[SeeGeeWhy]

I did some calculations with my business partners this week ahead of a business plan pitch at the energy new ventures competition hosted at the bow.

If we used the existing CANDU waste in Canada to fuel molten salt nuclear reactors generating steam and electricity for the oilsands - we'd be able to recover 50 billion barrels, conserve 64 Tcf of methane, and prevent 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.

All this while turning Canada into the worlds largest oil producer and eliminating what is currently an estimated 24 billion, 100,000 year legacy issue for the nuclear waste management organization.

Thats close to 40% of the currently posted recoverable reserves - there is much more than that in place. After that, we could extract about 3 barrels of oil for every 2.5g of naturally mined uranium (pre-enrichment), so this method is entirely sustainable using resources found entirely within Canada's borders. The miracle of the commons, we live in a truly blessed nation and we need to be doing something meaningful about the problems we are facing today.

Yes, it is possible to dramatically reduce the atmospheric impact with technologies that work. And yes the trade off is greater impact in the two other pillars of water and land disturbance (through sheer volume of projects), but the reality is that those impacts are much more reclaimable than what we do to the atmosphere.

What upsets me about this debate is that it appears the true issue Neil is taking up is supporting FN bands in defending their treaty rights, a noble cause; but proposing the that the only solution is to stop development outright is a huge distraction and a mistake.

This is not logical. Our society is entirely based on abundant, low cost energy. The most marginal oil sands plays, most extreme conventional sources and renewables ALL share in common extremely low and rapidly declining energy returns on energy invested (EROEI); even esteemed professors at the U of C who have made a lot of personal and academic gains from working in the oil patch are beginning to publish evidence that some SAGD plays are a net consumer of energy! (Meaning the bitumen recovered does not produce more energy when combusted than the energy it took to extract, upgrade and transport the fuel).

Combine that with a slowly converging consensus of the true economic cost of environmental externalities such as carbon emissions, and we start to see a true cost of energy emerging.

THIS is the issue that everyone on earth should be taking up, and with great concern. Without widely available, scalable, low cost energy, societies slip into widely separated classes which leads to declines in quality of life which leads to conflict and eventually collapse.

The oil sands are a tremendous resource not only because of their sheer size; but because they signal (to me, anyways), that we need to find our "new way" more than ever, and represent a true gift in giving us the opportunity to usher in a second nuclear age whose technology acts as an exceptional bridge to better ways ... Safely and Reliably backstopping distributed grids supplied by a large component of renewables; building exciting and practical fusion-fission hybrids as we push our controls to the point that sustained fusion may be possible...

People need to engage in energy literacy and policy discussion because status quo is leading us down a path that could blow up in our lifetime. That is OUR issue - we need to recognize it, and take it on now.