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No good reasons to tie Saskatchewan’s future to nuclear power

No to nuclear http://www.leaderpost.com/technology/nuclear/10895427/story.html THE LEADER-POST MARCH 17, 2015  Dale Dewar, Wynyard Re: “Prof says Sask. needs nuclear power” (March 7). Why hasn’t Saskatchewan gone nuclear?

1. Cost: No nuclear reactor has been built on budget (or even close to it) or on time. If it ever gets running, the energy produced has never been cost-efficient.

2. Water: No matter what the size of a nuclear power plant, it needs a lot of water. The water is returned to the rivers or lakes at a higher temperature.

3. Waste: No solution has been found. As for burying it in “solid rock”, once the rock has been disturbed to create the burial site, it is no longer solid. Two recently promising burial sites have leaked in less than two decades. One of the difficulties with problems underground is that when they occur, the tunnels are too dangerous for investigations.

4. Technology: The only time Canada has gone with unproven technology (which small modular reactors are) we were left with a government funded multi-million white elephant in the two Maple reactors near Ottawa. Need I remind people about the “new tech” reactor in Finland, still incomplete despite due date of 2012 and still uncertainty about it working?

There are no good reasons to tie our future to nuclear power. Promoting nuclear power as “green” is false – the only time it is green is the brief window during which it operates at full capacity (which is rare). And even then, its coolant water is warming the rivers. We have enough algae bloom already!

Dewar is a Saskatchewan physician, international human rights activist and author of From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You.

March 20, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general