Who's afraid of the Green Alternative?

The Government of Ontario, it would appear. According to documents obtained by Greenpeace through Access to Information legislation, the province chose to forgo participating in the current Environmental Assessment of the proposed new reactors at Darlington in order to limit “the threat of legal challenge to the Province and the threat that the scope of the environmental assessment will be expanded to include provincial issues such as power system planning.”[1] (Power system planning is code for ramping up investments in conservation and renewables to replace nuclear reactors as they go off-line).

In June 2006, the McGuinty government passed a special regulation to exempt their electricity plan from the requirements of the EA Act, but they wanted to ensure that project-level assessments didn't look at alternatives either.

More recently, the Ontario Ministry of Energy wrote to the Review Panel to say that their support for Ontario Power Generation’s exclusion of alternatives to building new reactors was “clear and unequivocal”.

This might make some sense if the Province had an approved plan for the overall development of the electricity system. But they don’t. They don’t even have a draft plan in front of the Ontario Energy Board yet, where we might be able to consider cost-effective alternatives to these new reactors. We do know that they halted the government’s nuclear procurement when the price tag came in at a reported $26 billion (more than 3 times what was expected).

So perhaps this hearing is part of one big game of chicken between the provincial and federal government to see who will finally put a stake in AECL or cough up the extra $20 billion.

But it isn’t a rational assessment which considers possible alternatives (like this one) to the proposed project, which is what an Environmental Assessment is supposed to do.

[1]  Cedric, Jobe (Ministry of Energy) and Rick Jennings (Ministry of Energy), “RE: The Provincial Role in the Federal EA Process,” December 11, 2006. Document aquired through Access to Information.