Nukes in Canada

French company Total SA (used to be Total Fina ELF when they were participating in the United Nations Oil for Food scandal -- they "reinvented" their brand) is considering the use of Nuclear Reactors to help extract Canadian Oil-Sand fields. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Total May Use Atomic Power At Oil-Sand Project
French oil giant Total SA, amid rising oil and natural-gas prices, is considering building a nuclear power plant to extract ultraheavy oil from the vast oil-sand fields of western Canada.

This comes as oil prices -- driven even higher by Hurricane Katrina and now the threat of Hurricane Rita -- are removing lingering doubts about the long-term profitability of extracting the molasseslike form of oil from sand, despite the fact that the output is much more expensive to produce and to upgrade than is conventional crude.

At the same time, prices of natural gas -- which oil-sands producers have relied on to produce the steam and electricity needed to push the viscous oil out of the ground -- have risen 45% in the past year. That is prompting Total, which holds permits on large fields in Alberta that contain oil sands, to consider building its own nuclear plant and using the energy produced to get the job done.

Despite the attraction of abundant electricity, industrial companies have been reluctant to install nuclear devices, however small, on their premises because of safety and cost concerns. Small nuclear reactors have been used for purposes other than generating commercial electricity, but mainly to power ships -- submarines, icebreakers and aircraft carriers, for example.

A notable exception was the Soviet Union, which built four small nuclear reactors at Bilibino, inside the Arctic Circle, in the mid-1970s to operate a gold mine. The plant still is in operation.

I have talked about this before but I'll go over the two points that the Enviros use against Nuclear power. Safety: Nobody died from Three Mile Island. Chernobyl was a disaster with 4,000 eventual deaths but the design was a bad one (cheap) and the idiot who ran the test that triggered the meltdown was operating way beyond the operating parameters for the reactor. Waste: The majority of the waste that needs to be stored is left over from the World War Two developments at Hanford and Oak Ridge. The waste from Power Plants is minimal. The designs that have failed are ones that date from the 1950's. Nuclear Engineering has come a long long way since then; not only with new insights on reactor physics but with better control systems. France and Japan derive the majority of their electricity from Nuclear. Lots of accidents over there right? Right? . . . . (crickets) Back to the article:

Even now, despite wanting to cut production costs, few oil-sands producers have been willing to talk openly about the nuclear possibility for fear of protests from environmentalists. Nuclear power doesn't bring back good memories in Alberta, where in the 1950s U.S. and Canadian scientists looked into the possibility -- later abandoned -- of detonating an atomic bomb to bring oil to the surface.

Total would speak about its plan only in general terms. "It's not foolish to look into the nuclear option," Yves-Louis Darricarr�re, Total's director for natural gas and power, said in a recent interview. "We have a team looking into it."

Memo to the Albertans: That was the 1950's We have moved on. A hair-brained scheme from the 1950's has zero bearing on what the engineers are looking at doing today. And more:

Total's interest is the latest sign that nuclear energy is making a global comeback. Finland commissioned a new reactor in 2003, the first such order in Western Europe in 13 years. France has chosen a site in Normandy where a reactor will be built. The U.S. hasn't commissioned a new nuclear plant for three decades, but the industry is talking seriously about a revival, encouraged by the Bush administration and the rising cost of fossil fuel.

Cool! And the political climate in Alberta:

The government of Alberta said that although there are no nuclear power plants in the province, there is no moratorium on nuclear energy. "We don't favor one form of energy over another," said Alberta Energy Ministry spokeswoman Donna McColl. "We let the market decide."

Awesome!