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New reactors for Darlington
June 16, 2008 - 6:38am
Read it here.
Ontario needs real leadership on serious demand management, conservation, efficiency, and investment in green energy sources.
Environmental Groups Voice Concern Over Darlington Hearings
http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2011/03/21/17705476.html
"A nuclear war is underway in Durham Region. Three environmental groups have come forward in an attempt to suspend the Darlington New Nuclear Power Plant environmental hearings in the wake of the ongoing accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station.
No Halt to Darlington Hearings - Police Move On Greenpeace Activists
http://www.thestar.com/business/companies/article/957791--no-halt-to-dar...
"Calls by several groups for a postponement of the hearings into proposed new nuclear reactors at Ontario Power Generation's Darlington site have been rejected by the panel reviewing safety and environmental issues. The hearings are slated to last until April 8
Earlier Monday, Mark Mattison, president of Lake Ontario Waterkeepers noted that OPG hasn't yet chosen the type of reactor it will build. That makes it impossible to do detailed analysis of air, water, and geological impacts, Mattson said. 'You are supposed to make a decision based on evidence,' he said. 'We think that evidence is lacking.'
Mattson said the earthquake and tsunami in Japan found the Achilles heel of the reactors there. 'What's our Achilles heel?' he asked. 'What are our weaknesses?' 'Is it the lack of containment of our spent fuel ponds? Is it the fact that we sit right beside our drinking water?'
Theresa McClenaghan of the Canadian Environmental Law Association also said the panel doesn't have the information it needs.
Durham Regional Police removed 4 Greenpeace protesters Tuesday at around 1:30 PM after they had chained themselves to a table in the hearing room.."
Follow The Darlington Joint Review Panel Hearings
http://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/newbuilds/upg_darlington/foll...
"The Joint Review Panel (JRP) Hearing for OPG's Darlington New Nuclear Power Plant project will take place from March 21 to April 8, 2011 at Hope Fellowship Church at 1685 Bloor St in Courtice Ontario. A toll free line is available to listen to the hearings.
webcast: http://jrpcnsc.canadacast.ca/ WEBCAST RESUMES MARCH 23 @ 9 AM
THIS IS CRAZY NO MORE NUKES!
NDP Press Release:
Well, I guess a pause is OK. It's too bad the NDP isn't prepared to actually take a stand against further nuclear power investment.
The ONDP has opposed nuclear power for years and years. The Darlington nuclear megafiasco was all the Liberal and Tory parties' baby. The bills for Darlington came rolling in to Queen's Park by 1991, the first year of the first ONDP government in Ontario, $35 billion dollars worth. A few years ago there was an audit done, and Darlington's assets were determined to be basically worthless due to aging reactors that needed replacing or upgrading at a premium to the taxpayers. Harebrained neoliberalist schemes power deregulation in Ontario were proven to be folly as the ONDP pointed out they would be for years and years. Darlington and nuclear power in Ontario has been one ongoing bottlomless nuclear money pit.
Green Alternatives to Nuclear Power
We also need to become more reliant on wind and solar energies. If we start now, Hampton believes that in the next 20 years, we should be able to cut our use of nuclear energy by about half.
'We Never Wanted To Talk About Meltdowns - by Krystyn Tully,
http://www.northumberlandview.ca/index.php?module=news&func=display&sid=...
"I am a child of the Durham Region nuclear family. I was born and raised and schooled in Oshawa, smack-dab in the middle of the Pickering and Darlington nuclear power plants. My friends' parents worked in the nuclear industry when I was younger. My friends work there today. I never wanted to talk about a 'worst case scenario' at a nuclear power plant..."
You're still quoting Howard Hampton, who hasn't been NDP leader for years. Where are the quotes from Andrea Horwath or her energy critic clearly saying the NDP opposes nuclear power expansion? Certainly not in that press release I quoted.
New Liberal energy plan is neither clean nor affordable
To go green, McGuinty must cancel nukes: Tabuns
More from the ONDP on the fight against nuclear power here
And it isn't just in Canada that the Canadian nuclear industry is expanding - this from recent WikiLeaks cables [since we don't get this news anywhere else, it seems]:
¶4. (SBU) Nuclear Cooperation: Canada is working hard to increase peaceful nuclear cooperation with Argentina.
The Canadians are going to carry out a major rehab of the Embalse nuclear energy plant in Cordoba which should total about US$800 million.
They are helping Argentina finish its Atucha II nuclear energy plant which has been under construction for years.
And, they are competing to build a new nuclear plant about which they hope the Argentines will reach a decision in the next year.
----- No New Nuclear power plants? A few shots:
It makes sense to reconsider any new construction of nuclear power plants. Yes, they will provide electricity for the grid - but that electricity that could be generated by "green alternative energy" at a lower cost, and without the potential for mega-problems like we are seeing in Japan, and without nuclear waste to deal with eventually.
There is even considerable CO2 emissions associated with nuclear power plant construction, mostly due to the massive amount of concrete used. Nuclear power is not a solution to global warming, as proponents claim.
Although one new nuclear power plant will produce a huge amount of electricity compared to a wind turbine [about the same as 30 big wind farms!!], it takes 15 bloody years to get a new nuclear power plant up and running... Those wind farms could be producing electricity in about 5 years, at a lower cost.
If not wind, then certainly natural gas is a better choice for producing electricity as compared to nuclear. The cost comparison heavily favours natural gas, and of course the hazards of nuclear must be considered.
I have to point out one of the more damning facts about nuclear power plant construction economics - no private bank will make loans for nuclear power, because it is just not economical.
They don't want Ontario to have just enough power for ourselves. The two old line parties and their private enterprising friends wanted to be able to sell power to the Northern US at a premium while Ontarians foot the bills for nuclear power.
No country in the world has more nuclear power than the USA, and they've got all the headaches of where to store the toxic waste as a result. The USA has more nuke power plants than any other country, and they are still short of power. Better that we have more nukes in our backyard so that the most wasteful, most energy-intensive and most unsustainable economy in the world can continue to stumble along its own path for self-destruction. The stoogeaucracy here in Canada isn't doing America any favours really by promising them things on the quiet which we can't afford ourselves. The whole system is corrupt from the top down.
So other than flapping gums is anyone here willing to do anything to organize against this?
Yes, we are flapping our gums, but that is part of it.
We are discussing the strategy right now, in this thread, possibly coming to a consensus about the issue.
What would you suggest, howard? I would get on board with a petition, perhaps a protest in the streets [but actually sabatoging a nuclear plant is not going to be helpfull, not at all].
----
PS - The Green Party also has a platform against nuclear power.... but the page won't load. I will get back to you on this...
The Low Level Radiation Campaign: '417,000 Cancers Forecast For Fukushima, 200km contamination zone by 2061.
http://www.llrc.org/index.html
"We research the health effects of ionising radiation. We demand a re-evalutation of the risk of radioactive pollution.."
What's a little cancer if it means propping-up an economy based on a cold war era lie?
We have no time or money to fix things at present - because we're fightin' a colder war now!
In between all this Ontario's Tories and Liberals created a Darlington nuclear megafiasco and dumped the $35 billion dollar tab for it on Bob Rae's NDP government.
First it was the Soviets. Then it was Serbs, Croats and Bosnians pissed off about how capitalism doesn't effin work worth a darn.
Then it was al-CIA'da sponsored terrorism.
What's next, invaders from Mars?
To All The Working People: Call For De-Nuke General Strike
http://jfissures.wordpress.com/
"The termination of atomic energy is the task of [the] entire humankind.."
and excellent Japan based commentary and analysis on the present catastrophe almost thoroughly ignored here (like most important things)
And the hard to get sourcebook on the true effects of the Chernobyl Catastrophe:
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
Quite frankly, I think anti-nuclear activists are basically the coal industry's useful idiots. I am not scared of nuclear power and I support the development of nuclear power to replace the base sources of energy (coal and natural gas). When people just want to close nuclear power stations, what they're really calling for, generally because they didn't think of the repercussions of what they ask, is the intensification of power generation by coal, which is known to kill around 13 000 people a year in the US alone due to air pollution. That means that, since Chernobyl, coal power has killed around 300 000 people in the US alone, most of these through respiratory diseases. Options have to be compared with each other, and it turns out that the nuclear option is one of the best ones available right now.
They claim that, no what they want is conservation... but conservation only means reduced energy consumption, it doesn't generate any energy by itself, you still need to generate the rest. They may say "wind and solar" but these sources of energy are not dependable as sole sources of power, not something they will ever get over no matter how far the technology gets. You need something you can control to provide a baseline power.
What I hear from the anti-nuclear activists is generally fear-mongering based on little to no science. I do not trust people who believe that "truthiness" is more important than truth, and the anti-nuke activists do just that.
France at least have the right thing going. On this, their elitist political culture has demonstrated its superiority in some aspects, because they have made the technically sound decision to go nuclear despite anti-nuke propaganda and agitation, and it's paying them a lot of dividends. They have some of the cheapest electricity rates in the world, they emit less greenhouse gas than most European countries and have not had any problems caused by their power plants.
This makes sense in a world where electrical efficiency doesn't matter, and one where there is ample room for waste and pollution.
Ignoring conservation and efficiency makes sense in a world where money is no object for spending on bottomless nuclear money pits, the same ones which Bay Street and Wall Street refuse to undertake full financing of due to nuclear power projects being the money-losing ventures that they are.
It might make sense for high-priced nuclear power contractors who used to tell us that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter". They don't say things like that anymore.
Conservation and efficiency is unpopular with private power producers and private distributors who only want their customers to use more not less power. Capitalists have no incentive whatsoever to promote conservation and efficiency. The less efficient our home appliances and the draftier and leakier our homes are the better it is for them. We will consume more of what they are selling and at highest prices possible.
Avoiding wasteful power usage actually makes it available for more productive things and for uses which are more in line with supporting the right to electrical power for things like essential services. The more power available for necessary usage makes electrical power cheaper to produce and distribute for use in an economy with direction and purpose. Right now we have tens of millions of drafty, leaky buildings across Canada that should either be rennovated and retrofitted with existing building technologies to save energy consumption and reduce pollution harmful to the environment and human health, or the old buildings should simply be bulldozed and rebuilt anew or simply discarded in favour of fewer buildings to heat and light in the name of efficiency.
Energy-intensive old world economies need lots of power, like much of Northern Canada's old world economies based on pulp and paper and wood mills. There is nothing to replace those jobs though due to an overall lack of central planning. Whole towns and villages across the North have simply been abandoned by foreign mining companies and lumber companies once profits are made and carted off to foreign banks leaving Canadian workers in the lurch. Nothing for a rainy day as a rule where capitalists have trampled down pieces of Canada and made bare and laid waste to over the last century to now. They leave little else to Canadians but the tabs for cleaning up their environmental mess after big business is long gone to seek out other naturally occurring wealth to exploit and raid and pollute willy nilly.
We could save the need for a number of new Darlington nuclear money pits by doing things more efficiently and conserving. Nuclear power is like doing brain surgery to cure a headache. It's an expensive solution to a problem that we could fix with less money and create a lot more jobs with wide-ranging investments than would pouring billions and billions into the pockets of a handful few nuclear power contractors who can't even give us accurate estimates for cost.
An excellent summary. Glad to see someone here think for themselves, rather than swallowing anti-nuclear power propaganda left over from the fully justified campaign against nuclear bomb testing.
And don't forget the nuclear accidents and other cock-ups, like Three Mile Island, Hanford-Washington, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima.
Canada is a net-exporter of electrical power. We aren't even using all of the electricity produced in Canada. The most energy-intensive and most wasteful economy in the world will always be ready to siphon off what surplus power Canada produces, including nuclear power subsidized by Canadians. No country has more nuclear power plants in the world, and yet their obsolete and wasteful economy is still short of electrical power and fossil fuels. At some point the world will have nothing more to give to that neutron absorber of an economy stuck in the past.
Fidel, maybe I explained it too shortly in my first post, but conservation and efficiency isn't an alternative to nuclear power.
No matter how efficient the economy becomes, we still need to produce some electricity to provide for the needs of the people and of the economy (which also provides for the needs of people). We can provide some of it through solar and wind power, but not all of it since when power is produced matters just as much as how much is actually produced, and solar and wind are unreliable, you can't force them to provide power in peak hours (look at Danemark, it ends up exporting most of its wind power because much of it is produced when there is little demand for it). So you need some forms of power-generation from the traditional sources (hydroelectric and geothermal are good too, but aren't applicable everywhere).
So you can't escape the equation, you WILL need power plants from "traditional" sources. This means either coal, gas or nuclear. There is no other choice. So what do you choose?
Personally, I opt for nuclear, because its wastes, though concentrated and dangerous, is more manageable than the wastes produced by coal and natural gas, which are dumped into the very air we breath. Basically, nuclear power controls its wastes to prevent them from entering the environment, coal and natural gas just pump it into the environment: "the solution to pollution is dilution" as they say... Which do you prefer?
Yes, there are possibilities of nuclear accidents (though we have neither the insanely dangerous reactors like the USSR had nor do we have a high likelihood of major natural disasters like Japan has), but it still means that, in normal conditions, 99,9% of the waste produced by nuclear power plants is kept out of the environment, whereas almost 100% of the waste produced by coal and natural gas is put directly into the environment in these same normal conditions.
Even in the case of these reactors in question, could you use conservation to avoid needing them? Probably. BUT this means that other coal power plants will keep running that these new reactors could have replaced. My advice: makes these new reactors AND try to increase efficiency/conservation. With the surplus of power thus obtained, shut down coal power plants.
In general, my favored energy policy is this:
-Try to increase efficiency to reduce the need for power while generating enough for the needs of the population
-When you need power plants, try for hydroelectric or geothermal first
-If you don't have the opportunity for these, then go for nuclear power
-Additionally, invest in wind and solar power to supplement your electricity-generating system, they won't ever replace traditional power plants completely, but they can help reduce the need for additional power plants
Thank you!
Thank you!
read the links, especially #15
Ah! Yes that's true. But it's a matter of deciding what methods will replace fossil fuels, which represent about 80% of energy consumption world wide and contributing the most to dangerous climate change. Nuclear is a relatively small source of power for the world outside of the USA whose most energy-intensive and most wasteful economy in the world is what no other country should attempt to emulate. And if I wasn't clear about it before, then perhaps it warrants repeating: The world can not afford to supply more oil and natural gas to what is an unsustainable economy. Because American citizens themselves do not want more nuclear power projects in their back yards is not a good reason to build them in our's so that they can buy the power from Canadian sources. Canada has enough electrical power that we should not have to create dead aquatic zones in and around Lake Winnipeg so that Manitoba Hydro can supply more power to the states. And we should not be weakening environmental laws around Lake Ontario to accommodate nuclear power expansions, like Dalton McGuinty has done already without public consultation.
Once again, the USA's is the most nuclear-powered economy in the world, and it still isn't enough power. Why are they using so much power and still experiencing economic decline?
I like what Mark Jocobson says about alternative power. Jacobson says it's possible for the world to be powered by alternative energy, using today's technology, in 20-40 years
And all pre-existing power sources replaced by solar, wind and water energy sources by 2050. And the costs would be comparable to today's power production.
Jacobson also doesn't appear to account for future advancements in building and manufacturing technologies. Smart design in architecture and manufacturing could reduce power consumption significantly according to scientists. They need money and time and a committment from the public just like nuclear does. Which path? Or does it warrant investment in alternative technologies and nuclear power physics in equal amounts?
But nuclear will have certain appeal in comparison to fossil fuels. And that's all. In addition to Japan's decades-old GE reactors now leaking toxic wastewater into to the Pacific Ocean, an estimated 20% of nuclear reactors are situated in seismically active parts of the world. And then there are tropical storm areas of the world where it's unkown whether nuclear safety features were considered when building the things and probably not if TEPCO's miserly ways on nuclear safety and fuel storage methods are typical of private, for-profit seeking power companies having nuclear in their mix of power sources.
I think all existing nuclear power plants should be phased out and mothballed safely over time. We have to learn to live within our means. If nuclear breakthroughs are made in the meantime, then we would have to reconsider nuclear for sure. But why put all our eggs in one basket? Whether nuclear or no, research into more efficient electric motors will continue, and the answer in the meantime is reduce power demand. Conservation and efficiency deliver results in the here and now whereas expensive and dangerous nuclear power projects take years to complete and always at consider cost overrun. It takes time and money to shut them down without losing money in off peak times. Nuclear and spot market electricity pricing do not work as advertised as deregulation advocates used to tell us it would here in Ontario. We need to do something now, and I don't think that public servants should allow themselves to be coerced and manipulated by a well funded nuclear power lobby. Public consultations are needed, and our two oldest political parties in Ontario circumvented that democratic process when saddling us with Darlington. And they've done it again here in the 2000s-2010s.
Darlington Nuclear News:
http://interceder.net/list/darlington-nuclear
Darlington Nuclear Critics
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper
http://www.waterkeeper.ca/
"Canadian nuclear plant operaters would have to pay no more than $75 million in liability claims if a nuclear disaster like that unfolding in Japan were to occur in Canada..."
Groups Across Canada Call For An Inquiry Into The Future of Nuclear Power
http://www.mediacoop.ca/newsrelease/6812
Association Of German Utility Companies Calls For Abolishing Nuclear Power By 2020
http://fukushima.greenaction-japan.org/2011/04/09/association-of-german-...
"Germany's utility companies want 'swift and complete' abolishment of nuclear power in the wake of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima reactors, says their umbrella organization."
NDPP, you do know that this news confirms my description of anti-nuclear activists as "the coal industry's useful idiots", right? Who do you think this association represents mostly? That's right, coal and natural gas industries. They're the big players in the association and they made that statement against the will of the members involved in the nuclear industry.
This statement is a ploy by the coal and gas industries to displace nuclear and so get more demand for their own dirty electricity.
So why do you choose nuclear syphilis over coal gonorrhea? They're both lethal. Nukes worse. You need to stop drinking the nuclear industry's poison cool aid. After Chernobyl and now Fukushima it's gotta be finito for nuclear power, my friend, otherwise we're toast. Read #15 about the true costs of a nuclear accident like Chernobyl - it's more than we can or should ever pay.
I explained it before. Coal is much, much worse, because nuclear, the vast majority of the time, is controlled and has little to no impacts on people's lives. There are serious accidents that occurred, but I still prefer these to the continued poisoning and slow, crawling disaster of coal and natural gas. These accidents can also be avoided, both Chernobyl and Fukushima were preventable, Chernobyl, by using a containment building and Fukushima, by preparing for a larger earthquake and tsunami than what it was prepared for (other power plants were affected as much by the earthquake as Fukushima Dai-Ichi but haven't had anywhere near the level of problems of that power plant, so even under-designed plants had a more than 50% chance of surviving without major accident through this earthquake and tsunami).
If nuclear power is to die because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, then the deaths related to this decision because of increased fossil fuel power generation would quickly dwarf the number of deaths that could ever be attributed directly to the disasters at both stations.
For what it's worth, some scientists are suggesting smaller nuclear power plants would be safer and meltdowns less likely, or at least meltdowns more easily dealt with. I dunno. I think r&d of nuclear power physics suffered a big setback in the 70s and 80s with protests around the world against nuclear power. A cold war was still on.
Another aspect of nuclear power that won't go away is nuclear weapons. A certain set of countries seem to want to monopolize nuclear power as well as related nuclear weapons tech. It's been referred to as part of the technological imperialism of the last century carrying over. It's a way of keeping the west built up and metering out the technology to nations friendly to empire only. And some of those nations that have quietly acquired nuclear power and weapons capability don't have very good records for upholding basic human rights themselves.
I think that Canada is a country that could do very well without pursuing nuclear energy here at home. It doesn't mean we have to give up doing nuclear research.
But countries like Iran, for instance, have shown a real need for alternative power sources other than oil. The United Nations says developing electrical power sources is key to human rights issues for any nation. And nuclear power is highly controversial on the political side of things. I think they could be a lot smarter about nuclear policies and pursuing world peace in general.