Submissions-Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development-Parliament-Canada-March2022

I will focus my remarks on the implications of the potential deployment of SMRs for the governance of nuclear waste in Canada. [...] One question that came up concerned the potential conflict of interest resulting from the current governance structure where the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission reports to the Minister of Natural Resources. [...] Article 8 of the international Convention on Nuclear Safety, which Canada has signed and ratified, calls upon signatories to “take the appropriate steps to ensure an effective separation between the functions of the regulatory body and those of any other body or organization concerned with the promotion or utilization of nuclear energy”. [...] Because the CNSC is responsible for the protection of “health, safety, security and the environment”, its ideal role can, on occasion, be at odds with the promotion of nuclear energy. [...] The general conclusion is that pyroprocessing does increase the risk of proliferation, and that risk is roughly comparable to the risk associated with the traditional reprocessing technology called PUREX, which has been used by many countries to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.1 5.