Libbe HaLevy, the producer and host of an audio podcast, Nuclear Hotseat, interviewed Gordon Edwards in one of her weekly shows. Here Is an excerpt. For the entire conversation: nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/ontario-nuclear-blind-spot

Libbe HaLevy: Dr Gordon Edwards is a mathematician, physicist, nuclear consultant and president of the Canadian Coalition for nuclear responsibility. He is one of our most cogent thinkers on nuclear issues, and he regularly puts together the pieces to give us a clear picture of what is going on, why we should be alarmed, and what we can do about it.

In light of Trump’s tariff tantrum and threats to annex Canada as our 51st state, Dr Edwards spells out the problems of Ontario’s planned importation of four US-made nuclear reactors, along with the safety issues created in these units by elimination of multiple safety systems in order to be able to label them small.

I can honestly call this one of the most important interviews I’ve conducted in almost 14 years of producing Nuclear Hotseat every week. I spoke with Dr Edwards on Tuesday, April 1, 2025 and I swear this is not an April Fool’s joke. This is for real. So, fasten your seat belts! Dr Gordon Edwards, thanks so much for joining us today on Nuclear Hotseat.

Let’s start with where things are right now. What is the current, or at least the most recent, energy scenario in Canada, as regards nukes? How many do you have? How much energy are they creating, and what happens to the energy?

Gordon Edwards: Well, up until the present, Canada has had only Canadian-designed nuclear reactors, using natural uranium, which we produce ourselves, and so we have a completely closed system. We are totally self-sufficient in our own nuclear industry.

We do export; 85% of our uranium is exported overseas to other reactors, and that requires enrichment services, which are now hard to come by because of the Russia-Ukrainian war. A lot of the enriched uranium, even from the United States, was being purchased from Russia as a result of the closure of the traditional enrichment plants in the United States. So, now that there’s an embargo against buying things from Russia, that makes it difficult to actually secure these contracts.

Now, Canada has not ordered a new nuclear power reactor since 1978 — except for one, and that is the BW RX 300. This is a GE Hitachi boiling water reactor, which is an American design, which would require uranium bought from the United States – enriched uranium, since we do not have any enrichment capabilities in Canada.

So, for the first time, we would have a nuclear reactor that is coming from another country and its fuel supply is purchased from another country as well. That other country happens to be Trump’s United States of America, and Trump seems to have declared a more or less economic war against Canada. He seems to be indicating that he would like to put Canada into dire straits economically so as to be able to acquire Canada as the 51st state.

This is a very hostile takeover, if you want to put it that way – a scenario very similar to his announced plans for getting Greenland “one way or the other.” It sounds very threatening. And Canadians have not responded well to this nasty turn. The result is that we’re really having a strong sensation here in Canada that we have to become more independent of the United States. Stop buying US products.

There’s a strong ‘buy Canadian’ trend right across from coast to coast to coast in Canada (we’ve got three oceans, the Arctic Ocean as well). There is this feeling that we should avoid buying from the United States because the United States right now is not a reliable supplier. To put our electricity system at the mercy of Trump’s goodwill seems foolish, because Trump is looking for any way that he can put pressure on Canada to make it more amenable to being actually taken over by the United States and made into the 51st state.

Right now, we have a new order, since 2021, for American reactors. They would be so-called ‘small modular reactors,’ but they’re really not small. They’re 21 stories high. That doesn’t sound like a small reactor to me. These are totally American design, and they would be totally using American supplies of fuel.

We now have a new prime minister – Mark Carney, who used to be in charge of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada. He has already said that they are reconsidering the purchase of $87 billion worth of American fighter jets, 16 of which have already been partially paid for by Canada. Now we’re considering the possibility of buying the rest of the jets from Sweden rather than from the United States.

We also have several provinces that have taken American alcoholic beverages off their shelves, and this has already hurt the bourbon industry in the United States. We really have friendly feelings towards the American people, and we’ve been friends for a long time. It’s a shame to see that all going down the drain right now. But the question is: Why should we be buying American reactors?.

Libbe HaLevy: With Canada in the process of withdrawing from various economic commitments that have been made, or believed to have been made, with the United States, why are they now trying to buy US nuclear reactors that require US fuel when you’re in a closed system that doesn’t require any contact with the United States in order to perpetuate your nuclear industry?

Gordon Edwards: That’s absolutely correct, and it is a puzzle because it seems that under the current circumstances, the smartest thing to do would be to stop the contract to purchase those four BWRX-300 reactors. They are boiling water reactors, version 10. The X stands for ten and BWR stands for boiling water reactor.

Libbe HaLevy: And are these the same as the small modular nuclear reactors that are under discussion?

Gordon Edwards: Well, they call them small modular reactors, but in fact, they’re 21 stories high – 10 stories above ground and 11 stories below ground – so, it’s hard to see why they would be called small.

And modular? They’re not really modular either. Certainly, the first ones are not going to be modular, because they’re going to be the first of a kind. The only way that you can really get the modular idea going is to have orders for hundreds or thousands of these reactors, and then you can start mass producing the components. That was the idea – that you could mass produce these components and make them quicker and easier to assemble. But you’re not going to build a mass production plant when you only have only three or four orders. So, the use of the phrase ‘small modular reactor’ is a misnomer.

The real problem is that Ontario has already committed to building four of these BWRX-300 reactors from the GE Hitachi Corporation, which is based in Wilmington, North Carolina. A lot of people are thinking that we should just cancel that order, start from scratch, and reconsider the whole idea.

But our government has been fooled, like many governments around the world have been fooled, into thinking that nuclear is going to be a valuable aid in fighting climate change, and therefore – because fighting climate change is regarded as urgent by our government – they don’t want to delay the building of these reactors.

However, nuclear power is very slow to build, no matter where you order it from. These have already been ordered since 2021 fact, the license that was issued for preparing the site for these reactors was issued way back in 2011, believe it or not. The result is that we’re talking about one of the slowest energy sources to deploy, and also one of the most expensive energy sources that are available. According to a Wall Street firm (Lazard) that advises investors on energy matters, the highest estimated cost of wind with storage and solar energy with storage, is far less than the lowest cost of nuclear.

And so, the question is: How do you make nuclear affordable? How do you make it deployable in time to actually make a difference for climate change? And how do you make it pay back its cost? Because again, these and in prices tend to escalate and soar out of control. They double and triple very often before the project is completed. We’ve seen this already in the United States. There was a project of small modular reactors called ‘Nuscale’, and the price just about doubled. All the investors backed out. That project is now dead. It’s on the scrap heap.

So, we have a complicated situation where Canada is trying to cancel the order for foreign jets from the United States, and yet we are on the hook for buying foreign reactors from the United States that would require fueling from the United States as well.

How to put yourself at the mercy of your economic enemy? Just put him in charge of supplying the fuel that you need to run your electricity system. It doesn’t seem like a very smart move. We don’t know how this is going to shake out, but that’s one of the concerns that’s going on.

Can they make these reactors, the BMRX reactor, more affordable? Nuclear is very expensive. In order to make it more affordable, what they’ve done is they’ve taken a previously designed reactor called the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) that was actually licensed in the United States back in 2011. It turned out to be very expensive and was never built. It was actually modeled after the Fukushima reactors that melted down in that same year, 2011. The three reactors that melted down at Fukushima were, in fact, boiling water reactors built by GE Hitachi. The Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor was a simplification of that model, but it was never built, and now they have an even further simplified version, which is the BWRX-300.

They’ve made it 90 percent smaller, partly by eliminating many safety systems. To reduce the cost and make it smaller, they’ve cut out a whole bunch of safety systems that were previously regarded as essential.

One of these safety systems, for example, is the emergency core cooling system, which is designed to provide emergency cooling when the ordinary cooling is lost, so as to prevent a meltdown. That’s gone.

They also had what are called ‘overpressure relief valves’ to prevent the vessel from bursting.

If it bursts, of course, it’s impossible to cool the fuel and you can’t avoid a meltdown. But they’ve eliminated the overpressure relief valves.

And they also had a thing called the ‘core catcher’. If there were a core meltdown, they had a device at the bottom that will catch the core as it melts and prevent it from melting through at the bottom. They’ve eliminated the core catcher.

So, they’ve eliminated a whole bunch of safety systems as a way of saving money, and they’re instead depending upon one single system, which is called the ‘isolation condenser system.’

I’ll tell you what that is. The idea is that in the event of a bad accident, the pressure vessel would immediately snap shut so that there would be no more coolant entering or leaving the core of the reactor, and another circuit, which goes vertically upwards, would take the steam that is generated by the heat of the core, the steam from the boiling water, and it would go up to a pool where it would condense into normal water and fall back down into the core by gravity on a different circuit. So, you have a loop that goes up from the core to the cooling pond and back down into the reactor to prevent the core from melting down. That’s the ‘isolation condenser system’.

I’ll tell you what that is. The idea is that in the event of a bad accident, the pressure vessel would immediately snap shut so that there would be no more coolant entering or leaving the core of the reactor, and another circuit, which goes vertically upwards, would take the steam that is generated by the heat of the core, the steam from the boiling water, and it would go up to a pool where it would condense into normal water and fall back down into the core by gravity on a different circuit. So, you have a loop that goes up from the core to the cooling pond and back down into the reactor to prevent the core from melting down. That’s the ‘isolation condenser system’.

It turns out that every boiling water reactor built in the past always had an isolation condenser system similar to this – not quite the same design, but the same idea – and on two previous occasions it has failed. There was a precursor of the BWRX, which is called the Humboldt Bay reactor. And back in 1970 it had a reactor accident which resulted in fuel damage and off-site radiation releases. Why? Because the isolation condenser system failed. And that’s the only system they’re using now to keep the BWRX’s safe.

I have recently made a presentation to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is considering issuing an operating license for this reactor. I pointed out that we do not know for sure what would happen if the isolation condenser system fails, as it did also in Fukushima Unit One, which contributed to the core meltdown there.

So, reactor safety is a complicated technical issue, but it’s easy to understand that you shouldn’t save money by eliminating safety systems. This is not a smart thing to do.

Libbe HaLevy: You know, Gordon, we’re talking on April 1. And I really wish all of what you were just saying were part of an April Fool’s joke. But really, the April Fools are the people in power in Canada who might give a green light to this and let it move forward, instead of being more rational.

Gordon Edwards: You’re absolutely right. I think that we’re the fools here. And another thing about fools. I remember that no less a person than Edward Teller once said, “There’s no such thing as a foolproof system, because a fool is always greater than the proof.”

Libbe HaLevy: I’m going to keep that one. What, if any, pushback has there been against this proposal and this movement and the seeming uncritical support of Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, who is pushing this forward?

Gordon Edwards: We have provinces. Each province has its own prime minister, you might say, but they’re called ‘premiers’ because there’s only one prime minister and that’s the Prime Minister of Canada. The premiers, though, rule supreme over their own provinces, except for the federal involvements, which have to do with foreign relations, the military, trade, and so on.

Yes, Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, exports a good deal of electricity – about 13 terawatt hours – to the United States – mostly New York and Michigan, and a little bit to Minnesota. And back on March 10, he announced that, in response to the unjustified tariffs that Trump has levied against Canada, he was going to put a 25% surcharge on the electricity that we’re selling to the United States. That would mean an extra $400,000 per day that would have to be paid by US customers for Ontario electricity.

When Trump heard that, he immediately dropped his own plan to increase the tariff on our Canadian aluminum and steel from 50% to 25% on condition that Ford would drop this surcharge on electricity, which he did.

So, Ford has already shown that he’s able to stand up to Trump to a limited degree. He could go further by simply saying, “Okay, we’re canceling these orders for American reactors. These orders are going nowhere, just like the orders for our jets are perhaps going nowhere.” They’re under evaluation, by the way. It is not yet decided whether we’re going to cancel the order for the jets. Nor is it yet decided whether we’re going to cancel the order for the reactors, but this seems to be the way things are going.

Libbe HaLevy: Is there any kind of public awareness and public push back to this? Any kind of a movement to not move forward on the nuclear reactors?

Gordon Edwards: There has been, in fact, a growing public awareness, but it’s still quite small, and it has to grow rapidly if it’s going to have a big impact. They haven’t yet got a construction license for the Ontario version of the BWRX 300 and in fact, they haven’t licensed it in the states either.

In the United States, the US nuclear regulatory commission (NRC) has identified a number of questionable aspects of the safety case for the BWRX-300. They’re not sure if it makes sense, as GE Hitachi has said, to declare that certain zones of the reactor are “Break Exclusion Zones.” What is a Break Exclusion Zone (BEZ)? It’s a zone in which no pipe will break.

To justify this, they’re saying that they are convinced any pipes that happen to be in those particular areas of the plant will leak before they will break, and the “leak before break” (LBB) will allow them time to shut down the reactor and take precautionary action. Of course, if you had a sudden break of the pipe you would not be able to respond to it in time. So, the GE-Hitachi team is saying, ‘because we declare these zones to be immune from sudden breakage, we don’t have to study them.’ They’re giving themselves a free pass, saying ‘we do not have to analyze these accidents. Because of the Break Exclusion Zone, they are now Beyond Design Basis (BDB) accidents, and we don’t have to study beyond-design-basis accidents.’

Libbe HaLevy: Explain what ‘beyond-design-basisaccident’ actually means,

Gordon Edwards: Nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous, but they’re trying to pretend that they’re inherently safe. And so, the Break Exclusion Zone is to say: ‘We think it’s inherently safe, provided none of these pipes have the audacity to break; because if they break, we can’t guarantee that it’s going to be safe at all.’

So, a ‘design-basis’ accident is an accident that the designer is willing to analyze and take preventative measures to cope with. ‘If it’s beyond-design-basis, then we don’t have to study it, because it’s too far beyond the pale and may well be too difficult for us to cope with.

I’ll give you an example. We’ve all heard about the nuclear reactors in Zaporizhzhia, which are being damaged by the war that’s going on between Russia and Ukraine. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has six nuclear reactors. It’s the largest single nuclear plant in Europe. And if these were attacked by warfare, by shells, nobody has ever studied how to cope with the results of such a so-called accident. So, a beyonddesign-basis accident is an accident that, in the opinion of the industry, is so improbable that we do not have to study it. Of course, when you have a war raging, as you do in Ukraine, it’s not improbable at all.

Libbe HaLevy: And, as the saying goes, “Man plans, God laughs,” Now, Canada is currently in an election cycle, is it not?

Gordon Edwards: Yes, we’re having a federal election coming up in the next few weeks. Prime Minister Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney was elected head of the Liberal Party, which makes him de facto prime minister. He hasn’t been elected, but he is prime minister simply because he’s the leader of the Liberal Party. In a parliamentary system, that’s how it works. It’s the party that rules, not the individual.

Both major parties in Canada – the Liberals and the Conservatives – are very pro-nuclear. They regard nuclear as a hot item for selling overseas. And of course, this is also a concern of ours, because safety weaknesses in Canada are bad enough, but if those same reactors are implanted in some Third World country that doesn’t have the experience with nuclear power that Canada has had for 80 years, then the consequences can be much worse.

Also, the likelihood of major military actions in Europe and elsewhere are becoming increasingly worrisome, which affects nuclear power as well. In fact, back in 1976 there was a Royal Commission report issued in Britain on nuclear energy and the environment. And the author of that report was a British nuclear scientist, Sir Brian Flowers, who worked in both the military and the civilian nuclear programs in Britain. He said that if nuclear power had been deployed in Europe before World War II, large parts of Europe would be uninhabitable today because they would undoubtedly have become targets in the war.

If it is targeted, you can blow one of these reactors to kingdom come. And of course, the small reactors are much easier to blow up because they don’t have the massive containment walls that the older ones do. Yet they produce the same kind of radioactive poisons inside them that all reactors do, so you can have something far worse than a meltdown – a complete evacuation of all the radioactive materials from the core of the reactor. That would cause contamination of a permanent nature over a very, very large land mass. So, they have to have devices to prevent the worst consequences from those. This is not the case for accidents that are ‘beyond the design basis’.

Libbe HaLlevy: For those who are concerned about this set of issues, which you have articulated so well, what do you suggest that we do? Can we perhaps put up a firewall to keep these really bad decisions of nukes from going forward?

Gordon Edwards: It’s difficult because people are mystified by nuclear technology. They’re less mystified now than they used to be. They now realize the dangers of the old reactors, the ones that we built back in the’60s and ‘50s and ‘70s. Around 1976, even before the Three Mile Island accident, they stopped ordering new reactors in North America.

You’ve heard perhaps about four largereactors that were built down in Georgia and South Carolina, the AP1000 reactors. Westinghouse went bankrupt over the $9 billion loss it suffered on two of those reactors in South Carolina, which were in fact cancelled. Even though they were almost all built, they just canceled them because they were already bankrupt.

They did, however, finish the ones in Georgia, and those are now operating. Those were the first reactors ordered and given a construction license by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in over 30 years. So, there’s been a long hiatus.

For the last 25 years, the nuclear industry worldwide has been in a steep decline. Nuclear power’s market share of global electricity has declined in those 25 years from 17% of the total electricity globally to only 9% today and is still going down.

The nuclear option has been very much on the decline, and the ones that are running are generally very old, and they’re going to be shut down fairly soon. They’re trying to keep them alive by giving them heart transplants and resuscitating them and maybe putting in a new set of lungs, but it’s not possible to restore these things to their original condition, and even their original condition was unable to cope with the consequences of all the accidents. Look at Three Mile Island as an example of that.

When the climate crisis really took hold and people realized that trillions of dollars were going to be put aside to deal with it, the nuclear industry saw this as an opportunity to grab as much of that money as possible. They were well positioned by having people in government on their side – people who had actually represented the industry at one point in their careers. They figured that they could get public money to build a host of new speculative nuclear reactors, like the Natrium reactor – that’s one that uses liquid sodium coolant instead of water; the BWRX, the boiling water reactors which use ordinary water as coolant; the Molten Salt Reactors, which use melted salt as a coolant.

Many of these reactors are receiving a lot of public funding, but they’re not going to make much difference in the global scheme of things, because they’re too slow and too expensive to solve the climate crisis, and they represent too small a portion of the energy budget.

Nuclear’s contribution has been declining sharply. The market share of electricity for nuclear has gone down from 17% to 9%, that’s electricity, but electricity is only one slice of the energy pie. If you look at overall energy globally, then nuclear power never supplied more than about 3.3% of the total energy, and now it’s down to under 2% of global energy use.

So, the idea that nuclear can solve the climate crisis, this is a complete fallacy. It can’t possibly solve the climate crisis. It’s much too slow, much too expensive, and in the case of these new reactors, none of them have even been tried and tested, whereas renewable energy is galloping along at a very rapid pace. In fact, the International Energy Agency has forecast that in the next 10 years, 90% of all new electricitygenerating facilities worldwide are going to be renewable. Renewables are really fast to deploy. They pay themselves back in a few seasons, a much faster payback time than nuclear, and you can really make rapid headway on climate change.

That’s what most of the countries in the world are doing. They’re investing in these renewables, and they’re making rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

With nuclear, you don’t make any reduction. You actually add to the greenhouse emissions as long as you’re just constructing them and mining the uranium and enriching the uranium. All this just adds to the greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s only when the reactors start up, which often takes ten years or more, that they begin to pay back the carbon dioxide debt that they’ve already built up. And it takes about an equal length of time, ten more years, before they pay themselves back economically. With wind and solar, you get paid back in a couple of seasons, and you can reinvest that money in more wind and more solar. And so, it multiplies very rapidly and overtakes the climate crisis much more quickly.

And in fact, there’s no speculation for these facilities. We know they work. They’ve all been tested and deployed. They don’t require specialized workforces to build either. The nuclear industry is complaining that they do not have enough trained people to build thousands of new reactors. Where are these people going to come from? Well, you don’t face that difficulty when you’re building solar installations and wind installations. Those people can come from almost anywhere, as long as they have a good technical background.

Libbe HaLevy: What do we do? What would be your suggestion for those of us who are appalled by the situation?

Gordon Edwards: People have to figure out how to make their voices heard in an effective way. No single person can do so, but collectively, we have the power to do it. It’s a question of having tenacity, courage, and conviction. People gain nothing financially from doing this, but they gain in terms of doing the right thing, in terms of accomplishing something for the world and for the benefit of their children and grandchildren.