Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Moltex Energy Canada has opened an office in Saint John. Their estimates for storing spent nuclear fuel after they extract fuel for their SMRs would be from a hundred times to a thousand times lower than current estimates for storage. Rory O’Sullivan is the CEO of Moltex Energy Canada. He said, "It's very different in cost, complexity, depth underground. … That's obviously a very big, very appealing factor." He was referring to the difference between storing the spent nuclear fuel after their extraction process versus storing un-reprocessed spent nuclear fuel.
There is currently no permanent geological repository for storing spent nuclear fuel in Canada. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization is researching sites in Ontario for a repository but there has been no decision on a location yet.
Allison Macfarlane was a former director of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is the current director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She said that creating a shorter-term radioactivity life for spent nuclear fuel could actually complicate underground storage. This is because such a situation would result in a facility that has to be constantly funded and secured as opposed to just being sealed up and abandoned. She said “That means that you believe that the institutions that exist to keep monitoring that ... will exist for hundreds of years, and I think that is a ridiculous assumption. I'm looking at the United States, I'm seeing institutions crumbling in a matter of a few years. I have no faith that institutions can last that long and that there will be streams of money to maintain the safety and security of these facilities. That's why you will need a deep geologic repository for this material."
Macfarlane said that Moltex is assuming that their technology will be able to successfully extract most of the highly radioactive part of the spent nuclear fuel. She said, “They are assuming that they remove one hundred per cent of the difficult, radionuclides, the difficult isotopes, that complicate the waste. My response is: prove it. Because if you leave five per cent, you have high-level waste that you're going to be dealing with. If you leave one per cent, you're going to have high-level waste that you're going to be dealing with. So sorry, that one doesn't fly with me.”
Macfarlane is a geologist by training. She first raised concerns about molten-salt technology and waste issues in a 2018 paper that she co-authored for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She questioned the plans for the construction of a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
The Coalition for Responsible Energy Development is a New Brunswick environmental group opposed to SMRs.
They have been referencing Macfarlane’s research as another reason to doubt the validity of molten-salt SMRs. O’Sullivan said that he is "personally very baffled and frustrated" by public opposition to SMRs. He went on to say that anti-nuclear activists have been complaining about dealing with spent nuclear fuel for decades “and we think we've finally got a solution that's cost effective to deal with it, and we're still getting this backlash. … We're environmentalists and we have this backlash.”
ARC Nuclear is another company based in Saint John that is working on SMRs. Their plans also call for the use of some existing spent nuclear fuel to fuel their SMRs. They said in a press release that their technology "has successfully been demonstrated, therefore proven, at the engineering scale."
NB Power has estimated that thousands of jobs will be created by the production of SMRs and there will be a one-billion-dollar boost to the provincial economy. The previous liberal government in Canada has giving Moltex and ARC a total of ten million dollars to support research and development of SMRs. The Canadian federal government has stated that nuclear power is critical to Canada for the reduction of carbon emissions. However, they have not granted any money to the two Saint John companies.