I first got interested in nuclear energy after the birth of my son in 2018. As an emergency physician, I specialize in triage, focusing limited time and resources on the most urgent problems. When I applied that logic to the climate crisis, the defining threat facing my son’s generation, the power of nuclear energy became clear. Between 1971 and 1993, Canada commissioned 22 reactors—one per year—resulting in one of the fastest per capita additions of clean energy the world has ever seen. In Ontario, nuclear enabled North America’s only large-scale coal phase-out, preventing thousands of premature deaths from heart attacks, strokes and respiratory diseases created by air pollution. And in my ER, I regularly used catheters and syringes sterilized by cobalt-60—a by-product of some reactors. By 2020, I’d put my newfound passion into practice and co-founded the nuclear-advocacy organization Canadians for Nuclear Energy. We push to save existing plants from premature closure—and for new ones to be built.

Canada’s nuclear sector doesn’t only fascinate me because of its public-health contributions. The CANDU reactor, invented and refined by Canadian engineers and scientists over the last 60 years, is now the third most widely deployed reactor design in the world. Funnily enough, it was created to solve a challenge this country faces again today: avoiding dependence on U.S. nuclear technology. Back in the ’50s, as Americans were developing light-water reactors, engineers in Deep River, Ontario, were finding ways to work around Canada’s lack of uranium enrichment and metal-forging infrastructure, required to build the massive pressure vessels of American models. They created CANDU, whose modular core of 480 fuel channels used heavy water (containing deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen), allowing it to run on unenriched Canadian uranium. From mine to megawatt, almost every component of the CANDU system was—and still is—Canadian-made.

Now, nuclear power is poised for a comeback. Global demand is set to increase more than twofold by 2050,........

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