Twenty five years after Chernobyl, the Fukushima nuclear accident has reminded the world about the catastrophic costs of nuclear power. What would the cost of a Fukushima-scale accident look like here in Ontario, where the McGuinty government is still intent on building new reactors? That’s a question partly answered by a new Greenpeace report released today.
Greenpeace commissioned the Centre for Spatial Economics to calculate the loss in property values and economic activity if a nuclear accident were to force the evacuation of a 20-kilometer area around the Pickering or Darlington nuclear stations.
The report found that uninsured residential property in the 20-km zone around the Darlington and Pickering nuclear station ranges from $61 to $186 billion. An accident causing the evacuation of the 1.3 million residents in the 20-km area around the Pickering station would cause a loss of $56 billion in economic production.
I visited Japan in August and the radioactive contamination can be found hundreds of kilometers from the plant.
Since the accident began six months ago a 20-km zone has been evacuated around the Fukushima reactors. Sadly, statements by the Japanese government indicate the evacuation zone may need to be permanently depopulated because of the high radiation levels.
There has been a 30km evacuation zone around the Chernobyl nuclear station since 1986. The real cost of a nuclear accident is really incalculable. It means you may never go home and entire communities and ways of living could disappear.
Unlike the Fukushima and Chernobyl stations, however, Ontario’s nuclear stations are right beside Canada’s largest city, Toronto.
The map below shows what a 20km evacuation zone would look like around the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations, along with some of the associated economic impacts (click on icons to learn more).
Large parts of the Greater Toronto Area would be impacted.
There are 437,000 households around the Pickering nuclear station and 1.3 million people would be forced to relocate.
There are 163,000 households around the Darlington and 477,000 people would need to be resettled.
Or course, the Canadian nuclear industry tells us a nuclear accident can’t happen here. Their actions tell a different story, however.
Indeed, the Canadian nuclear industry believes reactor accidents on the scale of Fukushima or Chernobyl are possible here. That’s why they’ve asked for special law from the federal government to protect them from compensating victims in the event of an accident.
This law, the Nuclear Liability Act, protects reactor operators from having to pay more than $75 million dollars in the event of an accident. Your home insurance policy exempts compensation for nuclear accidents, too. So in the event of a nuclear accident you – not the people responsible – will pay for the clean up
In the current Ontario election both Premier Dalton McGuinty and Conservative leader Tim Hudak say they’ll be new expensive reactors at Darlington.
Of course, if a nuclear accident happens, you, and not McGuinty or Hudak, will pay for massive clean-up costs. This is yet another cost we can’t afford.
We don’t need to build new reactors in Ontario. Safe green energy is already more affordable than reactors. And if Germany and Switzerland can shut down their reactors and ramp up renewables instead, all while stopping climate change, why can’t we?