Why should we trust the nuclear industry when it doesn’t trust itself? That’s the underlining question of a Greenpeace report released this week.
The Harper government has tabled the Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act in Parliament. The bill would, if passed, artificially cap the liability of a nuclear operator for accidents at $650 million – a miniscule fraction of the likely actual cost of a nuclear disaster. Why?
We’re once again grateful to Areva’s North America blog for pointing us towards yet another piece of nuclear hype, spin and propaganda. This time it comes from Jim Prentice, Canada’s Minister for the Environment.
Nuclear will play a key role in our clean energy strategy. And the reality is: nuclear is non-emitting.
Let’s be blunt here. This isn’t just misleading. This isn’t just misinformation. This is a lie.
Nuclear energy is not clean energy. One need only look at the environmental destruction caused by uranium mining. In his book ‘Wollaston: People Resisting Genocide’, Miles Goldstick details the damage brought to the lives of the people living around the uranium mines in Canada’s Saskatchewan province. The accumulation of radioactive isotopes in edible plants. The lead, arsenic, uranium and radium found downstream from the mines. The spills that J.A. Keily, then Vice President of Production and Engineering for Gulf Minerals Rabbit Lake, described in 1980 as ‘probably too numerous to count’.
These are stories found wherever uranium mining takes place. The ruined lives, the contamination, the cover-ups, and the deception. And that’s before we even consider what happens to the waste produced by generating nuclear energy.
As for ‘nuclear is non-emitting’, it takes just five seconds to Google for ‘nuclear power’ and ‘emissions’ to show that statement for the ridiculous falsehood that it is.
May we remind you that Jim Prentice is Canada’s Minister for the Environment?
This is, unfortunately, a deception that the whole nuclear industry wants you to believe. A child could see through it and yet the industry and its supporters persist. When the US’s EPA - that’s the Environmental Protection Agency – is filing nuclear energy under ‘clean’ energy, you know how far this deception has spread. Look again what EPA stands (or is supposed to stand) for. You begin to wonder it these people think you’re a moron.
The nuclear industry does not want you to look at where uranium comes from or where it goes to afterwards. To do so would destroy the myths that have supported it this long. ‘Look, our hands are clean,’ it says, while trying to hide its dirty fingers.
So, we’ve all heard the hype and propaganda about the forthcoming nuclear ‘renaissance’ with its shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors. The thing is, it’s looking as if the biggest barrier to this ‘renaissance’ taking place might actually be that shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors.
You see, this latest generation of nuclear reactors are, to put it mildly, a little on the flaky side…
The design for Westinghouse’s AP-1000 has recently been rejected by the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission because ‘a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes’. The projected cost of building them varies wildly as well.
GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) remains in the ‘early design stage’. Late last year, US energy corporation Exelon dropped plans to build a ESBWR in Texas because the ESBWR wouldn’t have earned them the vital government loan guarantees that keep the nuclear industry afloat. GE Hitachi also withdrew the design from the UK’s currently ongoing reactor evaluation process.
Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) also withdrew their ACR-1000 reactor design from the UK process. In July last year Canada’s own province of Ontario pulled the plug on plans to build two ACR-1000s after the project was priced at 26 billion Canadian dollars, three times what the province wanted to pay.
Which leaves us with French nuclear ogre Areva’s infamous European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) design. Two are currently under construction in the world – one in Olkiluoto in Finland and one in Flamanville in France. The EPR design has quickly become a symbol for everything wrong with the nuclear industry – expensive, late, unreliable, and farcical.
How are things going at those construction sites right now. Well, after it being announced that its anybody’s guess as to when the Olkiluoto OL3 reactor may be ready (it’s currently four years late), Areva said this week that the EPR at Flamanville is now running two years late as well. The company is also making a EUR 300 million provision on top of OL3’s rapidly expanding – and profit-killing - EUR 5.5 billion budget.
In fact, all you need to know about building an EPR reactor is summed up in this simple graph…
The graph upturns at the precise moment construction began. How much higher will those lines reach?
The nuclear industry is starting to look like its own worst enemy.
The nuclear industry's much-vaunted "renaissance" is playing out like a bad vampire flick.Every time it tries to crawl out of the grave it dug with earlier cost over-runs and the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear gets staked through the heart by an accountant.
The latest staking of the industry is the McGuinty government's decision to suspend the purchase of new reactors. They were supposed to cost a mere $6 billion and have suddenly been exposed as $26 billion monsters.
These monsters are the latest in a long line of untested reactors Atomic Energy of Canada Limited hopes will keep it alive.
But we don't even know if they'll work…
We knew there’d be a lot of people who’d say Canadian province Ontario’s embarrassing suspension of its plans for new nuclear reactors is good news, but who knew one of them would be Ontario premier, Dalton McGuinty?
‘Here's the good news: Under previous projects we didn't find out about the high pricing until we were half or three-quarters of the way or five years into the damned things,’ the premier said.
That’s some fine spin as Premier McGuinty tries to save the blushes of his administration. Only at the last minute did it realise that accepting the price tag for the new reactors would be like falling for one of those email scams promising a share of riches locked in Nigerian bank accounts.
(If only the Finnish government had had the same flash of inspiration before embarking on the farcical construction of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland. We imagine there are quite a few people referring to that reactor as a ‘damned thing’ as well.)
This is just the latest example of countries finding new nuclear reactors unaffordable. Apart from OL3 in Finland, remember Turkey’s disastrous tendering process for its first nuclear reactor? The price of electricity from a new reactor was pegged at three times the average price of electricity in Turkey. Premier McGuinty could have saved him and his administration a lot of hassle if he’d only read the news.
Just how his plans for new reactors in Ontario come back from this he isn’t saying. Somehow, the price of these new reactors has to be reduced by two-thirds to match the province’s budget. Good luck with that. In the meantime, while Ontario crosses its fingers and waits for the price of nuclear power to fall, how about investing in cheaper, more reliable and safer alternatives?
Nuclear power is cheap, the nuclear industry boasts. Isn’t time that myth was finally laid to rest? The latest example of nuclear’s false financial promise has emerged in Canada in recent days.
Late last month, the Ontario provincial government announced it was postponing its plans to build new nuclear reactors after it was found that the cost would be "billions" too high compared to what the province is able to pay.
Now it turns out that the price tag is in fact three times higher than what was expected: for two Candu reactors is 26 billion Canadian dollars – 16 billion Euros or eight billion each. Two EPR reactors would cost Ontario 23.6 billion Canadian dollars – 14.7 billion Euros or 7.35 billion each.
When Areva persuaded the Finnish government back in 2002 to build the disaster-prone EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, the price they quoted was 2.5 billion Euros (it’s currently costing five billion and counting). Seven years later and an EPR costs nearly three times as much. Talk about inflation!
The two Candu reactors would cost 10,800 Canadian dollars per kilowatt of power capacity. In 2007 the Ontario Power Authority assumed for a price of $2,900 per kilowatt – a third of the actual cost. The EPR price tag now says €4,587 per kilowatt of power capacity, while the International Energy Agency still tends to use a price of €1,600 per kilowatt in policy recommendations. Can you think of any other walk of life where getting figures so wrong would be tolerated? Thank goodness these guys aren’t in the census business – imagine the chaos they’d cause.
So what has the Ontario provincial government done? That’s right, it’s gone to the national government to ask for a bail-out, like a kid begging daddy for a larger allowance.
‘By simplifying any one submission down to a single number at this point would be very difficult to do and highly speculative,’ said Amy Tang, a spokeswoman for the Ontario energy ministry. She’s absolutely right. No-one can ever be sure how much a nuclear reactor will cost, least of all the nuclear industry whose promises and projections should never be believed, until the thing is completed. Going on previous experience, you should expect those figures to rise sharply.
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
Globe and Mail: Canada Reactor design puts safety of nuclear plants into question
’Canadian nuclear safety regulators say they have underestimated the seriousness of a design feature at the country's electricity-producing reactors that would cause them to experience dangerous power pulses during a major accident. If reactors are not shut down quickly, their ability to keep radioactivity from escaping would be put to the test, according to an internal commission document. The document says Canada's seven nuclear stations, which all use Candu technology, have a feature known as "positive reactivity feedback," in which their atomic chain reactions automatically speed up if the water pumped into the reactors to cool them leaks, one of the worst accidents possible at a nuclear station. If reactors aren't immediately shut down during this type of incident, positive reactivity leads to a quick snowballing in the pace of nuclear reactions, which in turn could cause potentially damaging overheating. The document was obtained by the anti-nuclear environmental group Greenpeace through a federal Access to Information Act request. Positive reactivity is "the Achilles heel of Candu," said spokesman Shawn-Patrick Stensil, who contended it amounts to a design flaw that puts the safety of the reactors into question.’
Continue reading "Nuclear News: Canada Reactor design puts safety of nuclear plants into question" »
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
Bloomberg: Gulf’s Push for Nuclear Experts May Delay U.K. Plans
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. utilities risk falling behind with plans to build nuclear power plants because Middle East nations may use higher salaries to lure skilled workers, reactor builder Westinghouse Electric Co. said. “These nations have no legacy program to use as a source for nuclear expertise,” said Adrian Bull, U.K. stakeholder relations manager at Westinghouse, a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp. “If you have literally nothing to go on, you have to be the Chelsea or Real Madrid and buy in the people from elsewhere.” Oil-producing nations including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait plan nuclear plants to meet growing energy demand at home while exporting fuel abroad. The U.A.E. plans to select companies to develop an atomic power program by the end of this year and has a 2017 target date for completing its first reactor, the same year Electricite de France SA plans to start a new British nuclear plant.
Continue reading "Nuclear News: Gulf’s Push for Nuclear Experts May Delay U.K. Plans" »
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
China View: IAEA discovers traces of uranium in Syria
’CAIRO, June 6 (Xinhua) -- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Friday that it has found traces of processed uranium in a second site in Syrian capital Damascus, Pan-Arab Al-Arabiya TV reported on Saturday. The IAEA is investigating a U.S. intelligence report which claimed that a secret DPRK-designed nuclear reactor that Syria has almost completed for the production of plutonium.’
Continue reading "Nuclear News: IAEA discovers traces of uranium in Syria" »
...maybe. But weird for sure. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, your eye might have caught something strange among the nuclear news. Let's see...
How often has it happened to you that you send an email to the wrong person, or say something nasty in the wrong Skype window, or even to upload some information on the internet when you shouldn't have? This is something likely to happen to any of us, at least to me.
Now, what are the possibilities of this happening to the federal government of the United States? Yes, mistake like this can happen anytime, we are all humans after all. But what is the probability of the US federal government uploading a 266-page 'highly confidential' report onto the internet? I'd say slightly less probable. Especially when the document gives ‘detailed information about hundreds of the nation's civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons’ and the US government leaves it online for two full days before withdrawing it. Ok. So big mistakes can happen even to professional experts and even when it might jeopardize the security of a whole nation... unless.... unless they just wanted to try their luck. Yes, that must be it.
Yesterday it was the turn of Canada to try its own luck and test the national media and public opinion: according to Reuters, some Canadian officials "left a binder full of confidential nuclear documents in a television studio". The funniest part is that they did not try to retrieve the documents. Not even after six days. Alright, it might be some political manoeuver, but still the message is pretty clear to me: Greenpeace is not the only one to want an open public debate on Nukes.
So who's next? Let's see what info we mistakenly receive tomorrow...
(This is a guest post by Anne-Laure Meladeck, GPI Climate & Energy Assistant for Greenpeace International)
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
AHN: Pickering Nuclear Power Station Lacks Experienced Staff To Deal With Serious Accident, Emergencies
’Calgary, Alberta (AHN) - The Chalk River nuclear reactor shutdown has Canada take a second look at its nuclear facilities. An assessment made by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission of the country's seven nuclear plants for 2008 showed that the nation's oldest power reactor in Pickering may compromise public safety because of its shortage of experienced staff to handle disaster and emergency situations. Aside from the experienced manpower lack, the assessment report, which will be presented at a hearing next week, pointed to the outages which had occurred at the Ontario Power Generation plant in Pickering because of equipment malfunction and other problem areas.’
Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:
Reuters: Secret Canada nuclear papers left in TV studio
’OTTAWA, June 3 (Reuters) - Senior Canadian officials left a binder full of confidential nuclear documents in a television studio and made no attempt to retrieve them, the TV network involved said on Wednesday. The incident is likely to increase pressure on the minority Conservative government, already under fire for its handling of the economic crisis. The main opposition Liberal Party said on Tuesday it would decide next week whether to try to bring down the Conservatives in Parliament. The binder was found in a CTV television studio after a visit by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. CTV, which kept the binder for six days before breaking the news, said the documents showed the government would spend far more money on a troubled nuclear reactor than it had acknowledged.’
Continue reading "Nuclear News: Secret Canada nuclear papers left in TV studio" »
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