Shouldn’t a new and experimental nuclear reactor for New Brunswick deserve a federal impact assessment?

The federal minister of Environment and Climate Change has chosen to ignore public concerns about a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) for New Brunswick, favouring the nuclear industry and weakening oversight of an untested and risky technology.

When the revised Impact Assessment Act (IAA) became law in 2019, new nuclear reactors were exempted from assessment if they met certain conditions. Those pushing the exemption aimed to ease the path to building new reactors. No surprise then that the conditions for exemption apply to almost all the SMR designs being considered for construction, even though Canada has no experience whatsoever with them.

The first SMR officially deemed exempt under the IAA is the ARC-100 sodium-cooled fast reactor proposed by NB Power for the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy. Given the ecological sensitivity of

the site and inherent problems with such reactors, the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB) formally requested to Minister Steven Guilbeault to designate the project for a full Impact Assessment. The Minister rejected the request on December 22, claiming that a review by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the New Brunswick government would be adequate.

The federal Impact Assessment is the most rigorous form of public review available under law, seeking inputs from multiple stakeholders with different forms of expertise and outlooks. The review panel would not be solely constituted by CNSC personnel and staff of the provincial government, a project funder. Indigenous nations and public interest groups had clearly stated their concerns to Minister Guilbeault. Letters of support for CRED-NB’s request were submitted by the Wolastoq Grand Council, and Indigenous organizations representing the Peskotomuhkati Nation and the Mi’gmaq First Nations in New Brunswick, as well as more than 300 groups and individuals.

Why the public concern? Unlike the CANDU reactors operating in Ontario and New Brunswick, the ARC-100 design uses molten sodium instead of heavy water to transfer the intense heat produced by nuclear fission. Sodium reacts violently with air or water, burning or exploding upon such contact.

Japan’s Monju demonstration reactor was shut down within a few months of the reactor starting to generate power in 1995 because of a sodium fire; it was restarted once in 2010 for a few months before it was shut down permanently. The total price tag for this reactor and its cleanup is upwards of $10 billion.

Sodium also tends to leak out of pipes and vessels because of chemical interactions with the stainless steel in reactors. France’s Superphénix, the world’s largest sodium-cooled reactor, suffered numerous

operational problems, including a major sodium leak. When put out of its misery in 1998, its load factor was under eight per cent, a fraction of the 80 to 90 per cent typical of commercial reactors.

Sodium cooled reactors have also had numerous accidents, starting with the 1955 partial core meltdown of the EBR-1 in Idaho. A decade later, the Fermi-1 demonstration fast reactor near Detroit in Michigan suffered a similar but more devastating accident, leading to the book We Almost Lost Detroit and a song by Gil Scott Heron.

Sodium-cooled reactors have never been successfully commercialised despite numerous attempts over decades. Shut-down sodium-cooled reactors have proven difficult to decommission. In the US, the EBR-2 reactor was shut down in 1994 but to date it has been unfeasible to extract the sodium metal from the highly radioactive spent fuel. The challenge is to dispose of this material without causing underground explosions due to a sodium-water reaction, as happened with the sodium-cooled Dounreay reactor in Scotland.

Radioactive particles are still being found on the Dounreay foreshore, more than four decades after the reactor waste exploded. A similar accident with the proposed ARC-100 reactor could result in widely spread radioactive contamination next to the Bay of Fundy.

These risks are all new to Canada. No sodium cooled reactor has ever been built here. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has never evaluated such reactors, one reason why the CNSC’s claim that its regulatory process provides sufficient oversight for SMR development rings hollow. What’s more, the CNSC’s active lobbying to speed up the regulatory process so SMRs could be more quickly brought to market suggests a fundamental conflict of interest by an “independent” regulator.

The ARC-100 project requires federal oversight and assessment. Its impacts on Indigenous rights as well as socio-economic factors and alternatives to the project will not necessarily be within the remit of either a CNSC review or a provincial assessment. The opportunities for an independent and official review of public concerns on these issues have now been significantly curtailed.

An earlier version of this commentary was published by The Hill Times.

Susan O’Donnell is an adjunct professor at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University, and a member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick. M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia.