119 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 10 STERN LABORATORIES INC. able to do it successfully. Most of them are in mechanical engineering because you need the nuclear engineer for the physics of the reactor, but a lot of the plumbing and things like that are mechanical. And that’s what we mostly work on – setting up these simulations for pressure, temperature, and power.” Project Manager, Richard Van Lochen talks about a normal workday at the lab: “It depends on what programs are going on at the time,” he begins, “but typically, an engineer is working with a technologist or multiple technicians, setting up hardware, preparing for a test program, or running test programs. We do various daily tests to keep our quality systems and our data acquisition systems up to par; we have a fairly extensive quality program that requires lots of checks and balances, whether that’s on the documentation side of things or the testing side of things.” “There are lots of different activities going on that involve the whole team and require coordination with the whole group to make sure everything happens as expected. We like to keep our customers engaged and meet their requirements, as well. Often a customer will come to us with a general design or program and we’ll work with them to make sure that the program they’re implementing will be costeffective and meet their end goals,” he details. Educating the public In addition to supplying its array of services to its clients, Hadaller believes that a necessary part of Stern Laboratories’ agenda is addressing one of the public’s main fears concerning nuclear power – the safe storage of nuclear waste, when reactor fuel rods, which has a limited life span of one to two years, need to be replaced. “We’ve been operating these reactors in Canada since 1971, and all the spent fuel will fit inside the boards of three hockey rinks. So the volume of spent fuel is relatively small, compared to the amount of power we generate,” he relays. “The power is clean and the industry has done a good job of looking after its waste, unlike the fossil plants, where everything goes up into the atmosphere. In fact, in Canada, every time a fuel bundle comes out of a reactor, some money goes into the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) for its long-term disposal. We might bury it, but we also might recycle and reuse it because a reactor only burns up about twoand-a-half percent of the fissionable isotopes. So, there’s lots of fuel that can be reused.” The other thing that people don’t understand, according to Hadaller, is how nuclear plants also produce isotopes that have many commercial and medical applications. “The medical isotope business is quite significant,” he states. A Nuclear Power Renaissance Hadaller believes that an uptick in the siting of new reactors is due to several factors, most specifically, the growing emphasis on the perils of climate change which is spurring increased ventures in the decarbonization of the electrical grid, and the equally growing awareness that having one’s own, independent energy system is a hedge against the vicissitudes of the fossil fuel market and the shifting international politics that can affect its global supply and transport.
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