The Argosy.ca
Canada’s deadly secret Retired professor visits Mount Allison to discuss Canada’s nuclear industry Argosy.ca 29 Nov 08 By Zoe Williams This Sunday, Jim Harding, a retired professor, and author of the book Canada’s Deadly Secret, visited Mount Allison and gave a talk that shed some light on a Canadian secret – the nuclear industry.
According to Harding, there is a concerted push in this country to expand the nuclear sector, which includes both mining and nuclear plants, and indirectly, nuclear weapons.
Canada, he said, has been at the forefront of the nuclear industry since the beginning, and although today, there is a decline in interest in nuclear globally,…………………..we are the major producer of uranium and that is an environmental carcinogen that we are exporting around the world, that we need to start thinking in terms of environmental ethics a little more, that Canada is not a leader in renewable energy, and there are reasons why, because the non-renewable sector is so powerful as a lobby.”
Harding blames the powerful business interests behind non-renewable energy, including nuclear, for stifling Canadian innovation……………….The nuclear industry has promoted itself as being both more efficient and more environmentally friendly than fossil fuel-based energy, but Harding said this is demonstrably false.
“They have over their 60 some year history, falsely promoted themselves as being a cheap source of energy, and all the economics show that when you do full costing, they are five or six times the cost, and I don’t know how you do cost-management of plutonium over thousands of years.”
“They promote themselves as peaceful, when it is a carcinogenic product, let alone that it finds its way into the weapons stream and they have promoted themselves as safe in terms of the radiation, when the cumulated knowledge all over the world shows that the levels of radiation that are permissible under regulations are going to increase cancers and particularly childhood cancers around nuclear facilities…they are doing what the tobacco industry did around smoking and cancer.”
Why has this dangerous and inefficient industry been as successful in Canada as it has been? Harding believes the answer lies in the support it receives from the government, in the form of subsidies.
“If these subsidies were pulled they wouldn’t be around, they are state backed [...]”
The reasons for these subsidies come from the historical connection between nuclear energy and weapons manufacturing.
Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium
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