Off the Rails 3

Don't Bring Me Down, Bruce!*

In advance of the landing of Bruce Power officials in this part of the woods next week (March 18, from 3 PM to 8 PM, at the Travelodge in Prince Albert), I am reproducing the comments I made at the public forum segment of the November 24, 2008 city council meeting. The additional notes in blue ink were generated by a close reading of the 24-page "Report on Bruce Power's Feasibility Study," a publication delivered to every household in the city in January 2009.** For an alternate view of the issues that should be presented in such a document, I attended presentations by (retired University of Regina professor) Jim Harding in Shellbrook (March 11) and Prince Albert (March 12). A more succinct assessment of the drawbacks of nuclear power can be found in an article about Dr. Gordon Edwards in the January 15, 2008, Calgary Herald ("Nuclear power called 'too risky'").

Please vote ONCE in the poll to the left. Voting is open until April 10, 2009.

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My comments tonight are about a topic that was in the news last week. I’m talking about the tour of the Bruce nuclear plant earlier this month by the Mayor and four other members of the community, and the intention of the Prince Albert Grand Council to meet with the same nuclear power company before the end of this year. The online comments [at the Prince Albert Daily Herald web site] about this news story - and there were many - quickly degenerated into poorly-grounded fiction, propelled by the inevitable personal right to have an uninformed opinion on any current news topic, even something so serious as a possible nuclear power plant in our community. The editor of the local daily paper subsequently lamented the lack of carefully presented fact and assessment by the individuals who were prompted to comment.

That said, there are four areas I want to touch on that explain my total, unreserved, and unequivocal opposition to the prospect of constructing a nuclear power plant in this area. In order, these are cost, safety, nuclear waste, and the toxicity of uranium.

First, let’s remember that, in Canada, the province of Ontario has the most experience with nuclear power plants: 20 reactors have operated there at some point since 1971. Only two other provinces have nuclear power.

Quebec had a lot of problems with Gentilly 1 during the eight years it operated; its Gentilly 2 plant has been in operation for 15 years. New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau operated from 1983 to March of this year, and is offline until late next year. The cost to construct all these reactors has never been close to the numbers initially provided to decision-makers - which explains why Bruce Power is telling people that a plant in Saskatchewan would cost $5 to $10 billion: remember that a $5 billion over-run on a $5 billion plant is a 100% increase, and hardly chump change. [Just ask the government of Finland. It headed to court over its new nuclear reactor, an Areva EPR, which has run up a $2 billion (US) cost over-run during the construction phase (which is two years behind schedule). On this side of the ocean, the average US nuclear plant construction cost over-run has been 207% - see Nuclear Power’s Role in Generating Electricity, a report by the United States' Congressional Budget Office, May 2008, page 17.]

Canadian nuclear power plants also don’t last as long as advertised, and, in Ontario, refitting costs have been higher than was forecast. Ontario Power Generation would love to tell Ontarians that the nuclear power building costs from the 70s and 80s have been paid off, but that’s still a future event. In addition, the “cheap electricity” that nuclear plants were supposed to provide turns out to be, in documents that New Brunswick Power prepared in 2006, at least 50% higher per kilowatt hour than for every other source. In other words, you, me, and our grandchildren would pay dearly for the nuclear luxury.

Second, a Canadian nuclear reactor is definitely safer than those that blew up at Chernobyl in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1977. But I’d feel a lot better if studies in Japan and Ontario ten years ago had not found that napping on the job was a major problem at nuclear power reactors in those jurisdictions. Safety considerations should also include our limited experience with this technology: nuclear power reactors first came online in Canada in 1962 - giving us a 46-year history with a technology whose human health issues are a concern for tens of thousands of years. This would be less of a problem if people could reasonably guess the results, one thousand years down the road, of actions we take today.

Third, the nuclear waste contamination issue is a long way from any kind of satisfactory resolution. [Yucca Mountain, the site in the Nevada desert that had been planned (since 1987) as a depository for all the spent fuel rods from nuclear plants in the United States, will not be funded further for that purpose by the US government - see the March 6, 2009 story at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-nuke-yucca_frimar06,0,2557502.story ] Aside from the need to have a safe storage site that is protected from both accidental and intentional human intervention for thousands of years, there is that recurring sticky problem of humans being incapable of considering life on this planet that far into the future. If you really believe the nuclear waste management issue is a non-starter, ask a senior citizen in this city if they foresaw, at the ripe age of twelve, an event like CNN’s (pseudo-)holographic live interview with reporters in Chicago on November 4, 2008.

Fourth, uranium’s chemical toxicity is something I only came across last month. While we usually think of the fuel for nuclear reactors in terms of its radioactive properties, a complicated scholarly article in the British Medical Journal explains that uranium has much more harmful effects on the body’s cells and organ functions than was previously realized. Interestingly, this longitudinal study (I think it covered exposure to uranium-laden air over a thirty-year period) does not address the issues of safe levels of exposure: it merely concludes that there was a large hole in medical knowledge about how uranium affects the human body.

To sum up, my view about the possibility of a nuclear plant in the Prince Albert area is simple: not while I’m still breathing.

Have a safe walk home.

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* Thanks to Electric Light Orchestra for this line, lifted from a song they released in 1979. Even though the actual lyric is "Don't bring me down....Groooss!" most people thought Jeff Lynne said "Bruce."

** Never mind the frighteningly-incomplete content of this document, the writing is so pitifully inept it reminds me of the sorry scribbles inflicted on paper by my grade 8 classmates (43 years ago). Maybe the authors thought the simple folk who inhabit these parts would simply fail to notice their incompetence at expressing themselves in writing . . . .