Nuclear energy isn't 'clean'
Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 10:33 am
Nuclear energy isn't 'clean' - Opinion
[ https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opini ... 71613.html ]
By: Dave Taylor, Winnipeg Free Press, April 25, 2018
Canada’s energy plan is dreadfully tainted by the stain of oil and the contamination of nuclear power.
Our beleaguered minister of natural resources, [Jim Carr] who is responsible for this vague and vacillating vision, is trying to persuade the public that he advocates a clean and green energy future for Canada.
The $2.2 billion to stimulate "clean-tech" energy development from this budget is being tossed around in a shotgun approach.
It is clear that the government of British Columbia and members of our chamber of sober second thought [the Canadian Senate] aren’t satisfied with these federal meanderings.
In fact, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr’s briefings to senators about the Kinder Morgan pipeline were characterized as being far from substantial.
Two senators went so far as to accuse Carr of being "unhelpful" in his explanations and of "blaming others."
Straight answers appear to be hard to come by.
Although there have been a number of positive renewable initiatives developed under his auspices, it has become evident that the Natural Resources Department does not have a clear path forward following the principles of renewable and sustainable energy development.
These are the very ideals our prime minister advocated for Canada at the Paris Climate Summit.
Carr’s department has launched a website with the acronym NICE: Nuclear Innovation: Clean Energy. It’s aimed at involving youth and women leaders in planning for a nuclear future.
Nuclear power generation, however, is neither the future, nor clean.
This energy dinosaur has left us with nuclear waste full of insidious poisons that threaten our environment for millennia.
A large tract of land in Manitoba is being designated for just this purpose.
Essentially, the reactor site at Pinawa will be filled with concrete and become a dead zone, and if the concrete fails and these poisons are not contained, they stand to contaminate the Winnipeg River and all that exists downstream.
The new cheap plan to decommission the site was so poorly put together by Carr’s government contractors that it was slammed by scientists and environmentalists alike and sent back to the drawing board.
The federal regulators are about to grant the same subcontractors a year’s extension to their licence in May by shortcutting the [licence] renewal procedure and eliminating public input.
This so-called "challenge" Natural Resources is promoting has been initiated in conjunction with an organization called the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), which features new energy ideas from around the world, but conspicuously does not have the word nuclear anywhere on its website.
[Nevertheless] their spokesman, Christian Zinglersen, made it very clear when questioned about this position: "I think it is difficult to find scenarios which point to massive decarbonization efforts in the decades ahead that do not include a substantial share of nuclear power in the global power mix."
He lauds Canada for hosting the CEM Ministerial meeting in 2019 and also views nuclear as a "clean" source of energy.
Carr, at a constituency get-together in a local community centre, seemed to be unaware of this initiative developed by the staff of natural resources.
He kept insisting that Canada is following a clean energy mix but, when pressed, was not able to actually associate the words "clean" and "nuclear" together because, as we all know, Canada’s nuclear industry has not solved its waste problem which befouls its operations.
The plans for a new prototype nuclear reactor in Manitoba, the futile attempt to sell reactors abroad and the sheer gall of policy makers around the world to hide their nuclear aspirations behind the words "clean energy" is an attempt to hoodwink the public.
We need a federal plan where our carbon taxes go toward the future, a future where our economy is based on renewable, sustainable and legitimately clean sources of energy.
- - - -
Dave Taylor teaches at the University of Winnipeg and has published many articles on the nuclear industry.
= = = =
Background – Dr. Gordon Edwards
Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ringing endorsement of the Paris climate accord, accompanied by praise for the bold and inspiring vision of an energy future based on clean, sustainable, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the reality of Canada’s energy policies and practices tells a different and contradictory story.
The Alberta tar sands, or oil sands, produce a nasty-looking sludge-like substance made up of hydrocarbons and impurities called “bitumen”. Just getting the resource out of the ground requires a lot of energy, so much so that the oil sands operation is by far the greatest greenhouse gas emitter in Canada, just due to extraction of the resource.
As the Canadian Encyclopedia says: One of the easiest ways to understand bitumen is to compare it to its cousin, conventional crude oil. Whereas conventional crude oil flows freely, bitumen does not. At room temperature it looks like cold molasses, and must be either heated or diluted before it flows. Like all petroleum, both conventional crude and bitumen are made up of hydrocarbons (i.e., organic compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen. However, compared to conventional crude oil, bitumen contains more carbon than hydrogen, as well as many more impurities, such as nitrogen, sulphur and heavy metals. In order to produce synthetic crude, these impurities must be removed and the carbon-hydrogen imbalance corrected.”
Not only do the oil sands release huge quantities of greenhouse gases during extraction, but the end product -- when burned -- produces and releases more carbon dioxide than other conventional fossil fuels, due to the disproportionate percentage of carbon.
Currently the Trudeau government is trying to ensure that the Kinder Morgan pipeline is built. This pipeline is designed to carry diluted bitumen from Alberta through British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, where the bitumen would be loaded onto ships and carried overseas to be refined elsewhere. The BC government is opposing this pipeline on the grounds that there are no proven effective methods to clean up after an accidental spill of diluted bitumen into the BC environment or into BC coastal waters. Both the Alberta government and the federal government are determined to overcome this resistance by hook or by crook and get that pipeline built.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, where 18 of Canada’s 20 nuclear power reactors are located, the provincial government has halted all support for renewable energy in order to favour the nuclear option. Already Ontario ratepayers are paying an extra levy on their monthly electricity bills to cover $30 billion of “stranded assets”. This huge debt, which is all due to various failures of Ontario’s nuclear fleet, is the very thing that decades ago bankrupted the original provincially-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. That utility has since been broken up into several companies, including Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a provincially-owned enterprise that owns all of Ontario nuclear reactors and all the radioactive wastes produced by those reactors.
Ontario’s reactors are nearing their end-of-life unless tens of billions of dollars are spent in “refurbishing” them. Refurbishment means rebuilding the reactor cores (despite intense penetrating radiation fields) and replacing, in each reactor, several kilometres worth of metallic conduits — highly radioactive pressure tubes that have become embrittled (prone to shatter) and heavily contaminated "feeder pipes” that have become corroded and whose “wall thickness” has been reduced by as much as 60 percent. Nevertheless, Ontario has opted to turn off the burgeoning business of wind and solar energy in favour of squandering billions of dollars on rebuilding the ageing fleet of nuclear reactors.
This leaves the Trudeau government in a tough spot requiring courageous leadership. But such leadership is, alas, not forthcoming. Having decided to champion the Alberta oil sands and the Kinder Morgan pipeline on the one hand, and bowing to Ontario’s choice of “used nukes” instead of new renewables, the Trudeau government has “knuckled under” and given Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr a free hand to promote a new generation of nuclear reactors, called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Minister Carr portrays nuclear energy as “clean energy”, and presents this highly speculative endeavour as one of Canada’s main “strategies" to reduce greenhouse gases.
To make matters worse, a private consortium of multinational corporations is receiving large sums of federal tax money (close to a billion dollars a year) to adopt quick-and-dirty approaches to radioactive waste management and nuclear decommissioning (i.e. radioactive demolition) activities so as to allow them to proceed as rapidly as possible with building and testing new SMR reactor designs on Canadian soil. This “venture capital" investment will not only be subsidized and tolerated by Canadians, but will also produce even more radioactive waste for our descendants to inherit.
One of the radioactive waste shortcuts envisaged by the consortium is to avoid the necessity of dismantling the radioactive structures of defunct nuclear reactors in order to package the rubble and remove it from the site, but instead to just bury the whole radioactive mess in Portland cement and abandon it beside a major water body such as the Winnipeg or Ottawa Rivers.
Even under the most optimistic estimates, SMRs will not be able to be deployed for decades to come, during which time the buildup of greenhouse gases will continue unabated, even as the existing nuclear option continues to shrivel. In the western world, the number of nuclear reactors is steadily decreasing. Meanwhile billions of tax dollars will be poured into subsidizing this new nuclear adventure of SMRs — a very flimsy platform indeed to offer any hope of arresting, let alone reversing, the inexorable buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the steady accumulation of radioactive wastes on land. Each of these legacies — greenhouse gases and radioactive wastes — will leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren with little manoeuvring room.
Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
http://www.ccnr.org
[ https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opini ... 71613.html ]
By: Dave Taylor, Winnipeg Free Press, April 25, 2018
Canada’s energy plan is dreadfully tainted by the stain of oil and the contamination of nuclear power.
Our beleaguered minister of natural resources, [Jim Carr] who is responsible for this vague and vacillating vision, is trying to persuade the public that he advocates a clean and green energy future for Canada.
The $2.2 billion to stimulate "clean-tech" energy development from this budget is being tossed around in a shotgun approach.
It is clear that the government of British Columbia and members of our chamber of sober second thought [the Canadian Senate] aren’t satisfied with these federal meanderings.
In fact, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr’s briefings to senators about the Kinder Morgan pipeline were characterized as being far from substantial.
Two senators went so far as to accuse Carr of being "unhelpful" in his explanations and of "blaming others."
Straight answers appear to be hard to come by.
Although there have been a number of positive renewable initiatives developed under his auspices, it has become evident that the Natural Resources Department does not have a clear path forward following the principles of renewable and sustainable energy development.
These are the very ideals our prime minister advocated for Canada at the Paris Climate Summit.
Carr’s department has launched a website with the acronym NICE: Nuclear Innovation: Clean Energy. It’s aimed at involving youth and women leaders in planning for a nuclear future.
Nuclear power generation, however, is neither the future, nor clean.
This energy dinosaur has left us with nuclear waste full of insidious poisons that threaten our environment for millennia.
A large tract of land in Manitoba is being designated for just this purpose.
Essentially, the reactor site at Pinawa will be filled with concrete and become a dead zone, and if the concrete fails and these poisons are not contained, they stand to contaminate the Winnipeg River and all that exists downstream.
The new cheap plan to decommission the site was so poorly put together by Carr’s government contractors that it was slammed by scientists and environmentalists alike and sent back to the drawing board.
The federal regulators are about to grant the same subcontractors a year’s extension to their licence in May by shortcutting the [licence] renewal procedure and eliminating public input.
This so-called "challenge" Natural Resources is promoting has been initiated in conjunction with an organization called the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), which features new energy ideas from around the world, but conspicuously does not have the word nuclear anywhere on its website.
[Nevertheless] their spokesman, Christian Zinglersen, made it very clear when questioned about this position: "I think it is difficult to find scenarios which point to massive decarbonization efforts in the decades ahead that do not include a substantial share of nuclear power in the global power mix."
He lauds Canada for hosting the CEM Ministerial meeting in 2019 and also views nuclear as a "clean" source of energy.
Carr, at a constituency get-together in a local community centre, seemed to be unaware of this initiative developed by the staff of natural resources.
He kept insisting that Canada is following a clean energy mix but, when pressed, was not able to actually associate the words "clean" and "nuclear" together because, as we all know, Canada’s nuclear industry has not solved its waste problem which befouls its operations.
The plans for a new prototype nuclear reactor in Manitoba, the futile attempt to sell reactors abroad and the sheer gall of policy makers around the world to hide their nuclear aspirations behind the words "clean energy" is an attempt to hoodwink the public.
We need a federal plan where our carbon taxes go toward the future, a future where our economy is based on renewable, sustainable and legitimately clean sources of energy.
- - - -
Dave Taylor teaches at the University of Winnipeg and has published many articles on the nuclear industry.
= = = =
Background – Dr. Gordon Edwards
Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ringing endorsement of the Paris climate accord, accompanied by praise for the bold and inspiring vision of an energy future based on clean, sustainable, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the reality of Canada’s energy policies and practices tells a different and contradictory story.
The Alberta tar sands, or oil sands, produce a nasty-looking sludge-like substance made up of hydrocarbons and impurities called “bitumen”. Just getting the resource out of the ground requires a lot of energy, so much so that the oil sands operation is by far the greatest greenhouse gas emitter in Canada, just due to extraction of the resource.
As the Canadian Encyclopedia says: One of the easiest ways to understand bitumen is to compare it to its cousin, conventional crude oil. Whereas conventional crude oil flows freely, bitumen does not. At room temperature it looks like cold molasses, and must be either heated or diluted before it flows. Like all petroleum, both conventional crude and bitumen are made up of hydrocarbons (i.e., organic compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen. However, compared to conventional crude oil, bitumen contains more carbon than hydrogen, as well as many more impurities, such as nitrogen, sulphur and heavy metals. In order to produce synthetic crude, these impurities must be removed and the carbon-hydrogen imbalance corrected.”
Not only do the oil sands release huge quantities of greenhouse gases during extraction, but the end product -- when burned -- produces and releases more carbon dioxide than other conventional fossil fuels, due to the disproportionate percentage of carbon.
Currently the Trudeau government is trying to ensure that the Kinder Morgan pipeline is built. This pipeline is designed to carry diluted bitumen from Alberta through British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, where the bitumen would be loaded onto ships and carried overseas to be refined elsewhere. The BC government is opposing this pipeline on the grounds that there are no proven effective methods to clean up after an accidental spill of diluted bitumen into the BC environment or into BC coastal waters. Both the Alberta government and the federal government are determined to overcome this resistance by hook or by crook and get that pipeline built.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, where 18 of Canada’s 20 nuclear power reactors are located, the provincial government has halted all support for renewable energy in order to favour the nuclear option. Already Ontario ratepayers are paying an extra levy on their monthly electricity bills to cover $30 billion of “stranded assets”. This huge debt, which is all due to various failures of Ontario’s nuclear fleet, is the very thing that decades ago bankrupted the original provincially-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. That utility has since been broken up into several companies, including Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a provincially-owned enterprise that owns all of Ontario nuclear reactors and all the radioactive wastes produced by those reactors.
Ontario’s reactors are nearing their end-of-life unless tens of billions of dollars are spent in “refurbishing” them. Refurbishment means rebuilding the reactor cores (despite intense penetrating radiation fields) and replacing, in each reactor, several kilometres worth of metallic conduits — highly radioactive pressure tubes that have become embrittled (prone to shatter) and heavily contaminated "feeder pipes” that have become corroded and whose “wall thickness” has been reduced by as much as 60 percent. Nevertheless, Ontario has opted to turn off the burgeoning business of wind and solar energy in favour of squandering billions of dollars on rebuilding the ageing fleet of nuclear reactors.
This leaves the Trudeau government in a tough spot requiring courageous leadership. But such leadership is, alas, not forthcoming. Having decided to champion the Alberta oil sands and the Kinder Morgan pipeline on the one hand, and bowing to Ontario’s choice of “used nukes” instead of new renewables, the Trudeau government has “knuckled under” and given Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr a free hand to promote a new generation of nuclear reactors, called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Minister Carr portrays nuclear energy as “clean energy”, and presents this highly speculative endeavour as one of Canada’s main “strategies" to reduce greenhouse gases.
To make matters worse, a private consortium of multinational corporations is receiving large sums of federal tax money (close to a billion dollars a year) to adopt quick-and-dirty approaches to radioactive waste management and nuclear decommissioning (i.e. radioactive demolition) activities so as to allow them to proceed as rapidly as possible with building and testing new SMR reactor designs on Canadian soil. This “venture capital" investment will not only be subsidized and tolerated by Canadians, but will also produce even more radioactive waste for our descendants to inherit.
One of the radioactive waste shortcuts envisaged by the consortium is to avoid the necessity of dismantling the radioactive structures of defunct nuclear reactors in order to package the rubble and remove it from the site, but instead to just bury the whole radioactive mess in Portland cement and abandon it beside a major water body such as the Winnipeg or Ottawa Rivers.
Even under the most optimistic estimates, SMRs will not be able to be deployed for decades to come, during which time the buildup of greenhouse gases will continue unabated, even as the existing nuclear option continues to shrivel. In the western world, the number of nuclear reactors is steadily decreasing. Meanwhile billions of tax dollars will be poured into subsidizing this new nuclear adventure of SMRs — a very flimsy platform indeed to offer any hope of arresting, let alone reversing, the inexorable buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the steady accumulation of radioactive wastes on land. Each of these legacies — greenhouse gases and radioactive wastes — will leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren with little manoeuvring room.
Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
http://www.ccnr.org