ENERGY PROBE: Stop Nuclear Expansion

[Oscar]

ENERGY PROBE: Stop Nuclear Expansion

http://www.energyprobe.org/energyprobe/ ... Energy.pdf

November 27, 2002

Dear Friend:

Thanks to Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, Ontarians are facing power shortages, leading to great risks of brownouts and blackouts.

The cause of our power problems is straightforward. Instead of promoting conservation and modern energy technologies that are clean and inexpensive to build, the government is betting our future on risky and expensive nuclear power, and polluting coal power.

For example, the government plans to spend $2.5 billion to refurbish four 30-year-old reactors at Pickering that became so dilapidated and dangerous that Hydro shut them down five years ago. Mike Harris then undid this sensible decision and we have been paying for it ever since.

The Pickering overhaul is already four years late and 200% over budget – a repeat of the uncontrolled nuclear spending that raised costs and bankrupted the old Ontario Hydro.

Meanwhile, because no one can compete against taxpayer-subsidized nuclear reactors, almost no environmentally clean, small-scale private power plants are being built anywhere in the province. Just the opposite. The many private power plants that had been in the works before the government resumed its backing of nuclear power have all been shelved.

The companies that were investing in them have now left Ontario.

Instead, they are building their highefficiency natural gas plants, cogeneration plants and windmills in other provinces and in the US.

Because clean, inexpensive power producers have gone, and because our government is sinking ever more money into the failed nuclear technology, our bills are rising. Ironically, some of these companies are now exporting their small-scale power to us from outside the province, preventing our power rates from climbing even higher.

There is a way out of this mess, but we need to act quickly to avoid blackouts and soaring costs.

First, we must stop throwing more good money after bad refurbishing old nuclear plants.

Nothing threatens Ontarians more than being overwhelmingly reliant on this one obsolete technology, which could shut down the entire province if a serious common fault emerges that requires us to shut down most or all of the reactors.

Second, we must make small-scale private power producers welcome in Ontario, not by offering incentives to a few token generators – the approach now taken by Ernie Eves – but by genuinely letting private power producers compete on a level playing field against coal and nuclear plants.

In a fair contest that pits the economics of nuclear power against the economics of windmills, windmills would win every time. Similarly, no coal plant in Ontario can compete against economically and environmentally superior natural gas technologies.

The nuclear and coal lobby doesn’t want fair competition. It knows that the same thing would happen to nuclear and coal plants here as happened in the UK after the power system became competitive. When the U.K. broke up its monopoly in 1990 and created some 20 competing power companies, most of the new companies quickly abandoned nuclear and coal plants, replacing them with natural gas, cogeneration and renewable technologies. The UK system became one of the world’s cleanest and most reliable. Without monopoly pricing, power rates plunged by 30% for all customers – whether small residential customers or large industries.

Only one of the UK’s 20 companies suffered in the competitive marketplace – British Energy, the only nuclear company.

Because Ontario Hydro’s successor knows that it can’t compete on a level playing field, it has lobbied first Mike Harris and then Ernie Eves to bring back the power monopoly to Ontario.

Sadly, the Ontario government has done their bidding. Instead of promoting competition, the government only split up Ontario Hydro’s assets into two public monopolies -- one that runs the generating plants, another that runs the transmission lines. As a result, the old Hydro monopoly is still alive and almost as strong as before. The provincial monopoly system is once again racking up nuclear debts and once again endangering the entire province.

With your help, we stopped the reckless power monopoly before, forcing it to cancel dozens of planned reactors and to control their costs. Working together, we can avoid environmental and economic ruin in Ontario’s power system and stop the new monopoly, too.

Sincerely,

Tom Adams
Executive Director

Energy Probe Research Foundation 225 BRUNSWICK AVENUE, TORONTO, ONTARIO M5S 2M6
Phone: (416) 964-9223 Fax: (416) 964-8239
E-mail: EnergyProbe@nextcity.com Internet: www.EnergyProbe.org

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