Why Michael Lee-Chin is investing in nuclear power

Lee-Chin now looks at the world and is ready to make his next prediction: nuclear power will sit at the core of our future energy consumption.

“The world’s energy mix is a hub-and-spoke model and at the hub you have fossil fuels and on the spokes you have renewables. Fossil fuels have some wonderful characteristics: they’re always on, they’re highly scalable, and they’re energy dense, but they’re dirty. They are contributing to two of humankind’s biggest challenges: cancer and climate change,” Lee-Chin says. “The energy mix of the future will be that same hub-and-spoke model, but we need to substitute fossil fuels for something else that is energy dense, scalable, always on, and clean. The only source of energy currently known to humankind with those qualities is nuclear fission.”

In line with Lee-Chin’s vision for the world’s new energy mix, Portland Investment Counsel Inc. has launched the Portland Replacement of Fossil Fuels Alternative Fund.  The fund is currently looking to invest in businesses at various stages of the nuclear value chain. In discussing the strategy, Lee-Chin cited another set of preconditions for wealth creation that he thinks nuclear energy meets: a gap between perception and reality, inefficiencies, and a lack of capital.

The gap, he says, is that many people still don’t accept that nuclear power will be the core of our exit from fossil fuel reliance. The inefficiencies, he believes, come from a technology and infrastructure set that is relatively old and ripe for disruption and innovation. The lack of capital, he notes, is something of a product of gaps in investor understanding of nuclear technology as well as the aforementioned inefficiencies.

Christopher Deir says that the shift towards greater efficiency and better understanding of Nuclear is now underway. Deir is the Chief Nuclear Officer at AIC Global Holdings Inc., a subsidiary of Portland Holdings. He noted that in the US, Canada, and around the world there are ongoing public private partnerships building new reactors using new technologies. These projects represent the first wave, he says, and are largely underpinned by government aid through cost share funding and support because the cost and regulatory approval structures of these projects are not fully known. Once this first wave is completed, he says, there should be a much larger rush to develop more reactor projects.