"Do We Need Nuclear"? - Yens Pedersen

We are confronted now with Sask Party/Bruce Power deal cooked up behind closed doors to build a nuclear reactor in the northwest part of Saskatchewan’s grain belt. They want to develop “Saskatchewan based opportunities for value added development of our uranium industry.”

Why do we need nuclear power?

Why would we go with the most dangerous, most complex and one of the most expensive options, when we have safer, simpler and cheaper options available? I am not opposed to new technology, but I do insist that there be clear benefits to embracing new technology which outweigh the costs. In all the research that I have done over the last year (which is a lot), it is clear to me that the costs associated with proven nuclear technology outweigh the benefits. The benefits are:
-a tremendous ability to produce energy from a relatively small amount of material (but the real issue is not the quantity of material, rather the energy return on energy expended),
-economic development, and
-a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The costs and risks are significant, including:

-the low (but still significant) risk of an enormous incident,
-the health costs of exposing a population to ongoing low level radiation (which we are just beginning to understand),
-the economic costs of building the reactor (no reactor has ever been built without taxpayer money),
-the economic costs of ’spinning reserves’ (backup power) equal to the size of the reactor required for NERC standards,
-the economic costs of building transmission lines (at $1.5 million/km),
-the economic costs of the costs of decommissioning (which are huge and will fall to the taxpayer),
-the risk of building a reactor which may not work (eg. Gentilly 1, the Maples) or which fails before the capital investment is recovered, and
-the economic costs of permanent waste storage (which hasn’t been proven or developed yet anywhere in the world).

You also have to compare the options that we have available - in which case you find that there is better economic development with renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass), more grid reliability with renewable energy, better greenhouse gas reductions with renewables, and less concern about the availability of water with renewables. Despite the protestations of dinosaurs stuck in old paradigms, other places in the world are showing that renewables like wind and solar can be integrated into the power grid in much greater proportions than we are currently doing. The best dollar spent is on conservation and efficiency which could reduce our electricity demand by at least 10%. We could easily expand our wind power production 9 fold.

There are always experimental projects and proposals for new nuclear technology, and while there may eventually be nuclear technology developed that overcomes these obstacles, given the health, safety and economic record of the nuclear industry I am not prepared to take a leap of faith and commit massive amounts of other people’s money to expanding the nuclear industry. I believe strongly that we can no longer develop technologies or resources without a sustainable solution for dealing with waste products. It is irresponsible for our generation and unconscionable to leave such waste products for the next generation — our children — to deal with.

Let me quote from a 1985 book titled “Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America” by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, at page 20:

No one knows how much there is. No one knows all the places where it is. And no one–despite all claims to the contrary–knows what to do with it. Not the government that encourages its production, not the industries that churn it out, not the scientists who created the processes that breed it. That is why radioactive waste in 1985 is held in “temporary” facilities, just as it was in 1945, just as it will be in 2005. Science, government, and industry have yet to devise the safe and permanent storage system they have promised for 30 years, one guaranteed to seal off the waste from people and the environment for as long as it will remain hazardous–forevermore.

You cannot see the radiation, or smell it, or taste it. But it is spreading across the American landscape. In 1950, waste from commercial use of the atom was counted in ounces, today, it is counted in tons.

Of far greater significance than weight is the curie content. The curie is used to measure radioactivity. In 1950, the curie level of this garbage was counted in the hundreds. Today, it is counted in the billions. At the end of 1984, waste kept in interim collection centers stood at 14.7 billion curies–enough to kill everyone in the United States.

The worst is yet to come. During the 1980s, businesses and institutions, but mostly electric utilities, will turn out twice as much waste–measured in terms of radioactivity– as they did in the three preceding decades combined.

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