Uranium fails the test

There is a common denominator between America’s Epic Fury, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trade trip to India and Premier Doug Ford’s energy plans for the future of Ontario.

They all revolve around a substance that is highly paradoxical.

Enriched uranium is coveted for certain types of reactors, and for bomb building, and is primarily extracted by chemical means or through a centrifuge process. This separation of different elements increases the level of fissile material essential for nuclear chain reactions.

It can also produce, albeit at lower enrichment levels, the fuel for small modular reactors, part of Ontario’s extravagant electricity future. Chemical enrichment is an especially toxic undertaking and leaves behind toxic radioactive waste. Enriching uranium is dirty, dangerous and deleterious to our planet.

Although Canada mines uranium and exports it, we don’t engage in the enrichment process, preferring to import it for use in research reactors without revealing the quantities of fissile material that exist.

As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Canada has agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons but to allow the potential use of nuclear weapons on our behalf. We seem to be prepared to provide a number of states with the basic element uranium, mostly mined in Saskatchewan, with very few strings attached. Unless a country is transparent in their enrichment process, accounting for all the fissile materials derived, rogue states with ulterior motives present a very real threat.

Such is the case in the Middle East as Iran’s enrichment facilities and stockpile of fissile materials are considered an imminent threat by Israel and the U.S. who have relentlessly bombed them.

This military objective may have been accomplished in June 2025, when a joint bombing campaign, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, “completely and totally obliterated” enrichment facilities. His justification for the present incursion appears to deal more with Iran’s failure to renounce its nuclear bomb-building ambitions.

Trump has indicated that he will not tolerate any level of enrichment, while Iran has defended its right to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear energy. The degree or percentage to which uranium can be enriched varies, and as it increases, so does its suitability for bombs.

What is left standing on Iranian soil after all this destruction is a Russian-sponsored nuclear reactor and an American research reactor from the ’60s ironically obtained under the “Atoms for Peace” project. To date, neither has been destroyed at risk of a major radioactive disaster, but both require enriched uranium as fuel.

The enrichment of uranium is a practice most countries avoid when seeking fuel for reactors, preferring to import it. India is one country that has had Canada’s assistance in obtaining fissile material and has now secured a deal for 22 million pounds of uranium as a result of Carney’s far east junket.

Canada suppled a CIRUS reactor to India in the 1950s for so-called peaceful purposes, however it became the source of fissile material for India’s first nuclear bomb detonation in 1974 and has persisted in enriching uranium and reprocessing spent fuel.

India has not signed the NPT and has not committed to halt the production of weapons grade materials, nor will it accept international inspections of its military nuclear facilities.

For 30 years there has been no collaboration between the two countries due to this misemployment of nuclear technology, yet Canada has now agreed to sell India the most fundamental element for expanding its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, currently estimated to be 170 warheads.

Ontario, under Ford’s evangelical zeal to go nuclear, has initiated — with federal funding — the building of a $6-billion small modular reactor, with three more to come. The fuel required for these reactors is enriched uranium which Canada does not produce. As a result, deals are being made to import it from the U.S. or France, increasing the dependence on foreign countries. There is no plan to enrich uranium in Canada.

Considering the chaos that persists in our world and the outrageous costs associated with the destruction of nuclear facilities and problems with uranium enrichment, there is a question that persists. Is Atoms for Peace just another subterfuge? Atoms for War seems to be a more likely moniker.

Uranium will either wind up in a reactor or a bomb and neither has contributed to a clean or peaceful future for our planet.

Dave Taylor is a regular contributor to the Free Press on environmental issues. Please see his blog at manitobanuclea@wordpress.com.