The Government of Saskatchewan publicized their plans to create an office designed to synchronize nuclear policy and programs within the Climate Change and Adaptation Division in the Ministry of Environment on June 24.
The government said the development and execution of a blueprint for the placement of small modular reactors built to deliver what they described as clean energy will be the Nuclear Secretariat’s primary objective for the province.
“The deployment of small modular reactors in Saskatchewan will require collaboration with several partners to fully encompass the benefits Saskatchewan could see in way of jobs, enhanced value-chains for Saskatchewan’s uranium and our made-in-Saskatchewan climate policy,” Environment Minister Dustin Duncan said.
Most of Canada’s reserve sources of uranium are found in the Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan, which has the world’s largest high-grade deposits.
Premier Moe led a MOU on small modular reactors with the Premiers of Ontario and New Brunswick to cooperate in deploying this new technology across the country last year.
“Clean nuclear energy will provide Saskatchewan the tools to fight climate change,” Duncan said as he defended the strategy. “The advancement of small modular reactors in Canada brings economic and environmental benefits with new clean technology that is also safe, reliable and competitively priced power.”
Small modular reactors are nuclear power reactors capable of producing electricity in the range of 50 to 300 megawatts, compared to current nuclear power plants ranging between 600 and 1,600 megawatts.
Small modular reactors represent low emitting technology – this technology is capable of providing baseload power within electrical grids.
Advocates for nuclear power have said nuclear power is emission-free, high-density energy.
Conversely, nuclear pessimists point to nuclear disasters in the past whenever the safety of nuclear energy is debated.
The Windscale fire in Northern England in 1957, the partial meltdown of reactor number two at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Ukraine’s Chernobyl tragedy in 1986 are three examples of nuclear catastrophes in history.
The Fukushima Daiichi is the most recent nuclear disaster occurring on March 11, 2011, when the Japanese power plant’s active reactors shut their fission reactions down during an earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku.
