0:00  
Nick Findler was just like any other young 20 something, he finished college and wasn't sure what to do next. Nuclear energy is slowly becoming more and more popular with some hoping for what's called the nuclear renaissance.

0:13  
So it was a number of years ago, I was I was doing quite a bit of research on nuclear and, and I'd had some friends and some family members talking about it and in a pretty negative light, right. So I wanted to like find out how negative it really was. And, you know, you look at countries like France. So France is one of the world leaders in nuclear about 80% of their energy mix is actually derived from nuclear. They have not only the cheapest but the cleanest energy in all the world, right? You look at, you know, Germany, which is supposed to be this green Haven, right? You know, France is half of the carbon emissions per person than Germany is. So so it's really a great way to make clean energy. And, yeah, so I saw this opportunity after Fukushima hit that, you know, you just have this decimated industry where, you know, just about every company had died.

1:02  
Events like Fukushima and Chernobyl were devastating, but they were anomalies. Canada gets 16% of its energy from nuclear with a projected increase under the current administration. Nuclear energy does much more good, or does it? Is nuclear power safe?

1:22  
My name is Doug Briggie. I'm a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Public Health. My research is mostly an occupational environmental health. And in recent years, a lot of that has been environmental health, frankly. You know, there was this whole idea of a nuclear renaissance and that they were going to build a lot of nuclear reactors, it hasn't happened. Instead, we see Japan have most of its reactors closed. Germany's closing down its reactors. Italy has decided not to pursue nuclear power in the US even which has a large number of reactors, they're building they're closing down a couple and they're building a couple there's no great expansion of nuclear power, and that that is driven more by economics than anything else.

2:08  
With carbon taxes being implemented on Canadian citizens, many are hoping this helps fund the nuclear sector. Nick Findler is among them, as well as the CEO Jordan Trimble of the new firm where he works Sky Harbor resources.

2:21  
Yeah, I mean, look, the you know, the the mainstream media has given it a bad rap. And you've seen obviously, in particular, in the last 30-40 years, there's been two notable nuclear disasters. Fukushima is the one that you know is topical today because it happened recently and Chernoble back a couple of few decades ago, but the reality of it is, is as Isaid it co2 free electricity. The new reactors coming online these generation three reactors are much larger, they consume more uranium they're much much safer, right? So we've come a long way you got to remember these two, Chernobyl and Fukushima these are generation one reactors. Fukushima actually was supposed to be decommissioned two years before the disaster happened. And keep in mind that disaster and the tsunami, you had to backup generator that failed at the reactor that were supposed to flood the core to prevent the meltdown. So really it was, you know, it was an unfortunate obviously, it was a disaster, it was very unfortunate. A lot of hard lessons learned for the industry. But going forward again, in places like China and India bigger a huge issue there right now is pollution, right? I mean, if you look at some of the mega cities in China, in particular, Beijing, you know, it can be a bright, sunny day and 20 minutes later, you can bet you can barely see barely see 20 feet in front of you, because the smog that comes in. People are literally choking on the air there a nd so nuclear is a going to be an important part of that the solution.  And if you just look, last year at COP one in Paris, you know, that there's nuclear has to be a part of that solution. There's been three events in history that have been catastrophic, right, you've had Fukushima, most recently, then you had Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, right? So these were all horrific events.

4:10  
But what's interesting is that, you know, there's plane crashes, and there's oil spills. And obviously you want to do whatever you can to avoid those those disasters. Right. But on on a nuclear co2 free. You know, it's, it's, it's so abundant in energy, right? So you look at one barrel of uranium gives you the same amount of energy as 40,000 barrels of oil. So you look at a carbon footprint, the carbon footprint for nuclear is much less than wind, much less than solar, because the actual process of creating the the windmills and you know, the solar panel is actually not the cleanest process. So, you know, the way that I look at it in a utopian world, you probably have, you know, 30, 40, 50%, nuclear and then the rest being renewables. But, you know, I think you look at you look at a country like China, right, that's suffering huge pollution problems. They've put nuclear on the forefront of their plan. They've got 14 new reactors coming online, just in China alone this year in 2017.

5:17  
Obviously, nuclear power is a great idea in places like China and India. As for Canada, however, an increase is projected, and that may not be such a bad idea, so long as alternatives become just a little more mainstream, as well. In Toronto, I'm Alexa DiDario.