More nuclear in Alberta news

The profit margins in Alberta keep getting slimmer, and the development costs are starting to spiral upwards. It's no surprise then that the nuclear industry is being aggressive in courting the tar sands companies. The latest comes from the Globe today:

Talks with six firms have already happened and a bigger push is now in the works, he said. Energy Alberta is targeting developers of projects that use steam injection to recover bitumen from the oil sands. That list is led by the likes of EnCana Corp., Husky Energy Inc. and Total SA of France.

Energy Alberta hopes to build a reactor worth about $3-billion by 2014 to provide steam to support the production of 220,000 barrels of bitumen a day.

As a rough guess, that probably means they're thinking "small" for nuclear, which means about 1000 MWe reactor. As it turns out, Westinghouse, GE, and the French company Areva are all pushing 1000MW reactor designs around the world, including here in Ontario. That said, Energy Alberta would be smart to think larger - if Canada is serious about increasing the tar sands production, then nuclear is pretty much the only option, aside from imported LNG.

For critics of the tar sands, just one more reason.