The province’s Saskatchewan Party government is keen on the idea as Premier Brad Wall repeatedly commits to the notion of upgrading the province’s vast stores of uranium. Calling the province the “Saudi Arabia of the uranium world” in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail, Wall’s enthusiasm has manifested in the province’s expressed interest in partnering with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to take Saskatchewan’s uranium to the next level.

Wall’s comments came shortly after a study done as part of the Saskatchewan 2020 energy initiative concluded that nuclear power can contribute 1,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020. The report was done at the request of the government by Ontario-based Bruce Power consortium of Cameco Corp., TransCanada Corp. and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust.

“We wanted to find out if there was a place in the Saskatchewan energy mix for nuclear energy and, yeah, our feasibility study came back and determined it did make sense,” says Bruce Power investor and media relations manager Steve Cannon.

Sites for a proposed reactor are being considered within a belt stretching from Lloydminster to Prince Albert along the North or South Saskatchewan rivers.

The report predicts a nuclear power plant will provide 2,000 construction jobs for six to 10 years, then 1,000 permanent operating positions. A poll done as part of the study says popular support in Saskatchewan for nuclear energy is second only to Bruce Power’s home in Ontario. “It doesn’t make sense from a business or a community point of view to move into an area where the population simply did not want it, but we don’t think that will happen.”

The project’s environmental assessment is going to take upwards of two years. During that time, company representatives will travel the province and give the public the facts on nuclear energy.
Attitudes have shifted since the first Warman proposal ran afoul of bygone Cold War images of atom bombs and then-fresh memories of American and Soviet accidents. Nuclear power is becoming viewed as a clean, green alternative to plants fired by fossil fuels. Furthermore, a 2004 Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce report pegged the lost gross domestic product of not securing the Warman plant at $12 billion. This combination of economic and ecological considerations is doing a lot to shape opinion.

“People are feeling the need to look to energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming,” says Cannon. “We’re seeing a lot of jurisdictions around the world take a second look at nuclear.”

Growing familiarity with the technology helps. “In our part of Ontario, we had a huge wind farm being proposed at the same time that we were looking to restart a couple of reactors. We had no negative intervention on our application for those new reactors whereas the wind farm had very strong opposition. Because it was new on a large scale, it wasn’t something that people understood or were willing to accept right off the bat. They had to educate themselves on it.”

The long and the short of nuclear power in Saskatchewan is that the government is in, the company is in and the people are coming around.

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