Give Green Energy a Fighting Chance

For the Greenpeace BLOG 2011-04-22
It is not surprising that, following a debacle such as has occurred in Japan that you would reassert an anti-nuclear position. I think it is fair to say that all of us would like energy producing technologies which do not incur any possibility of engendering mishaps. The place we part company, however, is in your apparent belief that we are there now; that there are renewable alternatives which can replace all (or enough of) the power we presently consume without environmental or economic consequence.
The economics are not my area of expertise. I can say that OPG is required to produce nuclear generated electricity for 5.5c/kw-hr; not as good as the cost of hydro-electric power – but better than most others. But that detail is less important to you than the environmental one.
If I have one over-arching criticism of the Ontario government’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act, it is that it identifies greenness with technologies. There are very few technologies which are unconditionally green.
Solar generation is excellent if one is talking of collectors on existing structures. But “solar panel farms” (brought to you by the same folks who came up with “industrial park”?) As numbering among those who have unconditionally lionized solar, you must accept some of the responsibility for the existence of that monstrosity in Sarnia which covers 900+ acres to produce 80 MW when the sun shines!
Biomass has the potential of becoming a great addition to the mix. Indeed, one already hears of using spent oil from deep fat fryers to replace diesel and the generation of electricity from wood wastes that used to be burned in a “bee-hive” incinerator. However, it is worrying to hear talk of using “agricultural residue” (needed to maintain the organic content of the soil) or monocultures of certain fast growing trees. And I’m sure you did not wish to see the cost of food for the World’s worst off people go through the roof so that corn could be turned to alcohol for North American cars.
And then there are the wind-mills. When the Danes tried to replace coal generation with wind, it was a bold experiment whose results are in. Now we know that, even with the North Sea as a source, wind provides a sporadic intrusion into the energy mix. You can’t reduce the number of other generating facilities with wind. Standby generation is still necessary and made much less efficient than if there were no wind. And you must know that wind turbines kill bats and migrating birds. Perhaps the bat mortality can be avoided by siting. But asking wind farm proponents not to build on migration fly-ways is like asking oil men not to drill in the Beaufort Sea! They are drawn to those places for the same reasons as the birds.
And then there are the other projects to which you seem to pay scant attention. In BC, there is every intention of developing site C on the Peace River. This will flood 88 km of river valley. Newfoundland and Labrador are positively salivating at the possibility of developing the Lower Churchill. This will flood vast tracts of land and liberate greenhouse gases presently tied up in vegetation there.
It does bug me that you would assume that someone like me would work a career in the nuclear industry and never think through the obvious objections. But what really hurts is not the evil you think you see – but that which you don’t seem to consider. One of the obvious objections to nuclear power is that of long lived waste. I can’t tell you today what technology will be used to consume it; only that it exists and will become better. And if the nuclear industry was prepared to live with the current once through system we have in place now, we would run out of uranium fuel in a few decades. (One can debate how many decades – 5? 7? I have seen both projections.) What will happen is reprocessing. The environmental release of radiation from reprocessing is much less than from uranium mining because the concentrated material is of relatively modest volume; with corresponding ease of control. Most of the really long lived stuff is - or can be - the fuel of the future. The way to turn it unconditionally into waste is to kill the nuclear industry. Then what we call “irradiated fuel” will assuredly be waste; of interest only to terrorists and bomb makers.
I watched a film once by David Attenborough about the Brazilian rain forest. At the end, he said that everything he had shown us was to be destroyed: inundated by a massive hydro project. However - he pointed out - at least it was not nuclear! Bring on the apocalypse, so long as it is not nuclear! That was a very bad day for me. Even worse was the one when I learned that the James Bay project is a larger land mass flooding than anything done in Brazil. The largest in the World is not in China; not in Brazil – but in Canada! And with site C on the Peace River plus the Lower Churchill poised for development, we are set to do much more. Whenever there is a climate change conference, the Canadian government tries to garner international points for the absorption of CO2 by our forests. Should we not also accept a penalty when land is flooded and the carbon erstwhile bound in that plant matter becomes eventually atmospheric?
I don’t want to suggest that you are cheer-leaders for hydroelectric development. You are more like deflectors of policy. Deflect governments away from the one technology: nuclear which – in the absence of screw-ups - can provide base load and replace green-house gas emitters and into something else; anything else, just so long as it is not nuclear. If you see yourselves as soldiers in the good fight for environmental excellence, I would suggest that your contribution to energy discussion is “friendly fire” – directed at Mother Earth.
One final point. If I had one wish in consequence of my nuclear experience, it would be that all industries be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as nuclear and with equally recalcitrant critics. I can understand how someone outside it would see the nuclear industry as a monolith – but what other industry do you know of where its survival becomes imperiled everywhere because something stupid is done somewhere? All of us in nuclear must bear this all the time: anyone’s screw-up is everyone’s screw-up. If only that were a universal truth for all industries!