The Effect of a Trade War with Canada on the Evolution of Advanced Nuclear Fuels.

Canada led the world in developing one of the most important classes of commercially available nuclear reactors, the CANDU, also known as the PHWR, (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors).

There were plans to shut several of these reactors in Canada, but because of the efforts of Chris Keefer, an emergency room Physician turned powerful advocate for nuclear power, the reactors at Darlington, and now Pickering, are being refurbished to serve humanity for many additional decades.

Here's a picture of Dr. Keefer with the Climate Scientist Dr. James Hansen in Berlin in 2021:



It appears on the website of Doctors for Nuclear Energy

I follow Dr. Keefer on Linkedin, and his posts have recently taken a rather (understandable under the circumstances of American insanity) nationalistic tone: He does not want Canada to be involved with US manufactured SMR's (of which he is quite critical) and wants Canada to rely solely on Canadian manufacturers of Canadian CANDU reactors.

Dr. Keefer maintains a podcast, an excellent one, a recent example here being about Chinese "State Capitalism:"

Decouple: Electric Dreams

(I have not watched the podcast, and am unlikely to find the time to do so. On the other hand, I don't need it.)

I personally do not agree with an "electrify everything" approach to environmental issues, since electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, but I do credit Dr. Keefer's claim that it is somewhat foolish to build small reactors on a major grid if the purpose is merely to make electricity as opposed to generating process heat. (I think China gets this; they have an advanced program to produce high temperature reactors, and in fact, operate some now.) Under any circumstances, more CANDUs are a good idea, in Canada and elsewhere. The world needs them. II wish we had some in the United States.

This said, as part of his newly nationalistic approach to energy, Dr. Keefer advocates, loudly, for using Canadian natural uranium as fuel for CANDUs. The problem with this is that effects the whole world, since it is critical for humanity to scale up availability of fissionable nuclides which can be done without mining anything (although it may involve picking through lanthanide ore mine tailings to isolate the thorium in them). The CANDU is the only thermal spectrum reactor that can act as breeder.

I discussed this approach here: Something I thought should happen, hoped to happen, actually happened in 2024, some good news. The burnup in CANDUs using natural uranium is low, hardly ideal.

On a planetary scale, independent of the American government of idiocy, and independent of a trade war with Canada fostered by a fucking idiot and his handlers like King Eloon, we need more readily fissionable nuclides, we need to grow them fast, and placing once through uranium from light water reactors in PHWRs (CANDUs) is a path to do that, particularly if mixed with thorium to generate the thermal reactor breeder fuel ²³³U.

It's another way that the reactionary suicide of the United States now underway is damaging, irreversibly, the future. In a sane world, we would be working with Canada to save the world far beyond the confines of North America. We do not, clearly, live in a sane world.

Have a nice weekend.