CEO, staff depart New Brunswick reactor developer ARC Clean Technology

ARC Clean Technology Canada, a developer of small modular reactors in New Brunswick, has revealed the sudden departure of its Canadian chief executive, raising questions about its future.

Alongside Tuesday’s announcement of CEO William Labbe’s exit, other ARC employees also received layoff notices, according to a report from the Telegraph Journal, a Saint John, N.B., newspaper. The company did not respond to questions from The Globe about those reported departures, or how many staffers remain with the company.

In a statement, ARC spokesperson Sandra Donnelly said the company had nearly completed a phase of a pre-licensing process with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and was “re-aligning personnel and resources to strengthen our strategic partnerships and rationalize operations to best prepare for the next phase of our deployment.”

Ms. Donnelly said ARC Canada will be led by Bob Braun, chief operating officer of its Washington-based parent ARC Clean Technology Inc., and two vice presidents, Lance Clarke and Jill Doucet.

The company’s staff changes follow the resignation of New Brunswick energy minister Mike Holland, announced June 20. Mr. Holland had been an advocate for the province’s SMR program, but had previously announced he would not stand for re-election.

ARC set up offices in Saint John several years ago, as part of an initiative to build SMRs at the province’s only nuclear power plant, Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. The plant’s owner, NB Power, has promoted plans for demonstration units of two different reactors built there by 2030. The second reactor would be designed by another startup, Moltex Energy, which would include a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.

ARC is one of several vendors jockeying to sell SMRs to Canadian utilities. All existing commercial power reactors in Canada – including the existing one at Point Lepreau – are of the home-grown Candu design. (The newest, at Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, was completed in the early 1990s.)

The company is in the early stages of designing a reactor known as the ARC-100, a next-generation reactor that would use sodium as coolant – a striking departure from Candus and nearly all other commercial power reactors used today, which are water-cooled. The ARC-100 is also marketed as having the ability to consume reprocessed spent fuel, something that has not been done historically in Canada.

As ARC rationalizes its workforce, some of its better-established competitors are staffing up. U.S.-based GE-Hitachi and Ontario Power Generation are preparing a site at Darlington for potential construction of a BWRX-300 small modular reactor. Westinghouse, which is marketing several reactors including its AP-1000 large reactor and eVinci microreactor, announced a new 13,000-square-foot office in Kitchener, Ont., this month along with plans to hire 100 engineers to staff it by next year.

Last year, Mr. Labbe said developing the ARC-100 would cost around $500-million. But so far, the company has raised only a small fraction of that. In 2022, it announced it had raised $30-million from the provincial government and the private sector. In October, the federal government awarded it another $7-million. Its partner, NB Power, has not contributed any funding.

ARC submitted an application to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in 2023 for a license to prepare a site at Point Lepreau for its demonstration unit. At an industry conference in April, Mr. Labbe said ARC was also preparing to apply for a license to construct the reactor, which it planned to issue within the next year.

“We’ve been at this for about seven years,” he told the audience. “And we really have another six, seven years until we get that commercial deployment.”

Mr. Labbe became ARC Canada’s CEO in May, 2021. His predecessor, Norm Sawyer, is now president of ION Nuclear Consulting Ltd., an adviser to investors, energy companies and First Nations. Mr. Sawyer said that, while he had no inside information on the company, reactor developers would not normally terminate staff after hitting a regulatory milestone.

“If they were going to move forward, basically, they would be hiring people,” he said.

“If you’re on hold and you’re thinking that you’re going to move forward in in a short time period, you maintain your staffing levels.”

Susan O’Donnell, a researcher at St. Thomas University who studies energy technologies, said that, while ARC has managed to attract some private funding, it has remained almost wholly dependent on government money. She added that the federal government is unlikely to provide the billions of dollars required to build new reactors at Point Lepreau.

“I just don’t see how this is going to work, where the money’s going to come from,” she said. “And I think this is why we’re seeing this with ARC today.

“They can’t afford to have that number of staff.”

As recently as November, NB Power chief executive officer Lori Clark had said SMRs were “a key part” of the utility’s plans to phase out coal by 2030. On Tuesday, NB Power said it will continue to provide technical expertise to ARC and Moltex, and that it regards SMRs as a “potential option” to achieve net zero emissions electricity production by 2035.

“We continue to work towards the goal of having an SMR on the grid by the early 2030s,” spokesperson Dominique Couture wrote in an e-mail.

With a report from Emma Graney