Well, the race is on. Ontario's BWR SMR go ahead hearings are coming up Oct 2 and Jan 8 - available by video streaming. While only one reactor is being considered for the hearing, Ontario wants to build 3 more on the same site before 2035. The plan is to build one first and learn from that before building the others. Does this inspire you with confidence in the construction/operation of this reactor? Does it feel comforting to you?

The BWRX-300, the X stands for the tenth edition, is a scaled down version of larger BWR reactors already in operation. Brings up the question, why do they not just build one larger reactor than 4 small ones. The handling of waste has always been the Achilles heel of nuclear reactors. Truth is no one has a socially acceptable way of dealing with the waste permanently, there are always the risks with a concept that they haven't quite got right - not much room for error as the mess would be next to impossible to mitigate. It doesn't much matter whether you have four 300MW reactors or one 1200MW reactor. The amount of waste is going to be about the same.

The Candu reactors use a lower grade nuclear fuel which we can manufacture in Canada. The BWRs use an enriched fuel produced by a manufacturer outside of Canada or the supplier may be asked to provide fuel that contains reprocessed fuel containing plutonium, etc. Enriching and recycling spent fuel is actually going to increase the amount of waste at the front end. For instance, the acid used to dissolve the spent fuel. It is also possible that four small reactors will not be as efficient as one larger one and will therefore generate more waste at the other end. Anyway, you can be sure that the source of its fuel or waste management will not be part of the licensing agreement to construct a reactor. They will only want to know if it can be built to speck and whether Ontario Power Generation (OPG) can operate it safely. Don't worry about what we may leave to future generations. What also has to be considered is the uranium mine waste left behind at the mines, they dust that off with a little topsoil and call it good to go for a million years or so, well maybe 300 - don't worry about that.

Again, why build several small reactors rather than one big one? The idea behind building modular reactors is so you can manufacture the components more efficiently, and then assemble them. There is greater savings if you can build 50 or 60 or more reactors exactly the same, than one of a kind, and then get countries all over the world to buy them. Can you imagine every country in the world having nuclear reactors, with their own waste dumps vulnerable to attack (Ukraine)? Remember when Canada helped India build their own Candu reactors - they went on to build a nuclear bomb! Every country having a nuclear reactor is not going to make the world a safer place, even if they can run them all safely without incident (remember Chalk River 1950 and 1952, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima - those are just the big ones). When companies and countries are choosing what technology to buy to generate electricity, they want to know the actual cost is per kWh of each technology. This is called levelized cost. The greatest cost of the levelized cost of nuclear energy is the construction of the reactor. With the modular reactor, they are producing a reactor with thinner walls and less concrete and they are hoping they can streamline the application and licensing process.

Let's look at the licensing process here to see how it might go in other countries. In 2009, Ontario Hydro was looking at three modular reactor designs. They applied for and got permission to begin site preparation even though a particular reactor design had not been picked. It turns out that all three reactors turned out to be way too expensive and the project was abandoned.

Twelve years later they started looking at SMR designs again and picked out the General Electric/Hitachi BWRX-300. They applied for and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) approved the old reactor site at Darlington would be fine for this reactor, even though the design of the reactor is different and it is going to be buried much deeper in the ground. Further, you must remember that the Fukushima disaster was in 2014. Prior to this no one could fathom such a disaster destroying a nuclear power plant, let alone three—actually four—because Unit 4 which was defueled and not operating was destroyed as well. The reactors survived the tsunami that pounded into them. It was loss of coolant and their backup systems that resulted in the meltdowns, the hydrogen explosions, and the loss of containment of the reactor cores. This was the direct result of management decisions not to plan and provide adequate backup for this possible eventuality. (Fukushima Daiichi Accident - World Nuclear Association)

The Hydrogen, which destroyed Unit 4, actually came from shared ventilation shafts with Unit 3 and was created through the reaction of hot zirconium cladding and steam. As they were dealing with the reactors it was determined that the cooling pools for used nuclear fuel was an even greater danger of potential radioactive releases, and was given even greater priority. As events unfolded, people were evacuated within a 10 km zone. These were GE boiling water reactors (BWRs) of an early (1960s) design supplied by GE, Toshiba and Hitachi. The world learned that you cannot place reactors within the exclusion zones of other reactors.

Previous to this, the US had established exclusion around their reactors of about 1 km, they now make that over 4 km. Darlington still has maintained an exclusion zone of 1 km and when a dry storage area for used fuel was established this was not extended to exclude them. The proposed site for the BWRX-300 is within the exclusion zone of the Darlington reactors, and actually just across the road from the dry fuel storage area. This presents a catastrophic danger to the new reactors, the old reactors, the used fuel storage area, the construction workers for the new projects, and if you look at a map and consider the US imposed 4 km exclusion zone requirements. There are industries adjacent to the Darlington site within that distance. Ontario Hydro and the CNSC must be in a very great hurry to have this site and reactor facility a done deal. In fact, they are so confident of the reactor(s) being approved that they have already done the site preparation and drilled the huge diameter hole, 35 m deep for the reactor construction, and likely have ordered many components and materials - so they are ready to go as soon as approval is given.

Just before the hearings are about to begin, OPG had applied to have a lot of material redacted from the application available to the public for commercial, technical and national security reasons. As far as I know, it has been granted. This is a public project using a sophisticated and potentially very dangerous technology that the public needs to feel confident in having in their backyard. It is also a stepping stone to sell these modular reactors to the world. It is being proposed as a joint partnership with Poland and the US. Poland plans to build a fleet of these SMR's, using Darlington as a test case. Saskatchewan has an interest in this reactor design, as well as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, the UK, and probably has many more clients in mind. There is no place here for lack of transparency. There were 57 items up for redaction including:

• program,
• construction,
• supply chain and execution management plans,
• project quality assurances,
• engineering oversight,
• construction/owner interface agreements,
• hazard and safety analysis methodologies,
• excavation and backfill,
• containment evaluation,
• computer modeling,
• ALARA design criteria,
• systems/structure/component report/ and mechanical design reports,
• shutdown analysis,
• and wind/flood/and climate change impacts.

In the redaction application documents they were all replaced with assurances that all material, components, procedures, etc. would comply with all appropriate standards, codes, procedures, etc. The application was also poorly worded with extensive use of acronyms and baffling procedure descriptions, lack of organization or even a table of contents or even headings defining each major section. It was a 1658 word document that had no links to tables, figures etc. The only way to get back and forth was to scroll. In short it was a completely sanitized document that was intimidating and I felt there would have been no recourse for the panel reviewing it, but to send it back because there was no discernable way to grant approval of the request. Click here to add text.