Global News published this video item, entitled “Canada’s politicians debate over using new nuclear power plant as energy source” – below is their description.
A relatively new kind of nuclear power plant, called small modular reactors (SMR), that can be used in ships, remote Northern communities or to power resource development like mines is a topic up for debate in the Canadian government.
The federal Liberals argue it’s one of many tools they hope to use to help reach their goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. However, the Green Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois all oppose this focus on SMRs, resulting in a debate over whether they could be used.
David Akin reports on how the new technology could be part of Canada’s energy mix in a sustainable economy.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. It extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres (3.85 million square miles), making it the world’s second-largest country by total area.
Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world’s longest bi-national land border. Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Various Indigenous peoples inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years before European colonization. The Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British Parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with a monarch and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the Cabinet and head of government.
As a highly developed country, Canada has the seventeenth-highest nominal per-capita income globally as well as the thirteenth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index. Its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat, which most frequently is then used in steam turbines to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions.