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Tim Gitzel was accustomed to being overlooked by the organizers of the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, a.k.a. COP. The meeting attracts a who’s who of the decarbonize-by-2050-or-else crowd to a different city each year, and they bat around big ideas, make lofty pronouncements, set emissions targets and try to hammer out a framework to achieve them.

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But Gitzel was never invited to join in the fun. The longtime chief executive of Cameco Corp., the Saskatoon-based mining giant that supplies about 20 per cent of the uranium used to fuel zero-emissions nuclear reactors worldwide, joked that the only way he could get close to COP was to sit in the “McDonald’s across the street” from the meeting.

“Nobody wanted to talk to us,” he said. “Nuclear just wasn’t on the agenda.”

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Now, just about everybody wants to chat him up, including those at last year’s COP28 in Dubai, where the first-time attendee was given “front-row billing” at a meeting that concluded with 22 countries, including Canada, making a commitment to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

To put that number in perspective, there are 440 nuclear plants worldwide, with another 60 or so new reactors under construction. Multiply by three, and that’s a lot of reactors to build and fuel. In Canada, oil-rich Alberta is giving nuclear a look, as is coal-burning Saskatchewan, while Ontario is midstream in a multi-billion-dollar refurbishment of its nuclear plants that will keep them splitting atoms for decades to come.

Even Greta Thunberg, the not-so-young-anymore Swedish climate-change activist, has taken a shine to nuclear energy, adding to the general vibe that nuclear power isn’t just another line item on the international agenda, but perhaps one that is entering its golden age.

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“There has just been a stunning reversal in thinking on the nuclear file,” Gitzel said.

What has been driving the conversation, he said — and by extension helping to push Cameco’s share price to around $65, double what it was 12 months ago — is not just the pro-nukes crowd, but the ongoing fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The European energy picture prior to the invasion of Ukraine had Germany, Poland, Italy, Finland, Bulgaria and several others hooked on Russian natural gas and nuclear fuel, but those countries have since awakened to the reality that relying on an unpredictable, war-mongering crackerjack to meet their domestic energy needs isn’t such a terrific idea.

Nor was it an effective means to put the financial screws to Russia over Ukraine, given the aggressor supplied about 24 per cent of the enriched uranium used to fuel the 93 reactors in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., voted to ban Russian uranium imports in December, but the bill includes a sunset clause for Russian-uranium-dependent American nuclear operators that doesn’t fully set until 2028.

Meanwhile, in Dubai, the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and France left COP with an agreement to allocate US$4.2 billion to build a safe and secure nuclear supply chain “free from Russian influence and the potential to be subject to political leverage by other countries.”

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Enter Saskatchewan, home to the planet’s highest-grade uranium deposits, situated about 7,500 kilometres from Moscow as the crow flies. What could be more safe and secure than a whack of uranium in the middle of nowhere in a country next door to a global superpower whose nuclear operators need to wean themselves off the Russian stuff as soon as possible?

“The race to net zero, climate change, climate catastrophe — Greta Thunberg — all of that had been kind of propelling the energy markets,” Gitzel said. “But then the Russians invaded Ukraine, and everything changed. We still hear about climate change, but energy security has dwarfed those conversations.”

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Caution ahead

Tim Gitzel is a dedicated beer league hockey player and a diehard Toronto Maple Leafs fan. His office is decorated with photographs of Mats Sundin and Wendel Clark.

What should be noted about both players is that neither won a Stanley Cup, or even came close, and so Gitzel is well-accustomed to good news stories — and playoff runs — that start well and somehow find a way to end in crushing disappointment. In other words, he is cautiously optimistic about his industry’s future, and should nuclear energy production triple, as prognosticators say, the challenge for executives will be in getting there.

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“Everybody is calling for a tripling,” he said. “That is a massive, massive industrial undertaking for the world, and so how are we going to do it?”

And it is the doing that can get a little dicey in the nuclear industry, to say the least. For anyone looking to throw a cautionary wet blanket over nuclear’s future in Canada and beyond, look no further than Arlington, Mass.

The Boston suburb is home to the nuclear industry’s most well-travelled critic, David Schlissel, a New Yorker and a lawyer by trade who once worked as a consumer protection attorney for New York state. That experience had him in court in the mid-1980s where he watched, aghast, as his witness “butchered” their testimony in a case involving allegedly unjust utility rate hikes.

Schlissel was smart. He can do economic analyses, has the gift for gab and concluded he should be the one testifying in the future, and so began the lawyer’s side hustle as an expert witness in cases related to nuclear power.

“I started testifying around the country as to whether nuclear power plants were prudently built and prudently operated, because state utility commissions are only allowed to prudently raise rates,” he said.

What he found digging through the financials is that nuclear power plants are almost never prudently built. Instead, they’re notorious for incurring massive cost overruns during construction — boondoggles that taxpayers wind up paying for.

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Schlissel is now an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank in Ohio. He is not anti-nukes; he is just anti-blowing budget estimates and leaving ratepayers on the hook. The 440 nuclear plants worldwide have cost, on average, double the estimate at the start of construction, with the highest cost increases associated with plants in North America and Europe, he said.

The 77-year-old’s tales of misspent money don’t just date from the bad old days. Mention “Vogtle” to the good citizens of Georgia and you may elicit a pained expression, quite possibly a rant.

In 2009, state regulators approved the construction of two additional reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant to go along with the pair already in operation. The reactors would be the first new ones built on American soil in decades, and hinted that a nuclear revival in the U.S. was in the works.

But the project, now all but complete, has come in seven years late and about US$20 billion over budget. It even claimed some casualties, chiefly Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC, the iconic nuclear outfit tasked with building the reactors that went bankrupt in 2017 due to the ballooning costs. Georgia Power Co. hiked its rates to help offset the whole sad affair.

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The moral of the story, Schlissel said, is that when a nuclear industry spin doctor, politician or perfectly affable, net-zero-obsessed pal buttonholes you to talk up the wisdom of going nuclear, you must remember that reactor builds aren’t cheap, and they can take forever to execute upon.

His advice? Do not be the “first, second, fourth … seventh” guinea pig to bite off on a new build, and instead let other jurisdictions take on the risk and iron out the kinks. And while waiting, perhaps consider building solar and wind farms in lieu of nuclear, which are quicker and, in theory, cheaper to deliver upon and have lately made strides in figuring out how to bank energy for those days when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

“Those famous nuclear engineers, The Who, have a song, Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Schlissel said. “There is a line, ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,’ and with nuclear, it is, ‘Meet the new cost, same as the old cost.’”

To be fair, it is not fair to single out nuclear’s track record for being an infrastructure money pit, said Dave Novog, a professor of nuclear engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. with a taste for plaid shirts, long hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, giving him the look of a veteran grunge rocker.

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But his academic chops are concerned with advanced nuclear reactor thermal dynamics, not rocking out. In short, he has been playing around with fission-related ideas ever since high school, when he did a science fair project on nuclear energy at J. H. Bruns Collegiate in Winnipeg.

The professor said nuclear plants undeniably cost a bundle, but anyone with a computer can do a quick Google search of the massive cost overruns and blown timelines on major infrastructure projects in Canada and find any number of egregious examples that aren’t related to nuclear: the Muskrat Falls generating station in Newfoundland and Labrador, the Site C dam in British Columbia, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in Toronto, Royal Canadian Navy warships, etc.

The point is that nothing is perfect. But what is different today, Novog said, is that unlike the bygone years of building nuclear reactors in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, when massive projects were underwritten by massive, state-owned entities, and the costs had a way of running amuck, the modern nuclear industry has welcomed the private sector to the fray.

“There is a lot of private-sector funding today, and so that has sort of driven the industry to become more lean and more accountable to investors,” he said.

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What this has meant for, say, Bruce Power LP, Canada’s only wholly private-sector-owned nuclear generating station, which provides about 30 per cent of Ontario’s electricity, is that its investors — TC Energy Corp., Ontario Municipal Retirement Systems (OMERS), the Power Workers’ Union and the Society of United Professionals — have an incentive to keep a keen eye on the bottom line.

Bruce Power is now eight years into a $13-billion, multistage reactor life extension program, and, lo and behold, the company has been hitting its deliverables ahead of schedule and on budget.

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Another industry shift, Novog said, which seems obvious but wasn’t necessarily standard in the past, is that project officials now seek to have design certainty and regulatory certainty before breaking ground. That is, the nuclear engineers and legal departments get every regulatory approval tip-to-tail to avoid any costly surprises before cranking up the bulldozers.

“There is a huge amount of private equity in these nuclear companies now, and so they are really driving continuous improvement and cost consolidation,” he said.

The short of it

But not everything in nuclear is big. It is probably a safe bet to say that only a small percentage of McMaster undergrads are aware the university is home to its very own five-megawatt nuclear reactor. It is used for research and produces about 50 per cent of the world’s iodine-125 supply for cancer treatment.

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The reactor does not generate electricity, but if it were in the business of keeping the lights on, it could power a city block. The entire setup is housed in a surprisingly small, white, nondescript, cylinder-shaped building. There are no barbed wires, machine-gun-toting guards or barking Dobermans. The reactor hides in plain view, as it has since it began operation in 1959.

Novog envisions a future where remote northern communities — or emerging city blocks — are powered by microreactors integrated into the community. Saskatchewan, for its part, is talking about building small modular reactors, which, according to the professor, aren’t exactly that small, but are in comparison to the behemoths of the 1970s.

Remember the 1970s? If you do, then you may also remember Candu — the made-and-designed-in-Canada reactor — 19 of which were put into service domestically, while the reactor design was exported to several countries, including South Korea, China, India and Romania. It is not a stretch to say Candus were a Cold War-era point of national pride.

“For a small population, Canada only does a handful of things really, really, well, and one of those things is nuclear,” John Gorman, chief executive of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said. “We are a Tier 1 nuclear nation.”

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Candu Energy Inc. today is a subsidiary of AtkinsRealis, a.k.a. SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. The company and Crown-owned Canadian Commercial Corp. recently signed a $750-million agreement to extend the life of one of Romania’s Candus, while AtkinsRealis debuted a new-generation Candu, the Monark, at the World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris in November.

Back in Saskatoon, Gitzel was dressed in a dark suit, with his hair neatly coiffed. He had an appointment with Premier Scott Moe to get to and then a plane to catch to Ottawa for a meeting with French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Up next was a trip to Almaty, Kazakhstan, for another nuclear conference. Cameco is hiring, its mines are gearing up to increase production, the boss’s agenda is jammed with commitments and there is a lot to talk about.

The company, in February 2023, announced a 12-year deal with Ukraine to fuel its reactors, including the six currently in Russian-occupied territory should they be liberated. That announcement was followed nine months later by news that Cameco had engaged in a “strategic” partnership with Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. to buy a 49 per cent stake in Westinghouse Electric (Brookfield owns the other 51 per cent of Westinghouse). The acquisition has positioned the uranium miner to build some of the reactors it supplies the uranium for, effectively making the Saskatoon outfit a one-stop shop.

“I hesitate to use the term nuclear renaissance, because in the 40 years I have been doing this, I have heard that a couple times and whenever you hear that, it is like the kiss of death,” Gitzel said. “But I think we are clearly seeing governments around the world take another look at what their energy options are and saying, honestly, it has got to be all of the above.”

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com

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