18 billion atoms in 2.5 seconds, incidentally: the economic, and potentially diplomatic, powerhouse that is DNGS
“We have all the cards, we have all the cards.” So said the U.S. president to a Fox News interviewer just after 11 a.m. on June 29, in one of the truly remarkable explanations of why he would again break off trade talks with Canada.
What he meant was, Canada is totally economically dependent on America, and he, the American president, is in the driver’s seat on any trade negotiations.
Really? Here is just one of the many examples of what Canada has to offer.
It took roughly 2.5 seconds for U.S. President Trump to utter the above statement to Fox News. In those 2.5 seconds, Canada, specifically the Darlington nuclear generating station (DNGS) made 18 billion atoms of helium-3, an extremely rare and extremely valuable isotope of helium.
He-3 is so rare in the natural environment on Earth that collecting it from natural sources would be prohibitively expensive. But it is possible to manufacture it by first manufacturing tritium, the radioactive mass-3 isotope of hydrogen.
You manufacture tritium by bombarding hydrogen-2 (a.k.a. deuterium) with lots of neutrons, and one way to make lots of neutrons is by splitting a certain type of uranium in a nuclear reactor. CANDU reactors, fueled with natural uranium and moderated/cooled with heavy water—i.e., water with a higher-than-normal concentration of deuterium—produce great numbers of neutrons. And they make more tritium, hence He-3, than most other reactors.
In the course of putting one megawatt-year of electricity into a grid, CANDUs, in general, make about 88.8 trillion becquerels of tritium—i.e., a quantity that undergoes 88.8 trillion decays to He-3 per second. That works out to 10.1 billion bq per megawatt-hour (an MWh is an MWy divided by 8,760 hours), or 2.815 million bq per MW. Each bq of activity in H-3 produces one atom of He-3 each second. Tritium radioactivity is subject to a decay constant of 1.78 x 10-9.
My daughters, my ducats, and the “miracle of compound interest”
The 3 operating generators at Darlington nuclear station (DNGS) at the time were collectively generating at 2,571 MW, so in the first second of the U.S. president’s “we have all the cards” statement DNGS produced roughly 7.23 billion atoms of the invaluable He-3 that Canada sells to the U.S. DNGS produced the same amount in the next second, and half that amount again in the final half-second. That’s roughly 18 billion atoms in those 2.5 seconds.
He-3 is a valuable side business for the owner of the Darlington NGS, Ontario Power Generation, employer of thousands of Members of Unions affiliated with the CNWC.
And that tritium produced in those same 2.5 seconds is still begetting billions of He-3 “daughters” as you read these words, subject, to repeat, to the decay constant mentioned above. It will continue producing these highly lucrative daughters until it has passed through all its half lives—look at it as a form of compound interest.
Along with tritium-then-helium-3, DNGS over those same 2.5 seconds produced 1,785 kilowatt-hours of electricity for the Ontario grid. That was more electricity than two “typical” Ontario residences use in a month, and more than 3 “typical” New York residences use.
We mention New York because a portion of those kWh were exported to the U.S., via the New York, Michigan, and Minnesota interties and also the Quebec ones because Quebec wheels a portion of the power it imports from Ontario into the U.S. Northeast.
We don’t see why at least pointing this out to our biggest trading partner would be a bad idea. Give the truth some air, we say. Clean Canadian air.
Epilogue: more Canadian energy security, please
There is much talk these days of new large reactor build in Ontario. Specific sites are even being mentioned: Wesleyville (near Port Hope), Nanticoke on Lake Erie, and Lambton near Sarnia. DNGS would be the perfect model to replicate: 4 CANDUs each roughly 860 MW, the utility knows them like the back of its hand, and it’s sourced in Canada, built with Canadian labour, and when operational employing still more Canadian labour.
