The potential irony of this story lies in the fact that France gets most of its electricity from nuclear plants. That historic and ongoing circumstance allowed France to label itself a 'low carbon society'. Viewed from a life cycle perspective, starting with uranium extraction, benefaction, and processing, the green nuclear dream loses some of the appeal, however.

For most of the last 20 years the price of uranium has hovered between $10 and $20 per pound. But beginning in 2004, driven by demand around the globe for new nuclear power plants, it has risen dramatically, peaking at $136 per pound in June 2007. By August, it was back to $90, still high enough to encourage at least 20 companies to spend more than $30-million this year exploring about 40 properties in the North.

Port Radium, Vancouver-based Alberta Star is searching in what’s known as the Hornby Bay basin, one of the North’s two hotspots. The other is the Thelon basin between Baker Lake, Nunavut and the NWT border. (There’s a little exploration going on in the Yukon, too, in the Wernecke Mountains 200 kilometres north of Keno.)

The most advanced uranium project in the North is in the Thelon basin, and belongs to Areva Resources Canada, a subsidiary of France’s state-owned nuclear giant Areva Group. The Kiggavik-Sissons project, about 80 kilometres west of Baker Lake is a deposit that has been explored since the 1970s. A proposed mine was stopped by popular protest in the early 1990s. But Areva opened a full-time office in Baker Lake last year and would appear to be winning the war for public support.

Existing nuclear plants [in Canada] avoid the emission of 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, emissions that would occur if fossil fuelled plants had produced the same electricity." Eighteen nuclear power plants provide about 15 percent of Canada's electricity and make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gas and other emissions.

It seems from this statement that Canadian mined uranium will fuel Canadian nuclear power plants. Given that "Canada is the world's largest producer of uranium," however, it would seem likely that there will be export to European and other customers. But that may be a temporary thing. Enter the Alberta Tar Sands.

The future encompasses includes this fact (bold font is our addition):
From about 2003 various proposals have been made to use nuclear power to produce steam for extraction of oil from Alberta's northern oils and (tar sand) deposits and electricity also for the major infrastructure involved. At present a lot of natural gas is used - up to 30 cubic metres per barrel of oil. With projections of three million barrels per day by 2016, a great deal of gas is used and the cost exposure is increasing dramatically. In fact, Canadian natural gas is inadequate to supply the anticipated expansion in oil sands output and its use has major CO2 implications which are creating public concern - about 20% of the energy in the oil is required to produce it and about 80kg of CO2 per barrel is released.

This seems to be the status of Nuclear Powered Tar Sands Oil Extraction in Canada as of 2007:
In March 2007 the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources recommended that no decision should be taken on the use of nuclear energy for Canada's oil sands until the "repercussions of this process are fully known and understood". Their report estimated that a reactor of some 600 MW capacity could supply a processing plant producing 60,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil per day. Hence almost 20 such reactors would be needed to meet the production growth planned to 2015, when Canadian output from oil sands is forecast to reach three million barrels per day. Smaller reactors, with capacities of some 100 MW, could be more suitable for individual projects, given the limitations of supplying steam over more than 25 km.

(By John Laumer, TreeHugger, 10/11/2007)