OTTAWA — Sanctions against Russia have cut off the supply of fuel for several of the next-generation nuclear reactors that Canada hopes to pioneer in the next few years, and there’s no immediate idea how to replace it, according to documents obtained by The Logic from Natural Resources Canada.

High-assay low-enriched uranium, or “HALEU,” is the fuel needed for many designs of small modular reactor, which are manufactured, transported and installed rather than built bespoke.

Canada sees SMRs as a key clean-energy innovation and potential export industry. It has sunk millions of public dollars into developing them, with multiple companies racing to answer calls from SMR-curious utilities and governments from Saskatchewan to New Brunswick.

The problem: “There is an immediate HALEU supply and security constraint that impedes the advancement of some SMR projects in Canada,” says a briefing note prepared last spring for the deputy minister at Natural Resources. “Russia is the primary commercial supplier of HALEU, but recent geopolitical events have suspended all trade possibilities.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine and Canada all but halted trade, the note adds, “securing HALEU supply now represents the critical path to deployment in Canada and globally.”

The deputy minister, John Hannaford, was being prepped for a meeting with Eddie Saab, the president of Westinghouse Electric Canada, which is working on a reactor design it calls the eVinci, and has a deal with the Saskatchewan Research Council to install one in that province. The eVinci is so small even by SMR standards that it’s sometimes called a microreactor, or MMR. It’s designed to produce about five megawatts of power—potentially good for industrial purposes or remote communities.

Canada promised $120.6 million toward SMR development in the last federal budget alone. Last March, Westinghouse received more than $27 million in federal subsidies for the eVinci project.

Westinghouse Canada did not respond to The Logic’s inquiries about its HALEU situation. Nor did other would-be suppliers of HALEU-dependent SMRs in Canada.

Canada has five SMR models with at least preliminary deployment plans and three of them need HALEU:

• Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor;
• Global First Power’s Micro Modular Reactor, another microreactor, meant for research at the storied Chalk River nuclear laboratories in Ontario; and
• Arc Clean Technology’s 100-megawatt ARC-100, one of two models to be piloted at New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau generating station, which already has an older CANDU reactor.

A 300-megawatt GE-Hitachi SMR meant for Ontario’s Darlington nuclear plant, which got $970 million in Canada Infrastructure Bank support earlier this week, would use uranium but enriched to a lower level than HALEU. GE-Hitachi has another potential customer for that model, called the BRWX-300, in Saskatchewan’s SaskPower. The second SMR being developed for New Brunswick, by Moltex, is to run on plutonium and other waste from the existing Point-Lepreau CANDU reactor. None of those has a HALEU problem.

Fresh off the Ontario announcement, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson boasted on Wednesday about Canada’s SMR projects at a meeting of nuclear ministers in Washington.

“I believe an important part of the future of nuclear power lies in SMRs,” he said. “And as an early domestic adopter of SMRs, Canada could realize a significant share of the global exports of technology, goods and services.”

The Chalk River SMR, he went on, is set to be deployed in 2026.

If it can be fuelled.

Natural uranium is about 0.7 per cent uranium-235, the fissile isotope; except for tiny traces of other isotopes, the rest is non-fissile uranium-238. The HALEU that the Chalk River and many other SMR designs need is enriched to between five and 20 per cent uranium-235.

(Fuel that is at least 20 per cent uranium-235 is called “high-enriched,” instead of low-enriched; weapons-grade uranium is enriched to over 90 per cent uranium-235.)

Markus Piro, the chair of the energy and nuclear engineering department at Ontario Tech University and a specialist in nuclear fuels and materials, said small modular reactors need compact nuclear cores.

“It’s kind of like the octane in your car,” Piro said in an interview with The Logic. “If you have a Ferrari, it can’t run on regular fuel. You’ve got to use higher-octane fuel.”

Furthermore, he said, modern nuclear reactor designs call for new and safer formulations of fuel, where the radioactive material is embedded within protective substances.

“You design the fuel to be as robust as possible to prevent the release of radioactive stuff in the event of an accident,” he said. “So because the fuel is designed to be so robust, they’ve got to increase the enrichment to compensate for all the stuff around it.”

Not all SMR designs demand HALEU, and the smallest reactors require little fuel, Piro emphasized. “It’s not an urgent fire, you know, burning right now,” he said of the supply issue. “But it’s definitely something that I think the government needs to think seriously about, if we are going to be deploying SMRs and MMRs.”

Enriching uranium is a difficult, highly technical process. Commercial enriched-uranium suppliers we might import from now max out at six per cent uranium-235, the NRCan document says. 

Canada mines uranium, but we’ve never built enrichment capacity because CANDU reactors run on fuel that doesn’t need enriching, Natural Resources Canada spokesperson Miriam Galipeau told The Logic in an emailed statement.

“Development of an enrichment facility in Canada would require an agreement with the country holding the rights to the technology as well as regulatory approvals. In addition, there would have to be a sufficient market for an enrichment facility to be economically viable,” she wrote. Instead, we’re working with other countries to try to create a non-Russian supply chain.

Such as the United States, which is funding a program to create a domestic HALEU supply chain. The U.S. licensed its first HALEU enrichment facility in June 2021, though even now Centrus Energy’s work is still at the demonstration stage.

Arc, one of the New Brunswick SMR vendors, signed a letter of intent with Centrus in 2020 to have the U.S. firm supply Arc’s HALEU needs, though they haven’t announced a binding deal.

The Department of Energy has a callout, closing this week, for suppliers capable of selling the U.S. government up to 25 tonnes a year of HALEU enriched from newly mined uranium.

The department “recognizes that it will take a few years to design, receive licensing, and construct new facilities to produce HALEU,” the notice says.

France’s Orano Group (which has a Canadian uranium-mining subsidiary) is publicly interested in becoming a HALEU supplier. But it would have to build a new enrichment facility from scratch because of the product’s “unique challenges … from both a time and operational standpoint,” Orano USA CEO Amir Vexler told an industry publication, The Nuclear Review, last November. 

Piro said spinning up a North American HALEU production line in time to feed Canadian SMRs is possible, especially if the timelines for getting them going slip a little.

He worked for several years at Chalk River. “With a lot of these projects, especially [at] a research facility like that, there tends to be some wiggle room. We’ll see,” Piro said.

Although Canada isn’t planning to enrich uranium domestically, he said it could. Uranium is mined in Saskatchewan and processed in stages into final fuel products there and at different sites in Ontario. Utilities in Ontario and New Brunswick have nuclear facilities already, with more intending to join them.

“If we were to deploy some of these reactors that require HALEU in Canada, there’d be a lot of value in having all of that manufacturing done here in Canada,” he said.