Alberta looks to develop nuclear power, will hold public consultations this fall
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There have long been discussions about building reactors in Alberta — including ones that could power oilsands operations — but the province is currently reliant on greenhouse-gas emitting natural gas for electricity.
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Those conversations are to begin anew around September or October, when Chantelle de Jonge, parliamentary secretary for affordability and utilities, plans to hold nuclear consultation sessions.
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'We want to talk to Albertans, because it's new for us,' Smith told reporters alongside Ontario Premier Doug Ford after the two flipped pancakes at the Alberta premier's annual Stampede breakfast.
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'It's not new for Ontario. Ontario gets 60 per cent of their power, I understand, on their grid from nuclear energy.'
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Small modular reactors probably make the most sense at remote rural sites that are heavy energy users, the premier added.
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'Our oilsands projects are perfect for it, if you can get both the power and steam, power and heat.'
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Small modular reactors, or SMRs, generate about one-third of the power of traditional nuclear plants and can be prefabricated elsewhere before being shipped to site.
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Ontario Power Generation is building an SMR at its Darlington site east of Toronto, which would make it the first power company in North America to connect such a plant to the grid. There are plans to build three more SMR units there.
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Ford said SMRs don't themselves employ a lot of people when they're up and running, but they could enable tech giants like Amazon or Google to set up shop with electricity-hungry artificial intelligence data centres.
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'And that's where the jobs are created because they just suck an endless amount of energy, these data centres,' Ford told reporters.
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'So that's the way of the future. We're leading the world and we're gonna make sure we share that technology right across the country.'
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At least one U.S. developer of SMRs has a keen eye on Alberta as a growth market.
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'We have designed a small modular reactor that is perfectly suited for Alberta,' Clay Sell, CEO of X-Energy Reactor Co., said in an interview last month.
The problem with conventional reactors has been their complexity, he said on the sidelines of the Global Energy Show in Calgary.
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'If you ever get one built, you'll run it for the next 80 years, but they're hard to build and they're capital intensive to build,' Sell said.
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