nuclear-news

”Nuclear Revival” for Canada? Gordon Edwards discusses the latest propaganda.

 

Gordon Edwards, 27 Nov 21, Christopher Read’s latest half-hour documentary on the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) discusses its efforts to convince some small community in Ontario to receive all of Canada’s high level radioactive wastes for deep burial. 

These are the most toxic materials ever produced by any industry. Of the hundreds of kinds of radioactive poisons contained in the used nuclear fuel, only a handful existed on Earth in significant amounts before 1939. They are created in large quantities inside nuclear reactors.

 NWMO is owned by the same companies that make the radioactive poisons in the first place – and they have no intention of stopping. They want to keep right on mass-producing the highly dangerous byproducts indefinitely. Because they have to wait 30 years before moving these deadly wastes – they are literally and figuratively “too hot” to move sooner — there will always be a catastrophic amount left unburied at the surface no matter how fast they bury the older, somewhat cooler wastes. 

Meanwhile they will be burdening communities with a permanent radioactive  legacy, including contamination caused by unpacking and repackaging millions of embrittled fuel bundles right at the surface, beside the proposed waste dump. Any damage to any of these fuel bundles during handling, even small  cracks, will allow radioactive materials to escape and some of it will inevitably enter the sir we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the soil we walk on.

New reactors are untested, exorbitantly expensive, and will take 10 to 20 years to become available, if ever. They are a DDD = Dirty, Dangerous Distraction from the real job of cutting greenhouse gases now, not 10 years from now.  Energy efficiency and renewables can be implemented in a single building season. Wind and solar and efficiency measures are far cheaper and much faster to implement than new nuclear. 

When your house is on fire, it is time to grab a bucket or a fire hose and pour water on it – out the fire out!  This is no time to sit down and design a new, improved sprinkler system for future use.

 Climate change is here now. Action is urgent.

Investing in new nuclear plants is just “kicking the can down the road”. Canada’s Environment Commissioner points out that Canada has the worst record for fighting climate change of any country in the G7, as our greenhouse gas emissions have increased steadily since Trudeau was first elected in 2915. Five of the G7 countries have reduced their GHG emissions, while the sixth has increased GHG emissions at a much slower rate than Canada has. 

To invest in unproven and dangerous nuclear plants now will guarantee that no progress will be made for at least 10 to 20 years, minimum. And it will give us more radioactive waste, much of it even more dangerous than the waste we already have. Can we afford to encourage this kind of behaviour with lavish government subsidies?

November 29, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, spinbuster