Time to pull plug on nuclear? – thestar.com. These below views are so good for us to be studied and may be reconsidered for the better choices and let see it case as happenning due to more local condition or it is so principles?

Time to pull plug on nuclear? – thestar.com			January 31st, 2011
Re: Don’t abandon Canada’s stake, Editorial Jan. 25; and Used nuclear company is no bargain, Opinion Jan. 25 http://www.waterkeeper.ca/2011/01/31/time-to-pull-plug-on-nuclear-thestar-com/ Your editorial considers it desirable for the residents of Ontario to continue to financially prop up AECL and the CANDU reactor, asserting that throwing good money after bad is necessary to “keep the industrial heartland humming.” Humbug, not humming, is more like it. Nuclear power continues to be a huge money-losing proposition, filling the pockets of AECL and OPG, while at the same time generating huge amounts of long-lived nuclear waste that nobody know how to dispose of, forcing our children and their children to pay for the excesses of our generation. This waste has to stop. It is time for Ontario and Canada to stop backing an always-losing horse, and to take that $33 billion slotted for reactor refurbishment, and put it into wind, solar, and other forms of renewable, clean power. Better yet, take some of that money and fund research into ways to embed large-capacity power storage within the grid, so that intermittent power generators can be used to best advantage, and allow scalable growth of power generation in Canada. Robert Bernecky, Toronto It is one thing to be proud of a Canadian invention, but to forget about AECL’s history is not being forthcoming. Sure, there are 20 CANDUs in Ontario, two of them now effectively mothballed, and one in Quebec and New Brunswick each, being refurbished or needing refurbishment. AECL’s reactor sales to South Korea and Argentina were under a cloud of bribery allegations. China was induced to buy them with heavy federal subsidies and we all know about the give-away reactor to India, which helped them to achieve their status as nuclear-weapon nation. Yes, 30,000 jobs are at stake, but how many jobs have been lost in the manufacturing sector during the economic downturn, and how many of those have been recouped through work in the renewable energy sector? Duncan Hawthorne is doing a great job, publicly, and as a registered Ontario lobbyist, by pushing this number. The difference is that AECL’s engineers are on the government payroll to keep them in the not-very-successful refurbishing business, and workers making wind turbine towers and blades and solar panels are on private paycheques. And that’s the crux: Do we poor taxpayers keep pouring our money into the AECL “sinkhole” as one of the federal Conservatives called it, to keep our Canadian pride? The fed’s are right this time to get rid of AECL at any price and save Canada from financial ruin. Ziggy Kleinau, Binbrook Canada’s “stake” in what? What if I told you that I could guarantee you a job for life? What if I told you that you would be well paid, union protected, and that your work would have social benefit: that you’d be helping people, by providing “clean” and “reliable” electricity, and doing so at a price that is so cheap that taxpayers would be thanking you for generations. Some 50 years ago many of us thought this was the promise of nuclear energy. “Clean” nuclear energy that gives us an endless supply of radioactive waste, that will only sometimes leak heavy water into the great lakes, leak radiation on employees, or turn into a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island. “Reliable” nuclear energy that will only sometimes need to be shut down for six months so that it can be maintained. “Affordable” nuclear energy that has never yet been built on time or on budget, and has in fact never cost less than 250 to 350 per cent of what the nuclear companies estimated it would cost to build. “Cheap” nuclear energy that cannot be sold to the market without heavy subsidies to cover all the “externalities” and unimportant minor details like the endless supply of radioactive waste that must somehow be stored for millions of years. And now when we need to rebuild them, we still haven’t paid off $30 billion out of a $39 billion investment we made. Some investment. It’s such a great investment that nobody wants to buy AECL after how many months of trying to sell? Surely somebody in the business world would have been interested by now if there was any value there. It seems to me that Canada’s nuclear industry has never been profitable without being highly subsidized, and that it would take a tragically misinformed or unobservant person to think it could ever compete profitably with any other generation technology, especially the newer technologies that are now available (combined cycle gas, combined heat and power, biomass, newer hydro turbines, wind, and yes, even solar). And here we are, in the one place in the world where people call electricity “hydro,” where all of our electricity once came from clean, reliable, affordable water, and somehow we bought into nuclear. It’s interesting that the cheapest electricity in our supply mix today still comes from water. Any economics professor would teach their students that a venture as unprofitable as nuclear is a losing business that will eventually fail. Nuclear is on tax-subsidized life support in Canada: somebody needs to pull the plug and let nature run its course. Nuclear has had its turn, and we’re still paying for it. It’s time to get back to programs that work; that have fully disclosed costs with no hidden subsidies, and that are reasonable; that can be built in a reasonable time, maintained with finite costs that will end; and that don’t continue to cost us money after they’ve been decommissioned. We need much more conservation, and much more renewable energy. Derek Satnik, Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer, Mindscape Innovations, Ottawa Yes, we have managed to get Canada in a difficult position on nuclear power. There was never any good reason for hydro-power-rich Canada to go nuclear. Not all science is good and this has proven to be bad. Every reactor emits radiation, and radiation, even at low levels, is a cause of major health problems. To bemoan the loss of jobs is to admit that Canada has no strategy for converting employment into the areas where workers are needed and will be employed in green jobs. One excuse used to be that we needed reactors for medical isotopes but this is no longer true as new methods are developed. Not only is the Darlington rebuild a big mistake, the export of CANDUs is an irresponsible policy. Both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were reactors with high ratings for safety. Nothing can guarantee that any reactor will not malfunction over time. To spread this technology and therefore this danger and the unsolvable matter of nuclear waste to other countries shows a disregard for the people of Canada and our export recipients. “Cheap, clean and safe”? Don’t bet on it. Shirley Farlinger, Toronto Nuclear advocates around the world are aggressively promoting nuclear power as an answer to the global warming resulting from carbon emission. Here are five reasons to reject their claims: 1. Nuclear energy produces greenhouse gasses. The nuclear industry is very energy intensive —from mining, refining to transporting uranium, the basic nuclear fuel. The ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFC)s continue to be released through uranium enrichment. 2. Nuclear energy is a great health hazard. Calling nuclear energy “clean” is Orwellian. Nuclear power stations spread radioactivity in the earth’s biosphere and these radioactive particles continue to accumulate in the food chain. Uranium mining leaves hundreds of thousands tons of radon-generating radioactive tailings. These are highly carcinogenic. 3. There is no solution to storing highly radioactive nuclear wastes. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor produces 500 pounds of lethal plutonium, which will remain radioactive for thousands of years. The idea of storing them deep underground is preposterous as these may contaminate ground water and eventually surface water. 4. Nuclear energy is extremely expensive. Without massive government subsidies, no private company will build a single nuclear power station. In France, imposition of nuclear power on a gargantuan scale has brought massive economic problems. Forced to raise cash for the nuclear program, the state-owned power company, Electricite de France (EDF), has been driven into enormous debt. Today, it owes $200 billion and is one of the greatest debtors in the world. 5. Nuclear power stations pose a great security risk as they remain a target of the terrorists. With terrorism as the greatest threat in the 21st century, nuclear reactors remain vulnerable to such attacks with catastrophic consequences. By opting for renewable energy, all these dangers can be avoided. Mahmood Elahi, Ottawa Nuclear power was not claimed to be “too cheap to meter.” I wrote an article for the Canadian Nuclear Society, putting this phrase into context. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, gave a speech to the National Association of Science Writers in 1954. He waxed poetic: “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter; will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history; will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace.” Strauss dreamed of these things, but made no promises. It is time to stop misquoting him. Morgan Brown, Research Engineer, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River It seems that one day, shortly after Mike Harris’ experiment in private power failed, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals decided that some variation was a good idea after all. So, a plan has emerged to close the coal plants and replace them with farms of windmills backed up by dozens of natural gas plants sprouting like weeds (the latest being on the Holland marsh) and all privately owned. Now we have the benefit of paying the wind farm owners 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for excess power that we don’t use on windy days while at the same time paying the natural gas plant owners to sit idle. I’m sure that I could set up a company to not produce electricity and every seven days undercut them by charging the government 15 cents per kw/h for the power I don’t produce because in the business of private power, less is more and more is less. We remember that the previous owner of privatized power in Ontario could afford to build one Casa Loma. Ah, but we have a solution on the next page where the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) suggests we move to combined heat and power systems. Then on hot sunny days, when we need more electricity for air conditioning, we can produce excess heat which can be dumped into the atmosphere. That will please those who believe we are actually in a period of global cooling. Then on cold wintry days, when the windmills are churning away and we need lots of heat, we can get lots of excess electricity that we don’t need but we get to pay for anyway. That seems like a great system for our hospitals. Of course, we could build new nuclear plants, especially useful if you also want to have the knowledge to build nuclear weapons, but as the OCAA points out, that power comes at an even higher price of 21 cents kw/h. Alternately we could send our dollars from Ontario to Quebec and Manitoba and maybe Newfoundland and Labrador too, at under 6 cents kw/h, assuming the free transmission lines that the OCAA tells us are already built. Personally, I think that deep geothermal power that is public, clean, local and only about 4.5 cents kw/h would be the better solution. Now if only we could get the herd of economists at the Ministry of Energy to look beyond the bottom line and crack open a science textbook. Bill Livingstone, Etobicoke Ontario cannot rely on thousands of kilometres of transmission lines from Manitoba and Quebec to keep our lights on. Jack Gibbons of Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) wants Ontario to rely on electricity imports from Quebec when Quebec can barely meet its own demand during this present cold spell. His combined heat and power systems would put polluting gas-fired generators in residential neighbourhoods to provide baseload power to a grid that will have enough baseload power. The OCAA supports using more gas, even if it comes from non-conventional sources like “fracked” shale, which emits as much life cycle greenhouse gases as coal, at a price that is sure to go up. Putting flue-gas clean-up on our existing coal plants would provide less expensive electricity. Reasonably priced and non-polluting nuclear should continue to provide the bulk of Ontario’s electricity. To do otherwise would be foolhardy. Donald Jones, Retired nuclear industry engineer, Mississauga It is relatively easy to criticize nuclear power, through misinformation, while presenting largely unfeasible alternatives. Thankfully, Ontarians have more common sense. Ontario has been blessed with cheap electricity for most of the last four decades, where more than half has been supplied by nuclear power. Recent price increases have little to do with nuclear power, but rather with addition of wind energy, solar, replacement of coal-fired generation with natural gas and with transmission upgrades. The OCAA’s Jack Gibbons’ inflated nuclear costs come from one data point, long since refuted. Historically, nuclear power has been economically competitive with coal-fired generation and countries that rely heavily on nuclear power, such as France and Sweden, also have very cheap electricity. Countries with rapidly expanding economies, that need cheap and reliable electricity, such as India and China, are building a lot of coal plants and a lot of nuclear plants. Whether AECL is privatized, or not, a lot of reactors will be sold around the world and as long as CANDU technology receives the same level of support that other governments provide their nuclear vendors then our industries will also benefit from our sales. It is more likely it is the federal government’s desire to exit the nuclear reactor business completely that has scared off potential investors. Dr. Michael Ivanco, Vice President, Society of Professional Engineers and Associates, Mississauga If Steven Harper is serious in selling our Canadian technology in nuclear reactors and at the same time killing thousands of Canadian jobs in this vital industry, then he will stand proudly alongside of John Diefenbaker, who killed our aircraft industry and sent thousands of Canadian jobs and scientists to the U.S., where they helped to build the leading space industry in the world, when he killed the Avro Arrow. France and America protect and encourage their scientists in this industry because they know that this technology is priceless. Canada has been a leader in this technology for many years and could be for many years to come. Will someone please open his eyes. David Fournier, Sutton The Ontario Clean Air Alliance can speculate all it wants about how to solve our future energy needs, but some things we know for certain: Nuclear energy is a proven, reliable, clean technology that powers half of Ontario and employs 71,000 Canadians. It is technology pioneered in Ontario that now leads the world in efficiency. And we know that the industry never claimed it would be “too cheap to meter,” a myth that has been soundly debunked. The environmental impact of nuclear energy is smaller than any other large-scale supply option. Moreover, the spent fuel can be recycled into more fuel with the potential to generate a hundred times more energy. If the Clean Air Alliance is concerned about terrorism and energy infrastructure, I suggest it take a hard look at the massive long-range transmission and natural gas network it proposes to fill the gap. Jeremy Whitlock, Past President, Canadian Nuclear Society, Deep River Nuclear’s future: Fission or fizzle, Insight Jan. 16 Author Wayne Lilley states that nuclear power is “the best emissions-free source of electricity.” This is false. Nuclear power plants are not “emissions-free.” In 2010, Advertising Standards Canada formally decided that ads making this claim were inaccurate, unsupported, and misleading. ASC’s decision was based, in part, on documentation proving that CANDU reactors at nuclear plants such as the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station emit many different contaminants: 2-propenoic acid, ammonia, aromatic hydrocarbon resin, benzene, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrazine, morpholine, nitrogen oxides, phosphoric acid, quarterly ammonium compounds, sulphur dioxide, suspended particulate matter, total hydrocarbons, as well as tritium. ASC posted a decision on its website declaring that the unqualified phrase “emission free” is inaccurate and unsupported. In its commentary, ASC stated emphatically: “it is misleading . . . for an advertiser to categorically promise one thing when, by its own admission, it can only deliver something that is significantly less.” Krystyn Tully, Vice President, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, Toronto The fizzling out of Canada’s nuclear industry is due to its high cost and poor performance. For example, consider the following facts. First, every nuclear project in Ontario’s history has gone way over budget. On average, the real costs of our nuclear projects have been 2.5 times greater than their original cost estimates. Second, Ontario had to increase the output of its dirty coal plants by over 120 per cent between 1995 and 2003 due to the poor performance of our CANDU nuclear reactors. Third, due to our heavy reliance on unreliable CANDU reactors it took Ontario more than eight days to fully recover from the 2003 blackout versus less than two days for New York State. The good news is that we can replace our aging nuclear reactors with lower cost and more reliable options to keep out lights on, namely, energy efficiency, renewable energy, natural gas-fired combined heat and power plants and water power imports from Quebec. Jack Gibbons, Chair, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Toronto Or should it be fusion or fizzle? Work is underway on building the nuclear fusion reactor ITER at Cadarache in the south of France, yet we hear little or nothing about it in mainstream news. Scientists from seven nations are working on this — China, India, Korea, Japan, Europe, the U.S. and Russia — to show that nuclear fusion is an energy source of the future. Teresa Porter, Newmarket