Nuclear energy has rather caught my attention lately. I’m definitely not alone.

This renewed awareness brought a thought as we were driving north recently and, for the 2,000th time, I became hyperaware of the great vastness of this province.

We are three times the size of the former West Germany and 2.7 times larger than the United Kingdom.

We are big. Large parts of Saskatchewan are barely inhabited.

Because husband was driving, I was free to mull. Two things came to mind.

One: It is difficult in the extreme to reliably keep the lights and heat on in many remote parts of this place.

Two: Could it really be so difficult to find a good place to store spent nuclear fuel? Methinks we have the room.

The day we returned to Saskatoon (in one of those strange coincidences that make us feel kind of clairvoyant), Cameco Corp. announced that it was buying approximately half of Westinghouse Electric Co. (WEC), with a group called Brookfield Renewable Partners (BRP) picking up the rest.

This is not the refrigerator firm. WEC was spun off from that company a long time ago. It services and maintains nuclear power plants and creates fuel for light water nuclear reactors. It’s big, too. It has 9,000 employees and services about half of the world’s reactors.

This was the biggest business news I had heard in an extremely long time. Cameco is vertically integrating from one end of the nuclear industry to the other, from mining uranium to reactor development. WEC is, by the way and for example, presently working with the Saskatchewan Research Council to figure out how small modular reactors (SMRs) would fit into our power profile.

A fascinating fact about Brookfield: Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, is the vice-chair of Brookfield Asset Management, parent of BRP. He has been making a lot of noise about climate change and energy sustainability for years.

“Every credible net-zero pathway relies on significant growth in nuclear power,” he said when the Cameco-WEC deal was announced.

He is probably right.

If there was ever a time to seriously consider low-emission energy, it is now.

If there was ever a time to seriously consider how to power democratic nations without reliance on insane dictators, it is now.

What is happening in Europe because of the Russian natural gas issue should be a wake-up call to all of us. That alarm should be screaming in our ears. It is certainly being heard, loud and clear, over the pond.

And that is resulting in more interest in Cameco, where uranium sales are up significantly this year.

Nuclear energy is here, it is going to stay here, and that genie is not going back into the bottle. That’s the reality.

What is also reality, despite a great many people who still deny climate change, is that we humans absolutely must reduce our environmental impact — whether this is just “some weather phase” or whether we are fully responsible.

We have to do something.

Nuclear reactors still scare some of us, though, don’t they? We had Chernobyl, with its very flawed design. We had Three Mile Island, which actually spewed only a tiny amount of radioactivity outside the plant itself. Then we had Fukushima-Daiichi, which sent the nuclear industry to its knees for years.

But nuclear reactor technology is not our grandparents’ technology. And I think we have, in the main, learned not to put reactors on fault lines or place them teetering on vulnerable coasts.

It’s less the fear of reactor meltdowns and more the fear of “waste” or spent fuel that seems to hold some of us back from accepting nuclear.

But nuclear energy is far more widespread than many people perhaps realize, because we really don’t hear about it very much.

The United States, for example, derives a fifth of its electricity and half of its clean energy from nuclear.

According to its Office of Nuclear Energy, (and I grant you this is not the most unbiased source, although it really should be accurate considering the extreme oversight of the industry), the U.S. generates 2,000 tonnes of spent fuel annually. That fits into half an Olympic swimming pool.

Commercial U.S. reactors have in total generated 90,000 tonnes since the 1950s, which would cover a football field at a depth of 10 yards. (But they don’t. They’re kept in contained storage areas.)

France gets 75 per cent of its energy from nuclear. (We’re 18 per cent bigger than France, too, by the way, with a tiny proportion of its population.)

Germany, I’m willing to bet, is now wishing it did not close down most of its reactors in favour of Russian natural gas.

There is no such thing as 100 per cent safe energy production, apart from, perhaps, solar and for the most part, wind. But we can’t store these renewables yet. The battery technology isn’t there, and some say it will be a very long time before we can rely on it.

Coal. Oil. Gas. Everything comes with its own problems.

Freezing our backsides off or eating uncooked food or not being able to get from point A to B are off the table in most parts of the world, and certainly here.

And so, there is obviously a growing interest in nuclear power, and I sense aversion to it is receding. SaskPower is looking at four of these small reactors, for example. Various countries are looking at dozens of them. Meanwhile, as of May, there were 439 nuclear reactors operating (and not melting down) in about 30 countries, Canada among them.

It’s not the issue it once was, but there is still blowback, and it’s understandable on some levels. Among the real issues is how to keep reactors from warming nearby water sources, for example.

However, while I continue to hope for reining sun and wind power, I think we’re going to have to accept that in the immediate, near and medium term, nuclear energy is part of our future.

Or we may not have one, politically or environmentally.

• Joanne Paulson