Prime Minister Harper has touted Canada as an energy powerhouse but his actions are likely to doom both Alberta’s oil sands and Canada’s nuclear industry.

The oil sands are under pressure due to cost and environmental considerations. Carbon capture will increase the former and burning clean, expensive, natural gas to produce bitumen has been likened to Alchemy in reverse.

Canada’s nuclear industry, as in every other country, is constrained by waste and proliferation concerns and on the waste front Harper’s government has put off a solution for at least 60 years. Researching the solution is the given rationale but the reality is Canada’s nuclear industry never put aside the requisite funds to deal with its waste and it will take 60 years for compound interest to grow the meager funds it is contributing annually to the amount required.

Here too costs have been escalating faster than their contributions are compounding.

It turns out the answer to both of these propositions is the same.

The global inventory of spent nuclear fuel has the energy equivalent of approximately 200 operating nuclear reactors. The energy return on investment for Alberta’s bitumen is 5.2/1 therefore the energy going to waste in spent nuclear fuel has the potential to produce in the neighbourhood of 6 billion barrels of synthetic oil annually. A recently published study, http://nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast.com/journal/article/504736, notes the unprecedented capacity of bitumen to sequester radioactive materials and much of Canada’s bitumen is found beneath a capping shale formation that would preclude either hydrocarbons or radionuclides from migrating to the surface.

Ionizing radiation will also reduce the cost of upgrading bitumen by fracturing portions of the long chain molecules into more valuable gases and hydrocarbons in the ground. Radiolysis of in situ water in these formations will also aid the upgrading process by adding hydrogen ions to the system.

Returning the global inventory to North America to develop this resource insures it never falls into the hands of proliferators or terrorists. And placing weapons plutonium and plutonium extracted from commercial spent fuel in the side walls or floor of a repository, or the lower reaches of a borehole ultimately filled with spent fuel insures it would meet the spent fuel standard for the elimination of these materials.

Spent nuclear fuel is a free, carbon-free source of energy that makes the Alberta’s unconventional oil viable at even $40 oil.

Lord Oxburgh, one of the world’s leading geologists and a former head of the House of Lords select committee on science and technology, has said of this solution, “I have often myself wondered whether it would be feasible to harness the heat generated by sequestered nuclear materials. I suspect that the major problems might well be political rather than technological.”

The political reality is Canada’s energy power house is virtually moribund for want of proper management.

... by giving priority to short term industrial benefits (by promoting in-house oil production and nuclear technology) over short, mid and long-term environmental benefits of investing now on renewables energy.
Hopefully the Canadians will notice this quickly and change his plan.