I'm starting this article not because of the title subject but what I consider alarming statements made by folks in the US about how the tech used here could be used for clandestine enrichment.
Best cast it's an attempt to dissuade other countries from adopting the CANDU reactor, or keep Canada buying enriched uranium from the states, and worse case it's further pretence for annexation.
"The only thing that inhibits Canada is the will to do it, the political decision to do it," said nuclear weapons expert Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, who served as head of national security and international affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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"All uranium-fuelled reactors produce plutonium. The issue with the CANDU is that it has online refuelling," explained Ed Lyman, director of nuclear safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "You're refuelling continuously, which makes it harder for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]."
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"Of the countries that have made nuclear weapons with plutonium, many of them have used a heavy water reactor," he said.
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Canada is also branching out into a new kind of technology that will require enriched uranium: the small modular reactor (SMR). Some of the proposed SMRs would use uranium enriched to a level as high as 20 per cent, known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
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"And so I worry about this push for advanced reactors, SMRs that use HALEU up near 20 per cent, like the ARC 100 in Canada, that the material itself is in the dangerous band. And if Canada were to pursue a whole fleet of SMRs using HALEU, and especially if they were to build their own enrichment plants to support that, that might give them a threshold capability for bombs, even if they never make highly enriched [over 20 per cent] uranium."
I hate that the idea of Canada acquiring nukes has become so prevalent. Having nukes does not help anyone, it merely increases the global risk of nuclear war. Every country with nukes is another country that can decide to pull the trigger.
Consider the actual calculus that goes into MAD. If we think we have a nuke heading towards us, we have to act prior to verification. The decision that is effectively to be made is: do we let a potential nuke hit one of our cities and let millions of people die, or do we launch a counter attack and kill millions more people and prompt further response from the enemy? The most likely outcome of this is full scale nuclear war. Even between two countries, this would devastate the planet and result in countless deaths.
Counterintuitively, even if we have nukes, launching a counterattack is the response that would result in the worst possible outcome. But it is also useless to have nukes if you have no possible intent of using them defensively. This is basically entering into the most apocalyptic game of chicken that anyone can play.