AtkinsRéalis Group Inc. signage in Montreal in November, 2023. The company has been pressing Ottawa to provide financial and political support for Canada’s homegrown CANDU reactor.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Robin Shaban is a founding partner at 2R Strategy.
The federal government has announced plans to develop a nuclear strategy by the end of 2026. The announcement comes after two years of public advocacy by AtkinsRéalis, where it has pressed Ottawa to provide financial and political support for Canada’s homegrown CANDU reactor and pressed Queen’s Park to build more CANDU reactors in Ontario. As governments take steps to nurture our homegrown nuclear technology, they must also ensure they are not creating a domestic nuclear monopoly in the process.
Canada is in the midst of a nuclear energy renaissance, rolling out some of the most ambitious projects in the world. The country’s energy consumption is expected to more than double by 2050. To meet this demand, provinces plan to build about 20 gigawatts, or GW, of nuclear generation capacity, enough to power up to 20 million homes. Assuming construction costs are in line with the new nuclear site in Darlington, Ont., the total cost of this 20GW buildout could be more than $300-billion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Qatar or Hungary.
CANDU nuclear technology is the crown jewel of Canada’s domestic nuclear sector. Built from nuclear technology developed during the Second World War, the Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor was introduced to the world in 1971 by Atomic Energy Canada Limited, a federal Crown corporation. Today, there are 30 CANDU reactors operating around the world using this Canadian technology.
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There are good reasons to build more CANDU reactors. As Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris, paid co-chairs of the AtkinsRéalis Canadians for CANDU campaign, pointed out in their op-ed, using CANDU technology lets us build a nearly complete domestic supply chain, achieve greater energy security in a shaky global order, and keep more jobs in Canada. All 17 nuclear reactors operating in Canada today are CANDU. Building more of them could keep electricity rates low by streamlining construction and operations, creating economies of scale across Canada’s electricity system.
However, there is a rub. In 2011 the federal government privatized the construction division of AECL, selling it to SNC-Lavalin (now AtkinsRéalis). As part of that agreement, AtkinsRéalis holds exclusive licence to use, manage and market that intellectual property, making it the original equipment manufacturer and the only firm that can provide certain, CANDU-specific engineering and reactor servicing. In effect, Ottawa has engineered a monopoly on Canadian-made nuclear reactors.
This monopolization is a problem if provinces want to build reactors using Canadian IP and expertise. AtkinsRéalis faces no competition for certain engineering and other services related to CANDU reactors. So, if provinces give preference to Canadian technology and supply chains, AtkinsRéalis can charge more for building and servicing power stations, leading to higher electricity rates for Canadians.
If provincial electricity operators want to have competitive bidding processes that allow different engineering firms to participate, they will have to consider non-Canadian nuclear reactor technologies. The two most credible options besides CANDU are the BWRX-300 from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy and the AP1000 from Westinghouse.
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Westinghouse is owned by Canadian firms Brookfield and Cameco. However, it has struck an agreement with Washington, receiving US$80-billion in financing and “financial, regulatory, policy and diplomatic” support for global expansion. In exchange, the U.S. government receives a profit share that can convert into a direct equity stake by 2029. A Canadian utility choosing the AP1000 would therefore be contracting with a vendor whose strategic direction is actively shaped by a foreign government, despite being Canadian-owned.
Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, jointly owned by GE Vernova (60 per cent) and Hitachi (40 per cent), has teamed up with Ontario Power Generation to build the first ever BWRX-300 reactor in Darlington. The Crown corporation has also signed co-operation agreements with the Tennessee Valley Authority and European utilities in Poland and Estonia, positioning itself as an export partner for this non-Canadian reactor technology.
When the federal government awarded AtkinsRéalis exclusive access to the CANDU IP, it sought to give it the profit incentive to further develop it and undertake ambitious research and development. Ironically, a side effect of this arrangement has been reduced choice in engineering and original equipment manufacturer services for Canadian-controlled technology. Had the federal government made the CANDU IP available to other Canadian firms, we could have had more domestic choice and competition today.
As a starting point, the Competition Bureau should do a market study on the nuclear sector to identify areas where competition issues may exist. Highly concentrated, IP-driven, and capital-intensive sectors such as nuclear energy can be rife with vertical integration, which dominant firms can abuse to keep potential competitors out of the market. The federal government should re-examine its licensing agreement with AtkinsRéalis and expand access to the CANDU IP to other companies that could be viable competitors.