Welcome to the Core Business Blog, the Canadian Nuclear Society’s new approach to letting you know about the issues facing the Canadian nuclear industry.
Nuclear power’s potential role in achieving net zero has been in the news a lot recently and that discussion will be ongoing. Here in Canada, some major changes could be taking place within our industry. For the first time in a long time, we are planning to build new reactors and the designs of those reactors will be very different to those that we are used to. We are also making plans to cease operation of Pickering and begin the process of decommissioning a large multi-unit nuclear station, and we will be making decisions about the site for a deep geologic repository. At the same time we continue to successfully progress the refurbishments, the largest, infrastructure projects in North America.
We can reasonably expect that nuclear power is going to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.
Some of the discussion that will take place in the public domain will be factual but an awful lot of it will be misinformation-based fearmongering. The Canadian Nuclear Society, and more importantly you, its members, are ideally placed to independently inform these discussions and correct misinformation. Grass-roots efforts can make all the difference as people are more likely to trust someone they can see and are interacting with directly, than distant professional communicators.
The issues will almost certainly be complex and likely contentious, and we believe that in the past some people in the nuclear industry have felt constrained to speak out in case they have not understood the situation correctly. We want to change that. That’s why we have started the Core Business Blog, a regular posting on our website that will discuss the important issues and how we can talk about them effectively.
Communication is a two-way process, and we want the Core Business Blog to be interactive, with you sharing your ideas and experiences, as well as myself and invited contributors, providing updates and ideas.
And we also want it to be transparent so that the public can see our deliberations, learning about us, and the things that matter to us as individuals.
The Core Business Blog will have a wide scope, providing you with clarity on the position that the industry is taking, and providing insight into why, while also sometimes discussing communications best practices that could assist you in discussing the issues with family, friends, community and whoever else might be interested.
We hope you will find the Core Business Blog useful and will become engaged in letting us know what you want to know about and in sharing your ideas with us. We also hope it will inspire you to talk about these issues with your community.
I am pleased to introduce our first article inspired by recent media attention to an Ontario Clean Air Alliance campaign to draw attention to a study they suggest implies OPG should be using hardened buildings for used nuclear fuel storage, but which doesn’t really say that at all.
Let us know what you think.