2000 May 20
Canada's nuclear nabobs try to turn green
Norman Rubin
National Post
For decades, nuclear power has been a promising industry. First, it
promised electricity too cheap to meter, and nuclear-powered cars and
airplanes. Later, it promised safe, reliable and economic electricity.
Today, those promises are hard to make with a straight face, and even
harder to keep: More than one-third of Canada's billion-dollar Candu
reactors have stopped producing any electricity (or income), and the
unsupportable debt created by Candu reactors has far surpassed
$10-billion, not including the additional nuclear billions in the federal
debt.
So today, the nuclear industry has taken to promising environmentally
friendly energy, and promising to help Canada meet its commitment to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 international Kyoto
agreement. As David Torgerson, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL)
vice-president, recently told a Senate committee: "We believe quite
strongly that Candu is a key to meeting the Kyoto targets."
That promise has already been adopted by Canada's reactor sales force --
led by Prime Minister Jean Chretien. It has also been spread widely by
U.S. officials. Ambassador John B. Ritch III, the U.S. representative to
the United Nations Organizations in Vienna, told a conference earlier this
year: "Only one technology on our horizon -- advanced nuclear reactors --
offers a realistic promise of contributing substantially to the world's
burgeoning need for large base-load power production without exacerbating
the hazards of environmental contamination and catastrophic climate
change."
To followers of the energy debate, the new emphasis is at its root a plea
for continued taxpayer subsidies from an industry that can't compete. The
hope for subsidies arises from a footnote in the Kyoto accord known as the
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). According to the CDM, countries that
fail to meet their agreed targets for emissions reductions under the Kyoto
accord could get compensating credits by promoting "clean development" in
other countries -- development that at least theoretically reduces
greenhouse gas emissions in a sustainable and "clean" way. Canada's
nuclear industry is basing its hopes for exporting reactors to the Third
World on having them qualify for the valuable credits.
As the International Atomic Energy Agency's Thomas Tisue explained to a
Canadian Nuclear Society audience late last year, "The basic idea is easy
to grasp: stimulate the use of nuclear power in developing countries
through the CDM mechanism to simultaneously generate CO2 offset credits
and promote sustainable development." Because of its higher costs, he
said, "nuclear would not be used by most developing countries in the
absence of the CDM mechanism."
Unfortunately for the industry, the promise that nuclear power is either
sustainable or clean -- or poses a practical or affordable way to lower
greenhouse gas emissions -- looks as empty as the industry's earlier
broken promises of cheap and reliable power:
- Canada's nuclear industry has already generated a world-class collection
of toxic trash, with virtually no funds set aside for cleaning up the
mess. Ontario Hydro estimated recently that its own nuclear clean-up would
cost $18.7-billion in today's dollars. The entire clean-up fund now stands
at $420-million. The rest will have to be raised in the future, since the
first two decades of Ontario's nuclear generation (like Quebec's and New
Brunswick's) left no funds at all.
The totally unfunded radioactive waste mess of the federal Crown
corporation, AECL, has been criticized by Canada's auditor-general since
1995 as a violation of accepted accounting principles, not to mention the
principles of sustainable or "clean" development.
- The industry's waste-disposal plans -- for unmonitored, irretrievable
burial -- have received only two public reviews, and neither supported
them. In 1988, an all-party federal committee unanimously recommended a
moratorium on reactor construction until the plans were improved. A second
look -- a nine-year federal review by an independent environmental
assessment panel that finished in 1998 -- unanimously judged the
industry's plans unacceptable, and produced a "hung jury" on their safety.
The panel unanimously recommended that the industry not proceed with its
preferred next step: selecting a site for burial.
- Although reactors emit extremely low levels of the greenhouse gases
implicated in global climate change, virtually no serious plans to
decrease emissions include building new reactors. Greater emissions cuts
are available sooner and cheaper from a combination of efficiency gains in
generation and consumption, and decentralized generation from natural gas
(a low-emission fuel) and renewables. The Canadian government's claims to
CDM credits for exporting Candu reactors have accordingly been met with
scorn from foreign governments and environmentalists alike.
- To the surprise of many non-experts, most major producers of nuclear
power -- including Ontario Power Generation (the new-generation successor
to Ontario Hydro) and New Brunswick Electric Power, as well as generators
in the United States, China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- are also
major coal burners and greenhouse gas emitters. Although they look like
alternatives, coal power and nuclear power are really natural partners:
Reactors produce constant or "base-load" power when they can run, while
coal-fired stations can fire up to meet "peak" loads and keep the lights
on whenever the reactors go down.
With all these developments sullying its latest repositioning as an
environmental saviour, the nuclear industry should find its plea for
ongoing subsidies a hard sell. But with the decision in the hands of a
federal government that continues to spout the rhetoric of the nuclear
industry all the way up to the prime minister, nothing can be ruled out.
Norman Rubin is director of nuclear research for Energy Probe in Toronto.
E-mail: NormanRubin@nextcity.com
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