Putting The Atom To Work

MR. LAWSON: One night about two weeks ago, during the ice storm, my wife awakened me in the middle of the night to say that she was cold. I quickly discovered that I was cold too, and that the reason was the failure of our General Electric blanket. With some difficulty we got back to sleep and woke up late in the morning, much later than usual as a matter of fact, because our General Electric alarm clock had stopped. I will not dwell on all the hardships that followed many of you had the same experience--except to say that absolutely nothing in the house worked. The lights were off, my electric razor wouldn't work, the whole house was cold. I had sugar pops for breakfast instead of oatmeal, the goldfish were gasping for air, and, while the car would start, the electronic garage doors wouldn't go up.

I am not suggesting that all this chaos was the fault of our speaker, or his company. (Even had we bought our appliances from a competing company this was one time we could not have been sure.) I simply want to point up the extent to which the amenities of our civilization, which after all do work ninety-nine per cent of the time, are the result of our having harnessed 'the forces of nature. This process is still continuing and the prospects are that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes will be the predominant influence in our lives during the remaining years of this twentieth century.

Our guest of honour today is an acknowledged expert and leader in this field. A native of Fredericton and a graduate in engineering from the University of New Brunswick (which recently conferred an honorary doctorate in science on him) he has spent all his working life with the Canadian General Electric Company. His record speaks for itself for he rose from the bottom (or as close to the bottom as an electrical engineer can get) to the top in only twenty-five years, becoming the first Canadian-born president of the company since 1924.

It is a pleasure to present to you Mr. J. Herbert Smith, President of the Canadian General Electric Company, who will speak to us on the subject "Putting the Atom to Work".

MR. J. HERBERT SMITH: I am holding up for your inspection a small object which weighs six ounces and is not much larger than the end of my thumb. This object is quite prosaic in appearance, but it symbolizes a new scientific art which--put to good use--will provide much of the electric power for our homes, offices and factories of the future.

For this is a pellet of the natural uranium used in a fuel rod for a nuclear reactor. Small though it is, this six-ounce pellet, if burned in a present-day reactor, will produce heat equivalent to 6,000 pounds of coal. While it is cylindrical in its dimensions, it could well be key-shaped, for it represents a new science which can unlock one of Nature's doors to provide vast quantities of much-needed electric power to many areas of the world.

If you have seen your newspapers during the past few days you have read of many of the proceedings of the highly successful conference just concluded dealing with the future of uranium and nuclear energy in Canada. This conference, sponsored by the Ontario Government, went a long way toward acquainting the public with the present activities and progress of those sections of government and industry concerned with the nuclear energy field.

Today I would like to discuss nuclear energy with you from the point of view of an electrical manufacturer--a manufacturer who is concerned both with disciplining the power of the atom to create new supplies of electrical energy, and with building equipment to put that energy to use in its most efficient manner.

As you all know, our productivity, and thus our whole standard of living, is dependent on abundant energy resources. Since our known resources of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) are limited in the long term, the advent of nuclear power gives assurance of meeting our power needs far into the future. While Mother Nature has bountifully supplied Canada with these other fuels, she was something less than perceptive in locating them. This oversight on her part has resulted in a situation which now sees Canada with very large reserves of coal, oil and gas, unfortunately located very long distances from the main areas of demand. And because of high transport costs, some of these areas of high electrical demand find it more economical to import fuels than to use those from domestic sources.

As a result of this situation, Canada, in the latest year for which statistics are available, had net imports of energy--that is to say, total imports of energy minus total exports of energy--which in absolute size were 50 per cent greater than the corresponding import of either the United States or the United Kingdom. Let me emphasize that we are talking of total figures, not figures per head of population. The Canadian net imports of energy were half as high again as either the American or British despite the much larger populations of the latter two countries! These imports add seriously to our foreign exchange problem today, and will do so increasingly in the years ahead, if we do not develop the use of our own resources.

For a further explanation of this situation, picture if you will a map of Canada. Over 40 per cent of this country's total population is located in Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec. This concentrated population is an indicator of a comparably concentrated demand for energy. Yet over 90 per cent of Canada's reserves of conventional fuels are located in an area roughly 2000 air miles west of Toronto, in Alberta and her bordering provinces. The coal deposits of the Maritimes are also at a formidable distance from these major power-using areas. The current situation, simply stated, is that it is cheaper for Ontario and Quebec to

import coal from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and to import oil from Venezuela and the Middle East, than it is for them to use such fuels from other parts of Canada. Even so, roughly half the cost of U.S. coal delivered in Toronto is composed of costs of transportation.

Compare that rather sombre picture with our past experience in using water power to generate our electricity. Large hydro resources--with fuel supplied free by nature--have up to the present been available close to the major power-consuming centres. Such rivers as the Kootenay, Bridge, Winnipeg, Niagara, St. Lawrence, Ottawa, Saguenay, St. Maurice and Peribonka, together with many smaller ones, have provided over 90 per cent of our total electrical requirements. But because the economic hydraulic power sites have now, or in the not too distant future will be, fully used, further development can only occur at sites much farther north. In many locations the transmission costs from these northerly sites would be sufficiently high that it is more economical to build thermal generating stations, fuelled with expensive imported coal.

Let us look at the situation in Southern Ontario. We have already noted that the completion of the St. Lawrence power project will mean that the last large hydro power site in this area has been developed. Meeting the expected load growth in this area will therefore require the building of thermal generating stations using the particular fuel which is least expensive in Southern Ontario--namely American coal. If no competitive nuclear power is available in Southern Ontario in 1980, the coal imports then required for electrical power production alone will amount to over 30 million tons per year, representing an annual cost of about 300 million dollars. Of this huge sum, at least 85 per cent will have to be paid in American dollars--dollars that will increase the adverse trade balance already existing between Canada and the United States.

Let me further illustrate this point. From the windows of this hotel you can see the R. L. Hearne steam power plant on the Toronto waterfront. It is fuelled by American coal. The completed Hearne station will alone use $40 million worth of U.S. coal for every year of its expected 33-year life. That involves a total expenditure, even with no rise in coal price, of $1,320,000,000 in U.S. funds--which equals one-and-a-half times the cost of the entire St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project.

Surely I need not emphasize further the nation's need for utilizing a Canadian source of fuel. We have that fuel right here in Ontario--uranium--and our reserves are the largest known in the world. That is the background for the challenge now being faced by engineers and scientists in the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, in the nation's utilities and in the growing number of private firms venturing into the nuclear equipment field. These groups have a common goal: to produce electrical power from nuclear sources at the earliest possible date at costs comparable to that obtained from conventional fuels.

Let us examine for a few moments our progress toward this goal. Canada's first nuclear-electric station is being constructed on the Ottawa River. Construction of this station, which is called NPD for Nuclear Power Demonstration, passed the half-way mark early last month.

NPD is a joint project of a Crown company (Atomic Energy of Canada Limited), a provincial utility (Ontario Hydro), and a private manufacturer (Canadian General Electric). This three-way partnership exemplifies the teamwork that is needed--and that is being applied--toward solving the problems of producing economic nuclear power. I might interject here that Canadian General Electric has contributed $2,000,000 of its own funds toward the design and development costs on this first reactor. This is an expression of our confidence that the Canadian approach is sound and will result in competitive power from the atom. The NPD installation is scheduled for completion by the end of this year, with testing and commissioning to take place in 1961. The 20,000 kilowatts of electric power from this plant will be fed into the Ontario Hydro System, but the power is incidental. The true product of the plant will be experience--experience with the design, construction and operation of this type of power reactor. And that experience will quickly be put to work. NPD is a prototype of the full-scale 200,000 kilowatt nuclear station known as CANDU, which was authorized last year. CANDU--an Ontario Hydro station--will be located near Kincardine, Ontario.

It is scheduled to be in operation by late 1964 or early 1965. And here is the important point. The engineers closely associated with the CANDU project have considerable confidence that the power costs achieved by this reactor will closely approach those of conventional coal-fired plants. Both of these reactors being built in Canada, NPD and CANDU, use a liquid known as heavy water to control the atomic reaction which produces heat. They also use the same liquid, that is heavy water, to carry the heat away from the reactor to the steam generator, where steam is produced at the pressure and temperature required to drive the electrical turbo-generators.

Heavy water is actually ordinary water with a special molecular structure. It exists in small quantities in our normal water supply. By means of rather a complicated and expensive process, the heavy water portion is separated from the ordinary water. Since the cost runs around $28 a pound and many tons of it are required in a reactor, it is obvious that a significant part of the cost of the reactor is made up of this heavy water.

As you are aware, the high cost of atomic reactors has been the chief impediment to the achievement of competitive power. Atomic fuels are already cheaper than fossil fuels. Searching for reductions in capital cost of reactors, Canadian General Electric made a considerable progress last year on a modification of our Canadian-type reactor. This design uses a low-cost light organic fluid in place of heavy water to transport heat from the reactor to the steam generator. Heavy water is still used in this design for the control of the atomic reaction and, of course, natural uranium for the fuel. Our preliminary work was so promising that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited has authorized us to perform a conceptual design and development study of this type of reactor, known as OCDR. This work is being carried on now in a new laboratory specially built for this purpose in our Civilian Atomic Power Department at. Peterborough.

It appears likely that this programme will result in the construction of an experimental reactor of this type known as OCDRE in the newly announced nuclear engineering facility to be set up north-east of Winnipeg by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. It is anticipated that this reactor design would prove most useful in electric generating stations of a wide range of capacities and may well prove useful in remote northern locations.

I have mentioned the type of reactor now being developed in Canada. There are literally dozens of reactor designs being worked on in other countries. And there is good reason for this. With the variation of environment from country to country, it appears that where a particular reactor type is chosen to suit the needs of one country, that type may be much less promising elsewhere.

Canada, having abundant resources of low cost natural uranium, is wisely and logically following the development of the natural uranium-fuelled, heavy-water-moderated reactor type, whose technology she has pioneered. We have been most fortunate in our choice of reactor type as is evidenced by the active interest shown in the Canadian programme by the United States, the United Kingdom and the nations comprising Euratom. Since this interest has included the building of a similar reactor by the United States and a $10 million joint development programme with Euratom, it is obvious that foreign interest is much more than academic.

It was just over 17 years ago that the Nuclear Age took practical form in a top secret research room in a stadium of the University of Chicago. When Enrico Fermi gave his historic report "the reaction is self-sustaining"--a completely new elemental kind of 'fire' had been started. The purpose of that wartime experiment was destruction--as was so horribly demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since then, while military nuclear tests have continued till recently, much of man's effort has been directed toward the peaceful uses of the atom. Already, I think it is safe to say, the atom promises benefits, not only in energy for power production but in practically every branch of science. Those benefits carry over into a multitude of applications which will increase our standard of living and, through medical science, prolong human life. Surely the atom will prove to be nature's greatest boon to man.

It is interesting to recall the biblical prophecy that reads "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares." In dozens of research centres around the world (with our own Chalk River outstanding among them), nuclear scientists and engineers are forging, with infinite care, the most productive "ploughshares" the world has ever known.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. Harold R. Lawson.