Canada Built A Nuclear Industry To Avoid Foreign Fuel, New Reactors Will Run On Imported Independence
The CANDU reactor was Canada's great engineering flex: a machine that ran on natural uranium, mined here, refined here, no need to ask Washington or anyone else for a favour. Energy sovereignty in a concrete dome.
The new small modular reactors going up in Ontario will run on enriched uranium, which Canada does not enrich. So the fuel will be enriched somewhere else and shipped in, which is the exact scenario the original programme was designed to make impossible.
Officials describe this as a modernisation. Technically true. We have modernised from "we don't need you" to "we'd like the standard package, please."
The defence of the decision is that the supply chain is friendly and diversified, a phrase that has aged beautifully over the last eighteen months of tariff negotiations. Canada also has enormous uranium deposits in Saskatchewan, roughly a quarter of global supply, which we will continue to dig up and send abroad so that someone with a centrifuge can add value and sell it back. This is the national business model applied to the atom.
There is talk of building domestic enrichment capacity. There has been talk of building domestic enrichment capacity for some time. There has also been talk of a high-speed train to Windsor.
Meanwhile the reactors themselves are genuinely good, the engineers are genuinely excellent, and the electricity will be genuinely clean. That is the frustrating part. Canada keeps designing world-class machines and then outsourcing the one component that makes them ours.
The original CANDU acronym stood for Canada Deuterium Uranium. The new one stands for Canada Depends Upon Neighbours, Uncomfortably.