Do the research and end the nuclear hype in New Brunswick

New Brunswick’s ARC nuclear project is in trouble. This situation highlights the lack of critical knowledge about nuclear reactor designs within NB Power and the New Brunswick government.

The ARC project goal is to design and build a nuclear reactor cooled with liquid sodium metal at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy. NB Power also plans a second reactor at the site, the Moltex reactor design cooled with molten salt.

The proposed nuclear reactor designs lack commercial viability

If NB Power and the provincial government reviewed available research, they would learn that both sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors have never operated successfully on a commercial electricity grid.

An expert report from the U.S. National Academies  of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated that inherent problems with sodium-cooled and molten salt reactors means new builds will have difficulty reaching commercial viability by the year 2050, far later than the federal 2035 deadline for utilities to transition to a net-zero electricity grid.

For sodium-cooled reactors like the ARC design, tens of billions of dollars have been spent over decades trying to make them work in a commercial setting, by companies in other countries with considerable experience building nuclear reactors. The failures are well-documented.

Liquid sodium metal is reactive and burns when exposed to air or water. The first commercial sodium-cooled reactor in the U.S. had a partial meltdown and was quickly scrapped.

In other countries, sodium fires and unpredictable performances led to sodium-cooled reactors being abandoned in France (the Superphénix), Japan (the Monju breeder), Germany (the Kalkar plant), and Scotland (the Dounreay reactor).

All these shut-down sodium-cooled reactors cost far more to decommission than they did to build, partly due to the expense of removing the sodium from the reactors’ radioactive waste material so it could be safely disposed without causing underground explosions due to sodium-water reactions, as happened for Scotland’s Dounreay reactor.

The proposed reactor designs lack financing

The ARC sodium-cooled design is in its preliminary stage. Bill Labbe, the ARC CEO who suddenly left the company recently, said in 2023 that $500 million is needed to develop the ARC reactor design, and a further $600 million in power purchase agreements to move the project forward. The money raised to date for the ARC project is only a tiny fraction of that.

Since 2018 the provincial government has handed $25 million to ARC and $10 million to Moltex, as ‘seed’ funding to attract private investment. The federal government gave Moltex $50.5 million in 2021 and ARC $7 million in 2023.

However, six years of trying to entice private investors to the ARC and Moltex projects has not yielded results. Globally, private investment in the energy sector is going into renewable – not nuclear – energy.

Misplaced government hype

Despite the ARC company’s financial difficulties, according to news reports both NB Power and the New Brunswick government continue to support the ARC project.

Since the two start-up companies arrived in Canada and landed in Saint John in 2018, the government’s hype around the ARC and Moltex projects at times has been intense, surprisingly so, given that neither company has ever built a nuclear reactor.

In the past, Energy Minister Mike Holland has been the biggest booster of the ARC and Moltex “advanced” reactor designs.

However, in a curious coincidence, Holland quit the cabinet and gave up his MLA seat just days before the troubles at the ARC company hit the news, after previously announcing he would not stand in the upcoming election.

New Brunswick’s money-losing Point Lepreau nuclear plant

NB Power wants to build the ARC reactor near its existing Point Lepreau nuclear reactor, a consistent money loser for the utility.

According to the NB Auditor General, about three-quarters of NB Power’s $5 billion debt is from cost over-runs on the original CANDU reactor build 40 years ago and the re-build more than a dozen years ago.

At the recent Energy and Utility Board hearings, it was clear that the ongoing poor performance of the Lepreau plant is contributing to the utility’s financial difficulties and its request for an unprecedented rate hike.

Nuclear: the most expensive option for generating electricity

New Brunswick’s abysmal prior experience with nuclear reactors raises an obvious question: why is the province intent on trying to develop experimental nuclear reactors as part of its energy transition plans?

Nuclear power is a more expensive way to generate electricity than renewable energy with storage. Nuclear plants take much longer to build than solar or wind farms. These facts are well-known.

Even the right-wing magazine The Economist recognizes the global trend toward renewables and away from nuclear energy, stating in its most recent issue that: “the next ten-fold increase (in solar energy) will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less than the time it typically takes to build one of them.”

New Brunswick: clinging to an outdated vision of electricity production

The challenge for New Brunswick is that our public utility NB Power is stuck, along with Ontario Power Generation, in the Jurassic era, feeding their nuclear dinosaurs while the rest of the utility world is getting on with their renewables and storage rollouts.

Across the globe, countries are focused on technological revolutions in energy efficiency and productivity, building smart grids with demand management and response and distributed renewable energy and storage resources. These offer lower-cost, lower-risk, faster and more flexible pathways for decarbonized electricity grids without large centralized nuclear systems.

Building more nuclear reactors and increasing power rates is not compatible with what many commentators in the province want in our shared economic, social and cultural future. It’s time for New Brunswick to end the nuclear hype.

Susan O’Donnell is the principal investigator with teammates of the CEDAR project, St. Thomas University in Fredericton.