Nuclear players push into heavy industry

This article was written by Emma Graney and was published in the Globe & Mail on April 9, 2024.

Proposal would see hydrogen produced using small modular reactors, with residual heat used for various industrial activities

The Port of Belledune has ambitious plans to reindustrialize northeastern New Brunswick, attracting investment and creating jobs by becoming a green energy hub – and it wants to use nuclear to get there.

Alongside potential wind turbines, solar farms and biomass projects is a proposal that would see hydrogen produced using small modular reactors (SMR), with residual heat from the process used for various industrial activities such as heavy metallurgy or petrochemical production.

The port’s plans underscore a broader vision for nuclear energy across Canada. From the Atlantic to the land-locked prairies, provinces are eyeing small modular reactors to provide not just electricity, but heat and energy for heavy industry, be it smelting aluminum in the east, or mining and accessing crude in the west.

The fact that no SMRs are fully designed, nor licensed for construction by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, seems of little consequence.

Instead, when asked, provincial and industry leaders point to Ontario Power Generation (OPG), which has begun preparations to construct up to four BWRX-300s – an SMR developed by American vendor GE-Hitachi – at its Darlington Station in Clarington. If completed on schedule by 2028, the first unit would be among the earliest SMRs built worldwide.

Once that’s up and running, other provinces can begin their own pursuit of nuclear, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Tuesday on the sidelines of the 2024 SMR Canada Summit in Calgary.

“I would like to be able to see us roll out a pilot project or an installation as soon as the technology is available,” Ms. Smith told media.

Ms. Smith is cognizant, however, of the potential for public pushback against SMRs – particularly in Alberta, where nuclear has never been part of the energy mix. She urged those at the summit to address such concerns head-on, making sure people understand Canada’s nuclear safety record.

Nuclear enjoys cross-partisan support in Canada. In Ontario, for example, the governing Progressive Conservatives and federal Liberals have both thrown cash behind the Darlington revamp and a new nuclear station at Bruce Power’s existing site in Tiverton.

In New Brunswick, it’s one of the few areas on which both sides of the aisle agree, said Rishi Jain, managing director of Cross River Infrastructure Partners, which is developing the SMR-hydrogen plan at Port of Belledune.

It helps that the province has had nuclear energy for decades, Mr. Jain said in an interview, but global ideological shifts focusing on emission reductions have resulted in endorsement of the technology across North America and in Europe.

“With nuclear, we’re not trying to get into an ideological fight. We’re trying to do the thing that is best for the planet, and best for industry,” he said. “And those two circles only overlap.”

The size of SMRs is flexible; in Saskatchewan, they’re even pursuing the demonstration of a microreactor. Much smaller than the BWRX-300 slated for Darlington, the government believes they would be a boon for remote mining operations and Indigenous communities that currently rely on diesel.

That flexibility is key to industrial use, Ms. Smith said, making them useful for most types of industrial operations that require power and heat.

“We want to make sure that anybody who’s interested in trying this technology, that we have a clear pathway for them to be able to implement it,” she said.

Earlier this year, Edmonton based power producer Capital Power Corp., in partnership with OPG, announced it would assess the viability of building SMRs in the province.

And this week, X-energy Reactor Company LLC announced a partnership with Calgary’s TransAlta Corp. to study the deployment of SMRs in Alberta. X-energy, which develops reactor technology and supplies fuel, is hoping to roll out SMRs in the province by the early 2030s.

The company calls its fuel “pebbles.” They are essentially spheres made of graphite, slightly smaller than a squash ball, containing tiny kernels of enriched uranium and wrapped in ceramic layers that allow them to be heated to extremely high temperatures – higher than traditional nuclear fuel – and maintain their structural integrity. Helium cools the thousands of pebbles inside a reactor and transmits the heat to a steam generation system.

The technology is at the heart of a joint development agreement between X-energy and Dow Chemicals to replace heat generation by natural gas with that of SMRs at the latter company’s massive, 4,700-acre plant in Seadrift, Tex. Partly funded by the U.S. federal government, construction of the four-reactor project is expected to begin in 2026.

The project would reduce Dow’s carbon dioxide emissions by around 440,000 tonnes per year, said Benjamin Reinke, X-energy’s vice-president of global business development.

In Alberta, similar projects could support a more sustainable approach to the extraction of oil, refining that oil or being used downstream to manufacture petrochemical products, Mr. Reinke said in an interview.

“We see a huge opportunity here,” he said. “Whenever you take a material out of the ground, and you refine it into a higher value product, it typically requires heat and or electricity to do that. So this type of technology is well suited for providing both heat and electricity.”