DIANE CAMERON | INTERVIEW
Canada gives one for the team
As Natural Resource Canada’s nuclear director, Diane Cameron helped chart the country’s nuclear roadmap and brought the technology into the climate change conversation. Ahead of her move to OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency, she sat down with NEI contributor Jacquie Hoornweg to reflect on her career and the path forward
DIANE CAMERON IS TRACING BACK through her career to explain her pivot from a career destined for distinguished service in the Canadian government to take on her new role as head of the Nuclear Technology Development and Economics Division at the OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA).
Her journey has been powered by her intellect but as she
speaks, it’s clear her career choices have been driven by her heart. Her internal compass points her toward solutions to climate change at a time when the planet is under duress from the strains of its effects. One important contributor to climate change mitigation
is low-carbon energy. Lots of it. One way to generate it, nuclear power. Cameron joined NEA earlier this year following seven
years as director of the Nuclear Division for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). Before taking that role, she says, she had seen increasing evidence of the powerful role nuclear could play in climate change mitigation. In May 2014, six months before the Canadian government announced the final piece in its restructuring of Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. (AECL), Cameron moved posts from Canada’s foreign affairs department into the nuclear division directorship, an open role left unfilled for years prior. Her time in the role serves as a map of the country’s nuclear programme itself, during that time. The department had been working in quiet mode as the
Jacquie Hoornweg
Managing partner at Querencia Partners
federal government undertook the review and restructuring of AECL, the crown corporation that gave the world CANDU technology and operated several national nuclear facilities, including the national research lab at Chalk River where the Nuclear Research Universal (NRU) reactor operated for more than 70 years before a well-earned retirement in 2018. As Cameron arrived, the restructuring, which included
sale of the crown corporation’s nuclear reactor division to SNC-Lavalin and the formation of government-owned, company-operated, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, was just wrapping up. As Cameron describes it, her role was to chart a new direction into unknown territory. “It was sort of carte blanche, almost. I had to rebuild the
team essentially from scratch, which was a challenge but also an opportunity, obviously,” says Cameron. “Every little growth step was pitching a vision to senior management of what we could accomplish; pitching an idea of a role we could play and incrementally building a team.” Fast forward to February 2021 when Cameron left NRCan to join the NEA. The NRCan team had grown to 24. But the U
Above: Diane Cameron is currently head of the Nuclear Technology Development and Economics Division at the OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency
www.neimagazine.com | August 2021 | 17
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