Quirks and Quarks - Belugas swap mates for survival, and more…

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Researchers made the surprising discovery that Alaska beluga whales have swinging sex lives — and that could be their key to survival in the warming Arctic.Plus:mission to the 'doomsday' Thwaites glacier in Antarctica ends in disappointment near-infrared light therapy offers hope to football players with brain injuries with nuclear power making a comeback, what's changed since the last Atomic Age?

If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, when a dangerous glacier visit forces a strategy rethink. I did actually feel like I was going to die out there because helicopters are very dangerous things

to be in these remote locations. It's beautiful it is to fly through ice canyons. It's not a good approach. And a beluga whale pod where the males and females spread their love around. It doesn't matter how magnificent a specimen you are as a male in a three-dimensional environment. Good luck trying to control a lot of females. Plus, shining near-infrared light on football brain injuries and how the

biggest strides in nuclear tech may come from smaller packages. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Underneath a critical glacier in western Antarctica, something unseen is shaping the future of the planet. The Thwaites Glacier, more commonly known as the Doomsday Glacier, is a massive sheet of ice, larger than the state of Florida, that is increasingly at risk of collapsing. It's called the Doomsday Glacier because if it gets into the ocean, it would raise global sea levels by more than half a meter, endangering coastal cities worldwide, and its clock is ticking. To understand how it's melting, scientists need to know what's happening underneath the glacier,

so back in 2022, researchers attempted to get that data, but failed to reach the glacier when the weather didn't cooperate. At the time, we spoke with a Canadian researcher on that mission, Dr. David Holland. This year, they went back to Antarctica and pushed closer to Thwaites than any ship has ever before. We caught up with Dr. Holland from the ship that got them right next to the glacier. He's a professor of mathematics and atmosphere ocean science and the director of the Center for Sea Level Change at New York University. Dr. Holland, hello and welcome back to Quarks

and Quarks. It's great to be back. So tell me where you are right now. Paint me a picture of the scene. I'm at the bottom of the earth. I'm at the furthest position. A ship has ever made it at the glacier in West Antarctica, a famous glacier now, the Thwaites Glacier. And due to some quark of nature, a pathway right to the heart of the glacier sort of has opened up and we parked our ship here, a little bit nervous. The path might close with the ice. So we're going to head out of here in a few days. So you're on top of the ice, on top of the glacier? Or right at the calving front. Like when I'm looking out my port window now, I am about 200 meters from the face, the terminus of the Thwaites glacier. What was the main goal of your mission

this time? The goal was the same as we talked four years ago. Just as on your smartphone, you have a forecast of weather in the atmosphere. We're trying to build a forecast of the glacier over the coming years and decades. What will it do to the world sea level? So the focus is what do you need to make a forecast? And one thing you need is data. So we're here to collect data. And if I could paint a picture of it, the way sea level works is land ice like Antarctica,

which is, you know, the size of Canada. As that ice falls into the ocean, it raises global sea level. And that's apparently what is happening right now at this very particular vulnerable spot called Thwaites. And so because ice floats on water, the Pacific Ocean is going underneath this glacier. And we are drilling through the glacier to get the water temperature underneath. Effectively a weather station, except in the ocean, under the glacier. So you're drilling through the glacier. How thick is the ice?

The ice is 1,000 meters or 1 kilometer. And a little update. We've been at this for three or four weeks now. And Saturday, most unfortunately, after a hole was drilled, a hot water hole, you can imagine like a fire hose that you heat water and you put it down to the glacier and it melts through over a period of a day or two. So we did that. We were quite happy.

Unfortunately, when we put the instruments down the next day as the glacier began to refreeze, an instrument got snagged, and so all of the instrumentation piled on top of one another at about three quarters of the way down. And once that begins to freeze, it is impossible to fix that situation. Oh, no. Yeah. So did you not get all the way through that hole and get your instruments down to the bottom to measure the water temperature? And that's right. So the hole was opened, and a single measurement was made of temperature. And that was a quick snap. shop, but that's the part that got stuck. And that was kind of a tragic moment. Nonetheless, I did put in subsequently a fiber optic cable, which was my original plan. And these cables are same as the

Ethernet cable you might have in your office or fiber optic for TV. They have the property that if you fire laser light through it and it reflects, it can actually give you the temperature every meter along a kilometer or two of cable. So that cable is down about 700 meters to the part where it's blocked. So that data is coming in over the satellite right now. Beautiful data. It's unfortunate. It's not going through the glacier. Well, what would you have been getting with the permanent instrumentation? Underneath, you'd be getting the equivalent of an atmosphere weather station. You'd be getting soundings of the water temperature. It's salinity because that matters in the ocean in terms of density and motion. And you'd be getting the actual currents

and the level of turbulence, if you will, if you picture turbulent atmosphere versus calm. And we're focused on a place which is called the grounding line. And if you can visualize that, that's the Antarctic beach. That's where the ice above, the ocean below, and the grounded ice meet at a juncture. It's about a kilometer below the surface of the ice. It's where the ocean stops and the glacier is grounded onto the seafloor.

And if that retreats, the glacier can begin to retreat uncontrollably or advance uncontrollably. At this moment, where I'm located is at what I call the gates of Thwaites. Beneath me is a canyon, and we're floating above the canyon in our boat. Adjacent to me is the beginning of the Thwait's Glacier, the ice front. The Pacific Ocean is pouring warm water, salty, dense warm water along this trough, this canyon coming from the continent. shelf break. It's reaching towards Antarctica. It's going under this ship. It's going under the glacier. And it's going to the grounding line, which is about 30 kilometers directly south of this boat where I am now. And that's where our camp was located. And that's the critical juncture because right now,

that grounding line is sitting on a sill, an underwater hill. And it's holding it in place. And if it retreats past that sill, that's the drama. That's because the next sill is called South Pole. So this glacier likely will retreat without any way to stop it. Wow. So it's the glacier ice on the land that you're worried about, not the ice over the ocean, because that's what's acting like a stopper holding all that glacial ice back. And if it melts back over the lip, it'll disintegrate. Absolutely. You nailed it. So what do you need to do at this point then to get a real handle on what's going on there and how quickly that's melting? The idea of getting back here again first of all, mental reset is, are we going to do this and fail again? That's a problem.

But the technology, I don't think, is up to scratch. This is the best technology in the world. It's not good enough. The glacier is, just picture a kilometer of ice, and you would think, okay, so that's nice, smooth ice. In fact, I'm looking at the window now at the terminus, and it's a cutaway of the 3D glacier, so you see a 2D face. And as you look at that face, What you see are these giant crevasses scattered, peppered throughout the entire face. Some are very close to the surface, and if you walk on one of those, that will be the last thing you walk on. And the other ones are buried down deeper. And the problem with drilling a hole with hot water, if you go through and drill through into a crevas, the water's just going to go everywhere.

So you're sort of back at square one and trying to get data about what's going on underneath the glacier then. Yeah, and I think it's a reset for the world. people keep asking, when will sea level change? Well, we know the last interglacial 100,000 years ago, sea level was much higher by several meters. And that's almost certainly because Thwaites and its neighbors collapsed. This time around, it didn't, but it looks like it's ready to go. And so people ask, when would it collapse and change sea level? There is no way to answer that, just like there's no way to have a forecast of the weather tomorrow without data. And there's no easy pass. pathway in sight to get there.

Well, speaking of easy pathways, what about thinking about this from the other way around? Is there any way that you could prevent that warm ocean water from getting to the glacier in the first place? What you can do here is a remarkable thing, which only occurred to us a couple of years ago. I want to paint this visual image of the Pacific Ocean, which has warm water in it, and Antarctica adjacent to it. They are actually connected by a trough in the shelf. break, that's the size of the Grand Canyon. So if you've ever been to the Grand Canyon, you kind of see that image, except this is an underwater canyon, a trough. And the warm,

salty water from the open ocean is pouring along the bottom of that canyon. And what we've been thinking recently is maybe you could block part of that canyon. Now, that will absolutely freak some people out. I get that. Geoengineering is something that should give you pause. I think anyone's first reaction to geoengineering should be, hold on. So what would be the geoengineering in Antarctica? It would be the building of a curtain along the seafloor in the trough that would stop the warm water that's currently coming here, reaching the glacier, and the problem would be arrested for some period of time because you're cutting the trigger to the glacier, you're cutting the source of warm water.

How large would that curtain have to be? on width, say 100 kilometers, on height, say 100 meters. So it's not the great wall of China, but it's something looking like that, a shorter version of that. Underwater. Okay. Let's go back to the reducing the carbon. Geoengineering is extremely controversial, and critics say you can't do this without local

environmental effects, and let alone the cost that it would be just too much to do. How do you justify that? So this wall could be built easily for, say, $10 billion to $100 billion. The cost to the earth, in terms of the rewriting of the entire coastline, countries will disappear. Florida, states in the U.S. will disappear. Now you're in the trillions of trillions of trillions. So what's the game?

Which one do you want to play? The cost of doing nothing is enormous. And this glacier has gone and it will go and the coastline will move and it always has moved. But as we move into solutions and problems, I don't think it's scientist's job to figure that out. We can offer solutions and the world has to make some really hard choices. And there is going to be no easy way out of this. There is no good ending. It's just what would be perhaps the best.

So what's the next step for you? step is to go back to Canada and rethink how we can do this because we're not doing it right and there's not a lot of people doing it. We're the only ship here in the world, you know, 40 scientists trying to solve a problem that's way bigger than us. So we'll go back. And I really think of safety. I did actually feel like I was going to die out there because helicopters are very dangerous

things to be in, particularly in these remote locations, as beautiful it has to fly through ice canyons. It's not a good approach. We need automation. We need robots to really explore these icy parts of our planet. And ultimately, that will be a benefit as we try to explore other worlds in our solar system and beyond Europa and whatnot. So I think we have to move to less human involvement in this. We need more smart automation robots and whatnot. And incidentally, we did put two robots yesterday in the canyon that's beneath this boat. So we'll climb up and down a wire rope from the seafloor to the surface for the next two years, collecting lots and lots of data. It's not under the ice. It's in the open ocean here where the ship is. And that's going to be a

fabulous data set, but we can't get the data for two years until we come back. However, there are large icebergs here everywhere and they tend to remove anything you put on the seafloor. Well, we're pretty good at sending robots to other planets. Now we have to say, and robots to planet Earth. There you go. Dr. Holland, thank you so much for your time. All right. Great to speak with you.

Dr. David Holland is a professor of mathematics and atmosphere ocean science and the director of the Center for Sea Level Change at New York University. We spoke with him from the Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica. Every snap demands trust. Every hit carries a purpose.

The Super Bowl is a spectacle like no other. For football fans, it's the ultimate climax of their beloved NFL season. But even non-football fans find themselves on the bandwagon cheering along as the players give it their all in the field, like modern-day gladiators. While it makes for great excitement, the kind of collisions the players get in can lead to some pretty serious injuries,

particularly in the brain. The science is clear. Hits to the head can cause concussions, and doing that week after week can lead to confusion, memory loss, and in severe cases, dementia. What is less clear is what to do about it. Well, in a new study, inspired by a former Canadian Football League player, scientists found a promising technology delivering incredible results. Dr. Larry Carr started playing football when he was 10,

and from 1975 to 76, he played for the Calgary Stampeders. Back then, the culture around head injuries in the game was very different than it is today. They taught us to use our head as a weapon. That's exactly what they said, is that the biggest weapon you have is your head and your helmet. And the helmets back in those days were suspension or these AirPods that usually broke halfway through the season and really gave very little support. And you actually lived for those hits. You lived to see actually to hurt somebody.

I mean, that was the goal is to hit somebody so hard that they were taken out of the game. So it was like war. It was a different time back then when we knew very little about how repeated blows to the head could affect a person in the long run. I was knocked unconscious several times. I had temporary annesia during the games on several occasions. There was nothing that they did or said about. concussions or brain injury back then. They just held up two fingers, and if you could say that it worked, then you're back in the game.

It wasn't until many years later that his injuries from his time playing football caught up to him. I paid a big price. I was diagnosed with brain injury, severe brain injury, about 13 years ago. And that was preceded by years and years of a downward spiral and cognitive abilities and emotional problems. Out of desperation, he started looking for anything that could help with his symptoms. Eventually, he found help from researchers who treated him with near-infrared light therapy. My wife claims that she noticed the difference in my attitude within two to three weeks. I didn't want to believe that.

I was afraid of thinking it was working when it really wasn't. So I kind of resist it. But after six or seven weeks, we went in back into and did post-testing. they showed me the results which were just off the charts, improvement, and just about everything they tested me in. Excited about his results, Dr. Carr approached scientists at the Traumatic Brain Injury and Concussion Center at the University of Utah to study this type of treatment. Now, finally, they have their results.

Dr. Hannah Lindsay is a research associate at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. She led the study. Hello and welcome to our program. Thank you for having me. Now, we just heard from Dr. Carr about the head injuries he sustained while playing football. How common are head injuries in football players? So head injuries are pretty common in football players, but specifically what we looked at was repetitive head acceleration events,

which I do want to differentiate from concussion and even from repetitive head impacts. So concussion is an actual blow to the head that result. in a neurological symptom, like losing consciousness or feeling dizzy or things like that. There's also like subconcussive blows that don't have any symptoms, but they are the result of actually hitting your head onto another person's helmet or the ground or something. But then the acceleration events are just the movement of your head rapidly back and forth that doesn't necessarily have direct impact with anything, but just the movement of your brain within the skull and impacting the skull itself, that can lead to damage.

And that happens at a rate immensely higher than repetitive head impacts and especially than concussions. Well, tell me about near-infrared light therapy. What does it do? Yeah, so it's really neat. It sounds for us at first was kind of a little like is the snake oil or like a woo-woo thing, you know, we don't know, but looking into the science. And there actually is quite a bit of science that's been done, especially in animals.

but also in humans, looking at the actual microbiological processes that are happening. And what it does is it basically acts on the mitochondria, which I'm sure we all remember from our first biology class, that's the powerhouse of the cell. So where it produces ATP or the energy. So it helps your brain produce more energy. And it also increases circulation, kind of getting rid of any debris or build up of broken down tissue or anything like that, our toxins. But the big thing we were looking at was, its ability to kind of stop that chronic or even acute inflammatory response that after a certain amount of time can be detrimental rather than helpful. Okay. Now, we're talking about infrared light here. So how do you get the light into the brain? So we use a special device that sits on the head.

And the wavelength of light that we use is specific wavelength and we use a specific dosage. And all of that allows it to penetrate through the skin and the skull and go into the brain. And so it actually does irradiate through the skull into the brain. We also use a nose clip where a small light will go into your nose and that actually can reach the tissue inside your head a lot better because it doesn't have to pass through the bone and it acts on like the capillaries in there and that mucosal tissue, which is just easier to penetrate. So that's how we get it in there. Well, take me through your study. How did you look at it? So we recruited football players on a collegiate football team in the United States. We had about 26 that had imaging data that we could include. And what we did is we

evaluated them before and after the season. And those evaluations involved some cognitive tests and questionnaires and, of course, the neuroimaging or the MRI scan that we did. And that all happened before they even started the practice period. So then they used the devices three times. a week throughout that 16-week practice period. So there was about 40 sessions. And each session is just about 20 minutes long. You just sit there and where the, where the headset for 20 minutes did that three times a week. And then we evaluated them again after the last game of the season. Oh, I see. So they do this themselves. I mean, do they feel anything or see anything when this, this is on their head? Nope. It is painless. That, you know, the nose clip could be a little bit more comfortable, but

otherwise it is, it is painless. And it's also important to mention that, Half of them had the active device that actually delivered the near-infrared light. And then half of them had a sham or a placebo or a fake device that looks the exact same, acts the exact same. There's no way to tell the difference because near-infred light is not on the visible spectrum. So they would just see like a red light. They looked the exact same. So nobody knew, not even us running the experiment knew who had which headset until the study was over.

So what were the results? In that sham group that didn't get treated with the. red light, they had inflammation throughout the entire brain. But in the active group who received the actual near infrared light therapy had no inflammation. And in fact, we actually, it was non-significant, but there was a small effect size for a decrease in inflammation in the athletes who wore the headsets that produced the actual light. Yeah. Wow. It was really, really astonishing. Wow, that's amazing. What were through your mind when you saw those results? So when I first saw the results, and I was the one who ran the analysis and I get the results, and I thought I had made an error because in this type of analysis where we're looking at the whole brain, but the results are just supposed to show the affected areas, you know? And so when I see that the sham group, the entire brain is affected, and then there's not one single area in the active group that is affected, I thought I did something wrong. And so I ended up redoing the analysis, making sure I did everything right.

increasing like the rigor of the analysis. I even sent the results to the guy who developed the analysis to make sure I didn't mess anything up. But yeah, I was pretty shocking. Now, how does this technology that you used compare to other red light therapy devices that we see around if somebody wants to try this at home? Yeah, so that's a great question. So the device that we used has been rigorously tested on animals and humans. we're working on FDA approval, what not we, but the company that's that created it is.

And we use a very specific wavelength of light, a very specific dose of light. There's all these specific aspects of the technology that are put in place so that we can see this effect. The kind of things that you're going to see online or, you know, at your local store or whatever that just say red light therapy, they probably are not of the same grade or efficacy is what we're seeing here. The important distinction is that we're not just using red light or even infrared light. We're using near-infrared light. And so that's the big kind of important point when you're looking for devices. So you need to find one that's actually got some scientific evidence backing its design. So do you have a word of caution to parents who might

think that they can buy this device and put it on their kids' head? Yeah. So first of all, this is one study and we need to replicate it. We need to do it in larger groups. And we by no means are able to say yet that this is some cure-all for, you know, head injuries. This is just really exciting stuff that's taking us to the next step. And that's kind of why we're trying to improve the science in this area so that it can be something that is available for people to use. Dr. Lindsay, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Hannah Lindsay is a research associate in the lab of traumatic brain injury and concussion center at the University of Utah Medical Center.

I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, The Future of Nuclear Tech. Got an Allen key? You can build them as like IKEA blocks or stacks, you know, You want one, you got it, you got ten of them, you can put ten and make it fit the purpose. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit.

But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave in the Fix. The Truish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that, held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, it's that time of year again when Valentine's Day love and romance is in the air. But for Baluga whales, living in remote regions of the Arctic, romance can be a little tricky. On the one hand, finding a mate and reproducing is essential for their species survival, but on the other hand, when population sizes are relatively small and selection is limited, they can run the risk of compounding their genetic weaknesses through in-breeding. While researchers studying a pot of beluga whales off the coast of Alaska

have discovered a particularly interesting and unexpected mating strategy. They're swingers. as in both the male and female belugas swap their mates on the regular. Dr. Greg Okori Crowe is a research professor in the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University. He led the study. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob. Glad to be here. First of all, why were you interested in studying the love lives of beluga whales?

Well, for a long time, I've been fascinated with beluga whales, as indeed has the public at large. but they are very challenging to study. And I'm particularly interested in social species. And belugas have this ability to form these large aggregations. And so one thing we wanted to understand was, you know, what is the mating system of this incredible species? What makes them so difficult to study? Well, partly the remoteness, obviously,

spending a lot of their time under the ice far away from shore. But that's also the draw from the point of view of exploration. and discovery. Well, what mating strategy did you think they had? Well, you know, because we know so little about not just belugas, but a lot of whale species, we tend to develop predictions based on other species, usually terrestrial species. And one of the things we looked at was that in species where males are very often much larger than females, as is the case with belugas, and we probably had what we describe as a polygynous mating system where a few, very dominant males dominate the breeding in a given year or even over in her few years.

Well, tell me about the population you were studying up in Alaska. Why were they of interest to you? So I've been very fortunate to work with a great team of scientists in Alaska and also with indigenous communities there. And so this project was co-led by Laurie Quakenbush at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. And we had initially an interest in this population because it's quite small, a resident population, and so there are some interesting sort of conservation concerns about that population. And we thought we could use genetics as a way to estimate abundance, which we did successfully. And then with all those genetic samples, we've turned our attention to look at social structure and mating systems. Now, when you say small population, how many

animals are there? The estimated abundance is about 2,000 whales. And we were able to sample over 600 of those whales. Well, how do you take samples from beluga whales if they're so difficult to study and they're under the ice and all of that? Well, actually, that's a really good question. With great care and working with indigenous hunters who have incredible expertise

on how to get close to whales and then just right at the moment when the animal surfaces, they have a long sort of jabstick and they're able to just take a little sample, the size of a pencil eraser, and that's all we need to get the whole sort of genetic story. So what did you see when you unraveled the genetics of these beluga whales? So one of the things we found was that males do mate with multiple females, but not extremely

so. And so that was a surprise. And what we think is happening there is that probably in the aquatic environment is very hard for any male to court and corral and monopolize a lot of females. But also, we know that belugas live a very long time. So we're thinking that males sort of play the long game of not trying to amass a huge amount of mating success in a brief amount of time, but, you know, taking their time, as it were, over a long life. And then on the female side, which was just as exciting, we found that, well, females actually hold a lot of cards in this game,

and they too actually switch mates over a long breeding life and probably have a lot of control in terms of the particular males they want to breed with. And so there's just definite sort of kind of equality to the system. Wow. So instead of the classic old image of a dominant male and a harem of females that he controls and defends, you're saying it's more of a free-for-all where the males are meeting with as many females as they can, and so are the females with the males. Well, yeah, and you can kind of picture a situation where it doesn't matter how magnificent a specimen you are as a male in a three-dimensional environment.

Good luck trying to control a lot of females. and that gives the female much more sort of control in potentially which males they choose to mate with and which ones they select. Well, what would be the genetic advantage of swapping mates? I mean, doesn't that just increase the chances that you're going to be mating with a cousin? Initially, we thought for this population that if there is this variation in reproductive success, you know, if some males or some females are doing better than others, the overall impact of this is that you have sort of less,

animals breeding in the population than the total or something like that. And these small populations can lose diversity very quickly. So that's what we sort of expected. But that's not what we found. We found that actually, despite Bristol Bay being a relatively small population, they somehow were able to maintain genetic diversity and keep inbreeding at a very low level. And so this was a real head scratcher for us as like, how are they able to do this? And we think it's this system of constantly switching mates that there's a low

risk of having highly related individuals and therefore an even lower risk of highly related individuals ultimately mating and having all these negative effects from inbreeding and diversity loss. Now, do these belugas just mate within their own pod or do pods get together occasionally? We're still trying to figure out this aspect of beluga whale societies, you know, the sort of social structure. But we're starting to think that they actually behave. in very large societies where there's a lot of interactions, so that there's a chance that any

given whale over the course of their life may encounter, interact, and even get to know hundreds of other whales. How common a strategy do you think this is in other animals with small populations? Well, that's what we want to find out. We want to find out how mating strategies and the different roles, males and females play, kind of lead to resilience. And so I expect we're going to see more surprises from Baluga whales. I think there's going to be differences among different beluga populations. So I think that's very likely.

Well, yeah, you studied the belugas in Alaska. We have belugas in the St. Lawrence here in Canada. So do you think it's something that all belugas do? I would say we're going to find out that some of these different populations do things differently. and I'm really interested to see if it's the same model that we're seeing in Bristol Bay or indeed if it's the same in the St. Lawrence or in the Canadian Hierctic. Do you think this strategy of everyone mating with everyone among the belugas leads to their, I guess, their survival because we hear some populations are actually endangered or threatened?

Yeah, I do think it's in one way cause for optimism because I think when populations do get small, all, there are real concerns. But when you see an animal like this essentially try to maximize its fitness by how it breeds or the decisions it makes, it gives you hope, it gives you optimism that, you know, this is an animal that has imbuilt resilience. Dr. O'Coree Crow, thank you for your time. Thank you. All the best. Dr. Greg O'Coree Crow is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University. Nuclear power is having a moment. That's why we have a plan to expand Ontario's nuclear energy capacity. We are formally initiating the process to select the technology that would be that large-scale nuclear design here in Saskatchewan. Premier Susan Holt says the province

will look at building a second large-scale nuclear power plant. The panel's report will inform our approach to a potential nuclear energy industry in Alberta, and I look forward to seeing it. Since the dawn of the atomic age in the 1960s, have we seen this much interest in nuclear power across Canada and around the world. And it's easy to see why. Nuclear is considered by many to be a clean, consistent energy source with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions and a suitable solution to our increasing need for climate-friendly power. A need that's growing in part due to the rise of AI and its power-hungry data centers.

Around the world, global energy use is expected to rise by 50% by the year 2050, more so in developed places like Canada. But of course, in the past, nuclear energy has come with some significant risks. Frank, it was an accident at the 3-mile island nuclear power plant. A cooling pump broke down, and the plant did just what it was supposed to do, shut itself off, but not before some radioactivity had escaped. There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the Soviets have admitted that it happened. One of the atomic reactors at the turnable atomic power plant in the city of Kiev was damaged,

and there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured and may have died. Big accidents like these, as well as fears of nuclear proliferation and enormous price tags, were enough to sour public opinion on nuclear for several decades. But it seems that recently our need for clean energy has overturned that opinion for many. Now, the International Atomic Energy Agency says global nuclear power generation is expected to double by the year 2050. Currently, we have four nuclear power plants running across Canada in Ontario and New Brunswick, housing 17 nuclear reactors providing 15% of our nation's energy. And more and more, nuclear's biggest growth is coming in smaller packages.

We are building four small modular reactors. This project will make us the first in the G7 to have an entirely new kind of nuclear reactor. So this week we wanted to take a close look at the nuclear power of the future, what lessons we've learned since the last atomic age, and what that means for the future of nuclear power moving forward. Quarks and Quartz producer Amanda Buckowitz is here with me now. Hi, Amanda.

Hi, Bob. So why did you want to look into nuclear power like this? Well, Bob, like you said, nuclear power is being held up as this game-changing climate saver. But I'm a millennial, and I grew up with this popular image of nuclear power being, let's just say, less than flattering. Now, Simpson, because of your many years as a nuclear technician, we're putting you on a nuclear sub. Nuclear. It's pronounced nuclear. Well, Amanda, when I grew up for a while, nuclear was sold to us as the next best thing, and not just for generating electricity. I remember the nucleon. It was a nuclear-powered car concept by Ford. They believed that nuclear was going to be everywhere.

We would have these tiny little reactors that would be powering airplanes and cars and everything. It was incredible. Amazing. I bet. That was in the original atomic age after the first nuclear power plant opened in Russia in 1954. and in the U.S., their first was in 1958. Because here, in fact, is the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man's command. And where was it, science found that giant? In the atom. At the time, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission even predicted that they would have

over a thousand reactors by the turn of the century, when in reality they ended up with about 100 reactors. Okay, well let's start with the fundamentals. How do we get nuclear power from an atom? All right, so nuclear reactors generate electricity by splitting uranium atoms in a process called nuclear fission that releases an incredible amount of energy. That energy produces heat, which generates high-pressure steam, that drives electricity-producing turbines. Most of them use water as a coolant to transfer heat from the core, but reactor designs vary. Canadian researchers work to develop our own homegrown technology called Can Do Reactors, which stands for Canada Deuterium Uranium. Essentially, they use natural uranium as a fuel,

and heavy water, or deuterium oxide, which is denser than regular water as a coolant. Today, most of the operating reactors in Canada are Can Do units. They were built over a roughly 35-year period with the last one opening at Darlington, near Toronto, in 1993. Right. So how is this current boom of interest in nuclear energy different from the boom we saw in the past? Well, as you mentioned, nuclear has some pretty big drawbacks. We know a lot more about how to mitigate some of those drawbacks now than we did in the 70s. All those big accidents all drove major design changes throughout the industry. But those added safety layers only add to the cost of building nuclear power plants,

which weren't cheap to begin with. Darlington was initially supposed to cost $3.9 billion when it was announced in 1978. And by the time it opened in 1993, the final construction costs had ballooned to $14.5 billion. One very vocal critic of nuclear is Dr. M.V. Ramana, a professor and Simon's chair in disarmament, global and human security at the University of British Columbia's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. The reason that reactors are expensive is because your de-remen is, dealing with a fundamentally hazardous technology that's producing all these radioactive materials. And you have to find ways of containing that. So that's why you need all those concrete and the steel

and these safety systems and these very highly trained workers. So there is no way nuclear power can ever be cheap. So one of the reasons we stopped building nuclear power plants all those years ago is that they are so expensive to build and take a long time. But one of the ways to shrink those costs is to shrink the size of the reactor. Ah, so are these the small modular nuclear reactors we keep hearing about? Exactly. SMRs, as they're known, have about a third of the generating capacity of the bigger reactors. The benefit of their smaller size is that they can be prefabricated, built off-site and trucked in to wherever they're needed. Since they're modular, they can be customized to fit whatever needs there are in a community, with different fuels, outputs, and designs.

I spoke with Dr. Jatine Nathwani, the executive director of, of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy at the University of Waterloo to get the full picture of what makes SMR so appealing right now. Modular means, you know, you can build them as like IKEA blocks or stacks, right? You know, you want one, you got it, you got 10 of them, you can put 10 and make it fit the purpose, if you wish. Is it data center?

Is it a remote community? Is it a mining operation? Is it a high-temperature heat for industry? and so on. Now, it's important to note that only Russia and China have small modular reactors in operation right now. There are none operational in North America as of yet, but around the world, there are over 100 SMRs in various stages of development and construction by many different companies in many different designs. Here in Canada, we have one in construction at the Darlington site that will hopefully be up and running by 2030, which would make it the first in the G7,

with three more to come in the next decade. But this is untested technology, so there are a lot of unknowns and a lot of costs as we figure things out. So how are these small modular reactors different in how they create energy from the traditional plants? So it varies from concept to concept. The ones being built at Darlington

are very much just smaller versions of the larger can-do reactors on site with a capacity of about 300 megawatts which can power 300,000 homes, versus the larger ones, which can generate up to three times as much power. But there are a variety of innovations being used, like the shape of the fuel that goes into them or how they're cooled.

Some are water cooled, some are gas cooled, liquid metal cooled, there are molten salt designs, and some are a bit more out of the ordinary. Oh, like what? Well, just a few weeks ago in Kansas, construction began on an underground nuclear power station. A company called Deep Fission is building small modular reactors over a kilometer deep in the earth.

They say that can help cut costs and speed up construction because the bedrock will provide natural shielding against radiation and contamination, so they need less infrastructure overall. And this makes waste easier to deal with because they can just bury it alongside the plant. Well, you mentioned waste. I know that's a big reason public perception shifted away from nuclear,

so what's changed there? Yeah, many of the experts I spoke with say that's what's nice about this particular boom, is that how to deal with waste is at the forefront this time around. It's not just an afterthought. Of course, the biggest concern is with that high-level nuclear waste. These are the spent fuel bundles of uranium. After we've used them to generate power,

they are highly unstable and therefore highly radioactive for a very long period of time. I spoke with Dr. Jamie Knoll, a chemistry professor at Western University, about the challenges of dealing with this material. And that radiation might be high-energy gamma rays, beta particles, which are high-energy electrons, and also alpha particles, which are effectively the same as helium nuclei, but coming out at high energy and smashing into things.

But all of these things are bad for biology, and so we want to maintain the isolation of the nuclear fuel from organisms and the environment for at least a million years. So where is all the nuclear waste now in Canada? So all of Canada's commercial nuclear waste is currently stored in warehouses on site wherever it's generated. But that's just a temporary solution. And it's soon about to change. The long-term plan is to bury it all deep underground in a specially constructed geological biorepository in the Canadian Shield. Recently, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is a nonprofit,

tasked by the Canadian government with figuring out how to handle all this waste, announced it had made an agreement with the town of Ignais in northwestern Ontario to be the home for this future biorepository. Now there are still years of impact assessment and scrutiny before construction can begin sometime in the next decade. But in the meantime, the challenge is to construct state-of-the-art containers that can hold this waste and withstand anything that the next hundred thousand years could throw at them. Earthquakes, global heating, and ice age, whatever. Here's Dr. Samantha Gatman, another chemist at Western University, who specializes in metal corrosion down to the individual atom. So we have first the actual fuel. It's a solid, so that's great,

and it's also very insoluble in water. The tubes that make up those fuel bundles, that's zirconia, it's also very corrosion resistant, so that's also very good. And then on top of that, now we have these containers. So the way that the container is made is it has this inner steel part, and that is what gives the container its mechanical integrity. So steel is very strong, but it's not a very corrosion resistant material. So in order to give the containers some resistivity to chemical degradation is to apply a coating of copper. So that copper is a more noble metal. So that copper is a more noble metal, which means that it corrods less. And what they're doing right now is trying to understand through accelerated testing in labs like mine do to say, okay, how much corrosion is going to

happen because of this scenario or this scenario. And it's all going to be stored in this one site in northern Ontario. How much total waste are we talking about here? So I was actually very surprised at this answer from Dr. Noll. Since the beginning of the use of nuclear power, in Canada. All of the nuclear fuel waste that we have accumulated to date, this is a very Canadian measurement, could fit in eight standard NHL-sized hockey rinks to the level of the boards. So in the grand scope of things, it's really not that much volume of material. So is the nuclear waste the same with SMRs as with the larger reactors? Likely not, because most SMRs run on enriched uranium to support, higher energy density and to reduce the need for refueling so often.

And because there are many different designs at play, the size and shape of the fuel bundles that deliver the uranium can vary widely. That means the containers that hold the waste have to be able to accommodate that, which is another consideration for people like Dr. Gatman and Dr. Noel. But the fact that the SMRs run on enriched uranium is also a problem, because instead of using the natural uranium straight from the mines in northern Saskatchewan, the way we do with Kandu reactors, we now have to ship it out to the U.S. to get it enriched,

and that creates a potential issue as well. I can see that. So can we avoid that in any way? Well, most SMRs use enriched uranium, but there's another fuel that's being looked at experimentally, and that's thorium. So it's a metal named after the god Thor, which is more abundant than uranium.

Its waste is less radioactive for less time, so it's safer. It also doesn't need water as a coolant. It uses molten salt instead. And it's harder to turn into weapons-grade materials. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched an experimental thorium reactor in the Gobi Desert in 2024, capable of generating two megawatts of power. And they even recently were able to refuel it without turning it off, which is a really big deal. But it has its drawbacks too. Mining thorium is expensive. It is a difficult material to handle, and other than this one experimental reactor, it's still unknown how to commercialize it and make it larger scale. So there's still a lot of research and development and a lot

of money needed to look into it further. So are there any other options available to us? Actually, there are uranium reactors called fast reactors. These squeeze every last drop out of their fuel, so they produce less waste, and could even be fueled by spent waste from other plants. Here's Dr. Nithwani from the University of Waterloo. So this is what we call advanced fast neutron spectrum, breeder reactors, have the capacity to actually consume the waste. It generates energy from the waste. So they're called breeders in that sense.

They're really cool that way. So it's high efficiency for fuel use, very minimal waste. And in fact, even apart from its own waste, waste, it can use, say we have high-level nuclear waste at the Bruce and Darlington stations, right? You could actually take that waste and generate electricity from it in these fast-prudder reactors, okay, which is a very elegant concept. What a fabulous idea, taking care of our nuclear waste by burning it in new reactors. Is anyone actually doing this? There are a few in operation already in Russia, China, and India. A company called Arc Clean Technology has plans to

build a fast nuclear reactor in Alberta and New Brunswick, which is under regulatory review now. And there's another similar one currently being built by a company called Terra Power in Washington State. So if they can deliver on their promises of being safer, cheaper, and producing less waste, that could be impressive. But we're still looking at several years before they're up and running. And these are all small reactors as well? Yes, the Terra power says it can go from 345 to a surge of 500 megawatts, and the arc technology is 100 megawatts. But again, nothing's been constructed yet, so it all remains to be seen.

So does this mean the end of large-scale nuclear reactors? Absolutely not. Just last year, the Canadian government announced plans to develop next generation can-do reactors. A lot of the more imminent work involves refurbishing the, old reactors around Canada in places like Darlington and Bruce Power in Ontario to keep them in service for decades to come. And many tech companies are grabbing hold of previously shut down existing nuclear infrastructure to power their data centers. Microsoft recently made a deal with the Three Mile Island nuclear site in Pennsylvania, and Google made a similar deal with the Dwayne

Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa. Okay, so it sounds like there's still lots of promise here with these new reactors, but it still seems expensive. and it's going to take a long time. Yeah, at the end of the day, 2050 is coming at us fast, and if we're going to decarbonize our power grid by then, we need to get moving. I spoke with Dr. Kristen Schell about this. She's an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Canada Research Chair in Net Zero Energy Modeling at Carlton University. We need everything we can get online. So we have, you know, only 24 years. It takes quite a bit of time to actually construct these physical plants. So we don't know how long it will take an SMR to get built. The industry

is telling us maybe four years of construction time. So every delay in construction delays the CO2 emissions reductions that we could be getting off of that and accumulating more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and causing temperature rise. So the fastest things to build are wind and solar. The more of those technologies we can get online, the better. But nuclear does play a role in providing stable power to the grid for when wind and solar are variable or in the evening once the sun isn't shining. She also reminded me that there's low-hanging fruit we could tackle as well, like increasing our power transmission capabilities to be able to share surplus energy easier between provinces. We don't do that well right now, and that's an easy target.

Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, Bob. Amanda Buckowitz is a producer here at Quirks and Quartz. And that's it for Quarks and Quartz this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our web page at cbc.ca slash Quirx, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bacowicz, and Dan Falk. Our intern is Dionne Sudial.

Our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.