On Wednesday morning, as part of Toronto-based anti-nuke group DONT NUKE TO!, I commemorated the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster by unfurling an enormous stop sign banner in the middle of the intersection of Yonge and Dundas in the centre of Toronto.
I was in the intersection of Yonge and Dundas simply because I'm 27 years old and I've been alive for four nuclear meltdowns -- unit 4 at Chernobyl, and units 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi.
I've seen reports of the radioactive materials contaminating more that 125,000 square kilometres in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, causing hundreds of thousands of people to be relocated, willingly and otherwise. I've also seen the 30km exclusion zone around Chernobyl, an area that includes the once bustling city of Pripyat, which has now become a site of post-apocalyptic curiousity.
There is also the matter of Chernobyl's collapsing ad hoc 'Sarcophagus', the concrete structure built to contain the radioactive contents of reactor four. The Sarcophagus around Chernobyl is rapidly deteriorating, and no longer a reliable guard against the radioactivity of the station. An international campaign launched by the European Commission to fund a new containment at Chernobyl is hoping to be completed by 2015.
In other words, I commemorated Chernobyl's anniversary in hopes of making clear the ongoing and horrific impacts of nuclear energy. When this unruly technology isn't contained, it can cause mass displacement, radioactive contamination of vital land and require indefinite vigilance to prevent more fallout.
In Ontario, where our government intends to build two new reactors and rebuild four others at the Darlington Nuclear Station, it is especially important to consider the risks of continuing with nuclear.
A 2011 report by the Centre for Spatial Economics (C4SE) outlined some of the effects of a nuclear disaster at the Darlington Nuclear Station. The Centre found that an accident at Darlington severe enough to enact a 20km exclusion zone for a year-long period would displace 465,000 residents and make their 167,000 households uninhabitable.
In economic terms, a one-year exclusion zone around Darlington would shut down 150,000 workplaces and prevent the region from generating $10 billion in gross domestic product. There is also the small matter of making the 401 highway and the CN, Via Rail and GO train lines that run parallel to it impassable in the 20km exclusion zone around Darlington.
All of these results, C4SE indicates, would intensify in impact if the exclusion zone were to be maintained for more than one year.
Even after Chernobyl and Fukushima, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission still asserts that the Canadian reactor, the CANDU, "does not pose significant risks". However, there are some legitimate concerns specific to Canadian reactors.
However, the CANDU reactor shares a significant design flaw with Chernobyl's reactors -positive reactivity. This means that like Chernobyl's RBMK design, the CANDU can experience a violent and sudden increase in energy output if the flow of cooling water is interrupted and the safety shutdowns fail.
If there is a sudden and unmitigated burst of energy in a reactor, as seen in Chernobyl, explosions can happen quickly and a meltdown of the reactor core is soon to follow.
Since Chernobyl, there have been some efforts on the part of international regulators to tighten the safety of nukes. In 2000, the International Atomic Energy Agency set global safety standards for new reactors to be inherently safe, or in other words, free of fundamentally hazardous design concepts.
Because positive radioactivity is a hazardous feature of its design, the CANDU does not meet new international standards of inherent safety.
While Canada's nuclear industry has optimistically pointed to the availability of a new design without this problem, the ACR-1000, it has never actually been built. At this point, it's merely an expensive concept.
What's more, 11 years after the CANDU design no longer met international standards, the old CANDU with its inherently hazardous design crept onto the list of potential new reactor types for Darlington.
This means that despite international standards, and the demonstrated risks involved in this design, Ontario might get stuck with brand new, old nuclear reactors. Add the proposed life-extension of four more CANDU reactors at Darlington and the risks for Ontario escalates.
Yesterday morning, that banner I helped unfurl read "Remember Chernobyl? Stop Darlington," causing conversations about a different energy future to perculate all around me.
In that intersection of Dundas and Yonge, we stood -- about 60 km away from Darlington and only 30 km from Pickering Nuclear Station -- working on a energy future without any more Chernobyls or Fukushimas.
Steve Cornwell is an MA candidate at York University. He is interested in the interactions of social movements, science and technology. Steve has worked on energy issues with Greenpeace Canada, Environmental Defense, and Safe and Green Energy Peterborough. Follow Steve Cornwell at Twitter.com/Steve_Cornwell
Well, of note is that no Ontario reactor has had problems as what happen with your 4 examples. We do risk management all the time, and ensure that these things would not happen.
In Bruce County, many folks are up in arms about industrial wind turbines and are asking for a moritorium on building them or putting them on the grid until intedependent health studies are completed for negative effects on human health. So again, it's about mitigating risk.
As a resident of Bruce County who also lives near Bruce Nuclear Power, I feel quite safe as most of my neighbours and friends work there and want to ensure that a high safety standard is maintained to ensure their con't employment with a good employer who pays extremely well, and to make sure their family and friends are "safe".
Do we really want Ontario to emulate Germany in terms of its decision to abandon nuclear power? Germany's plan to shut down all of its nuclear plants will result in an additional 300 million tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere annually. Scientific research shows that we are quickly approaching a climate catastrophe.
Over the full life cycle, nuclear power emits 100 times less CO2 than coal and 60 times less than conventional natural gas (shale gas, which is becoming the norm, is far worse, and can cause widespread groundwater contamination and health problems). A lot of people, including myself, would prefer to have a nuclear plant in their backyard than a coal plant or a shale gas extraction facility.
Yes - let's regulate the nuclear industry and let's make sure that the plants are operating in a safe manner. But let's not get rid of the industry. The renowned climate scientists James Hansen and James Lovelock (of the Gaia hypothesis) are strong supporters of nuclear technology. So are progressives like George Monbiot. They know that coal is the real problem that we have to face in order to avert the climate crisis.
We may already be in the midst of a mass extinction event as a result of the dire circumstances at Fukushima Japan. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has recently confirmed there have been three meltdowns and they are ongoing, unabated for thirteen months and no effort has been made to contain them. Technology has to be developed to deal with the melted out corium under the reactors. The area around the reactors is so highly radioactive even robots are unable to operate. Reactor #4 building is on the verge of collapse. Seismisity standards rate the building at zero meaning that even a small earthquake could turn the building into a heap of rubble and sitting on top of the building in a pool that is cracked, leaking and precarious even without an earthquake are 1565 fuel rods some of them fresh that were ready to go into the reactor on the morning of March 11th when the earthquake struck. If they are MOX fuel containing 6% plutonium, one fuel rod has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people. If this pool collapses as U.S. Senator Wyden is warning after his visit to Fukushima, we will be facing a mass extinction event.
Now I appreciate the fact that government shills of the nuclear industry have been keeping this news from the public, but I find it difficult to comprehend how anyone who has any real knowledge of the nuclear industry could continue to support it.
You can find images of the devastation at Fukishima here: www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/a-visual-tour-of-the-fuel-pools-of-fukus...