontario. The reactor has had several prolonged and unplanned outages in recent years as its age begins to show.  Each outage set off a crisis in the world of nuclear medicine because there are only a few reactors in the world that can make them and the isotopes themselves have very short half lives. You can’t make batches of the them and then store an inventory in the event of a future outage.

The Canadian government in Ottawa has not decided whether it will replace the Chalk River reactor.  Another problem is that the government has put the quasi government Atomic Energy Canada Ltd (AECL) up for sale hobbling its ability to selling its Candu technology or a new reactor design, the 1,100 MW ACR1000, to anyone in Canada or anywhere else.

Saskatchewan doesn’t want an 1,100 MW reactor. It doesn’t have the population, electricity demand, or the grid to support one.  According to government statistics, the population in 2010 was 1.05 million people. Interesting, it is about the same size, in terms of people as the population of Rhode Island.  While that state has a land area of less than 1,000 square miles, Saskatchewan has a land area of about 252,000 square miles.  Two cities, Saskatoon and Regina, hold about 400,000 people or just under half the total population.

The money in Saskatchewan is in mining.  The province exports 20% of the world’s supply in part because it has some of the world’s highest quality uranium ore deposits.  The value of those exports in 2009 was $5 billion.  Every exporter of basic minerals knows the path to wealth building is to move up the value chain by making semi-finished goods from the raw materials.  One might assume that uranium enrichment, the next step in the nuclear fuel cycle, would be Wall’s choice.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.  First, Canada would have to go hat in hand to the G20 group of nations, and the IAEA, to get permission to start up a uranium enrichment plant.  Second, it could take up to ten years to build one and get it into production.  Third, an elected politician doesn’t have ten years to produce results.  Within the constraints of an election cycle, Premier Wall needs to ink a deal that will begin to accrue benefits while he is in office.

In addition to its uranium deposits, Saskatchewan has significant oil fields and coal mining operations.  They’re burning some of it to produce the rest and to keep their cities warm during the province’s brutal winters.  So it follows bringing in a 300 MW SMR, or several of them, would release for export a portion of the coal and oil that was being burned domestically. On an energy balance basis, the investment in the uranium and in the reactors would produce very significant increases in coal and oil exports.

The two largest uranium mining companies in Saskatchewan are happy to support the initiative by Energy Minister Bill Boyd.  Jerry Grandy, CEO at Cameco, told the media last August SMR technology could be available commercially by the end of this decade.  Roger Alexander, CEO of Areva Canada said that the smaller reactors would fit nicely into the province’s far flung electric grid.

On Janurary 20, Premier Wall told the CBC News he’s working on bringing an SMR developer to Saskatchewan. 

“We want to plug them into the existing grid,” he said. 

Boyd said at the energy conference last August the economic and demographic realities of the province make saying no to large reactors a no brainer.  But he thinks SMR’s are a “duh” moment.

“In this province, particularly when you have such a diffused population base, you need nodes of generation to keep the grid balanced.  So 300 MW reactors make eminent sense.”

The only remaining question is who is going to supply the SMR?  Stay tuned.

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