Members of the Arctic Response Company Group walk down a road in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, as Canadian Armed Forces demonstrate a series of drills designed to highlight the military's ability to defend the Canadian Arctic.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
The federal government will explore the possibility of powering remote military outposts in the Arctic using nuclear reactors, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson announced Wednesday.
Speaking at a nuclear industry conference in Ottawa, Mr. Hodgson said the Department of National Defence would spend $40-million this year to study the feasibility of using microreactors to provide heat and electricity to military facilities in remote and northern areas.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., a small Crown corporation charged with enabling nuclear science and technology, will also participate in the study. AECL spokesperson Jeremy Latta declined to answer questions about its involvement, noting DND is leading the initiative. DND also denied interview requests and did not respond to questions from The Globe and Mail on Wednesday afternoon.
Microreactors are compact reactors small enough to be transported by truck and generally produce less than 20 megawatts of heat, which could be used directly (for example, to heat buildings) or to produce electricity. Conceptually, most microreactors would be mass-produced in factories, although no such factories have yet been built.
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The government’s Defence Industrial Strategy, released in February, acknowledged that infrastructure in Canada’s North is insufficient to support military activities. It envisioned spending $2.67-billion to established “dispersed network of principal hubs and secondary nodes to provide critical infrastructure and logistical support for military operations in the North.”
Nuclear reactors have rarely been used for generating power in the Arctic. There is only one such plant currently operating at high latitude: Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov, a vessel equipped with two marine reactors that supply electricity.
But a small handful of Canadian companies are in the early stages of developing microreactors and related infrastructure intended for deployment in frigid, remote locations.
Ottawa-based startup Boreal Energy Systems Ltd. is developing a one-megawatt microreactor called the Micro Modular Reactor, with the primary goal of supplying energy to DND missions in the Arctic such as military bases and installations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a mutual defence initiative between the United States and Canada.
Albert Heller, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said DND will need more power as it pursues Arctic missions – and it can’t supply enough liquid fuels such as diesel to meet its needs. Renewables such as wind and solar are also not feasible, he added.
“The work we’re doing and the prototypes that we’re building is all around getting a licensable reactor by the 2030 time frame,” he said. “And that is geared to meet DND’s operational requirements for their NORAD modernization plan.”
Prodigy Clean Energy Ltd. is developing a barge-like vessel called the Transportable Nuclear Power Plant that is intended to facilitate deployment of small reactors in the North; Canadian Forces and Coast Guard installations are among Prodigy’s target markets. The federal government provided $2.75-million to finance the company’s development efforts.
Also on Wednesday, Mr. Hodgson said the federal government will introduce what he described as a “comprehensive nuclear energy strategy” in the coming weeks. It will focus on enabling construction of small and large reactors domestically, promoting exports of Canadian nuclear technology and domestic use of Canadian uranium.
“Our government is moving at speeds not seen in generations to get big things done,” Mr. Hodgson said in a statement.
Previous federal initiatives promoting nuclear deployment have fallen well short of their objectives.
After consulting with the nuclear industry, provincial governments, utilities and other stakeholders, in 2018 the government of then prime minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a “roadmap” to promote development of small modular reactors. Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal spending followed, much of it directed to reactor developers such as Terrestrial Energy Inc., Moltex Energy and Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC.
Yet despite federal support, most of the projects promoted by the SMR roadmap have yet to materialize. One of them envisioned deployment of microreactors in Northern and remote locations: Ontario Power Generation Inc. formed a joint venture with reactor developer Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. to build a five-megawatt gas-cooled reactor at AECL’s Chalk River research facility in Deep River, Ont., northwest of Ottawa. That prototype was supposed to be in service by this year.
But OPG pulled out of that joint venture in 2024, just months before Ultra Safe went bankrupt. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which operates the Chalk River facility, said it has no plans to build new reactors there.