Article content continued

The meltdown scares around the nuclear industry have pushed us away from this technology, but they also pushed the nuclear industry to focus on safety and to deal with waste material in a way that no other energy industry comes close to approaching, Wagner said.

“All the fear about radiation has made us very, very good at understanding radiation and how to stop it.”

New reactors, such as molten salt reactors, are being designed to shut down automatically whenever a problem arises. “The entire purpose of these Generation 4 reactor designs are what are called, ‘Walk Away Safe.’ You could turn them on and then have everyone leave the building. And they would just plug along until, if something went wrong, they would shut themselves down.”

Nuclear waste is now safely stored in 100-tonne storage casks, multi-layered concrete and steel drums filled with inert gases, Wagner said.

Canada has five plants with 22 nuclear reactors, most of them in Ontario, which produce 15 per cent of the nation’s electricity. Because of the fear around nuclear energy — partly driven by a few high-profile disasters at plants but also due to conflation with people’s fear of atomic bombs — Canada hasn’t opened a new reactor since 1993. Plans for an Alberta reactor near Peace River were shelved in 2011.

It will be expensive for Canada to get back into constructing reactors, Wagner said. But when it comes to reasonable ways to combat climate change, nuclear is the only known option that will work.