OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 18 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Alliances or rivalries?
In an industry like nuclear, which is so different to its competitors, it is an interesting thought experiment to ask ourselves what we really wish it would be like and whether it would really be like the reality?
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev
barriers to entry so that the number of countries using nuclear energy would be in the 100s, rather than in the 30s, like today. We were close to achieving this at one point in history with CANDU technology but missed our chance. We have to be careful not to miss out again in the transition to small reactors.
The CANDU version of a pressurised heavy water reactor
was developed in Canada and went on to be used there as well as in Romania, Argentina, South Korea and China, while its derivatives are the mainstay of India’s nuclear sector. The UK was also interested in the design in the 1960s and demonstrated a version of the technology. What if there had been, by design or by chance, a
Now we can relax, guys – we have 10 years of building nothing ahead.
HAT WOULD BE A dream version of the nuclear industry? We would surely
want lower prices for our products, with healthy and open competition. We would want technology to take a
back seat to its application and for innovation to be more incremental. We would certainly prefer to have lower
14 | April 2023 |
www.neimagazine.com
coalition of companies from these countries supplying CANDU technology according to some broadly standardised features? There could be vendors that compete with different variations, while each country’s contractors and supply chain would form a competitive ecosystem of goods and services around the base technology, and this would grow with every country that introduced CANDU to its energy mix. CANDU has a lot going for it. It’s a workhorse that
can run on almost any fuel: natural uranium or slightly enriched; it can consume recovered uranium and plutonium from used LWR fuel; it can even run on thorium. CANDU can also be fuelled by downblended HEU. The machine itself does not need the large heavy forgings of light water reactors and a lot of its parts can be made in the purchasing country. There are advantages for buyers too, from newcomers to the longest-established pioneers.
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