TORONTO – The Philippine government is exploring collaboration or cooperation deal with the Canadian government and its industry players on reinforcing research and development (R&D) initiatives that will aid the country on its nuclear rebirth by the turn of the decade.

That intent has been sounded off by Philippine Energy Undersecretary Sharon S. Garin in series of discussions that the visiting Philippine officials and private companies had pulled off with peers and counterparts in the Canadian nuclear sector.
    
According to Garin, one major wish of the Philippine government is to set up R&D facility akin to the McMaster University and the University Network of Excellence in Nuclear Engineering (UNENE) in Ontario which pioneered the development of the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor way back in the 1950s via an initial $2.0 million funding infused by its government – and that technology strategically bolstered up the eventual massive rollout of nuclear power projects in the country.

Beyond the development of expertise in nuclear engineering, the academic institution serves as a licensing entity for nuclear reactors prior to commercial deployment; and has also been offering suite of science and nuclear research opportunities as well as development of next generation isotopes on clean energy, discoveries in medicine that are targeted for cancer treatments as well as innovations on neutron radiography that can generate photographic image of an object once placed in a beam or even computer-readable data, a technology that is primarily used for security screening at airports and other risk-averse establishments.

Garin said if the Philippines could cement its way into setting up R&D facility, one ideal location that can be evaluated is the current site of the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) – with the government seeing the potential of that area as the R&D hub for the country’s nuclear renaissance pathway.

The delegation led by the DOE and Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) for the Philippine Nuclear Energy Mission with the Executives of Canada's Bruce Power.

She qualified one avenue of prospective collaboration with Canada toward capacity enhancement would be training of trainers (ToT) arrangement – and that could be done by deploying nuclear professionals from the Philippines to pursue further training or studies in Canada on facets of project development and the corresponding innovations on nuclear technology; as well as gain expertise on regulatory frameworks, primarily on the licensing precept.

In the Canadian nuclear sector, it was conveyed that licensing requirements are anchored on multi-tiered milestones that nuclear power projects are required to accomplish – including those on environmental assessment that must also include site evaluation; site preparation license, construction license, initial fuel loading, low-power commissioning and that will extend all the full commissioning then operations as well as site abandonment or returning the installation area to its ‘unrestricted usage’ state.

Garin noted that while Canada is not the only market willing to help Philippines into its nuclear power resurgence, “it has been the reliability of the CANDU reactor that really enticed the Philippine government to really look and try to study their CANDU reactor…because this is already a tested and proven technology and it is well-known worldwide.”

In the energy mix of the provincial government in Ontario, in particular, it has been emphasized that 53-percent of its power supply is drawn from nuclear generation; and this is also a well-calculated technology deployment propping Canada’s net zero goal.

One of Canada’s major nuclear power producers which joined the net zero global pledge in last year’s 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) of the United Nations is Bruce Power, which is now at the process of renewing its fleets to extend their operating life cycles – and that’s being concretized via its life extension program as well as major component replacements.

“Canada’s nuclear industry is a good learning experience for us because it already has well-developed supply chain, it has robust R&D network and they also achieved successes on the commercial side of operations, including the integration of safety redundancies in their fleets,” Garin stressed.

Apart from looking at the best practices of Canada’s nuclear power sector, the DOE official further specified that “we are also here to learn from their mistakes, so we would know how to avoid them when we start building our own nuclear plants.”