Burying radioactive nuclear waste poses enormous risks
by David Suzuki, July 31, 2024, https://rabble.ca/environment/burying-radioactive-nuclear-waste-poses-enormous-risks/
The spent fuel will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, and contamination and leaks are possible during storage, containment, transportation and burial.
As the consequences of burning dirty, climate-altering fossil fuels hit harder by the day, many are seizing on nuclear power as a “clean” energy alternative. But how clean is it?
Although it may not produce the emissions that burning fossil fuels does, nuclear power presents many other problems. Mining, processing and transporting uranium to fuel reactors creates toxic pollution and destroys ecosystems, and reactors increase risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and radioactive contamination. Disposing of the highly radioactive waste is also challenging.
In this case, the NWMO has already paid Indigenous and municipal governments large sums to accept its plans — ignoring communities that will also be affected along transportation routes or downstream of burial sites.
According to Canadian Dimension, industry expects to ship the wastes “in two to three trucks per day for fifty years, in one of three potential containers.” None of the three containment methods has been subjected to rigorous testing.
Even without an accident, trucking the wastes will emit low levels of radiation, which industry claims will produce “acceptable” exposure. Transferring it from the facility to truck and then to repository also poses major risks.
Although industry claims storing high-level radioactive waste in deep geological repositories is safe, no such facility has been approved anywhere in the world, despite many years of industry effort.
Canadian Dimension says, “a growing number of First Nations have passed resolutions or issued statements opposing the transportation and/or disposal of nuclear waste in northwestern Ontario, including Lac Seul First Nation, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, Grassy Narrows First Nation, Fort William First Nation, and Wabaseemoong Independent Nations.”
Five First Nations — including Grassy Narrows, which is still suffering from industrial mercury contamination after more than 60 years — have formed the First Nations Land Alliance, which wrote to the NWMO, stating, “Our Nations have not been consulted, we have not given our consent, and we stand together in saying ‘no’ to the proposed nuclear waste storage site near Ignace.”
Groups such as We the Nuclear Free North are also campaigning against the plan.
All have good reason to be worried. As Canadian Dimension reports, “All of Canada’s commercial reactors are the CANDU design, where 18 months in the reactor core turns simple uranium into an extremely complex and highly radioactive mix of over 200 different radioactive ingredients. Twenty seconds exposure to a single fuel bundle would be lethal.”
The spent fuel will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, and contamination and leaks are possible during storage, containment, transportation and burial. Industry, with its usual “out of sight, out of mind” approach, has no valid way to monitor the radioactive materials once they’re buried.
With 3.3 million bundles of spent fuels already waiting in wet or dry storage at power plants in Ontario, New Brunswick, Quebec and Manitoba, and many more to come, industry is desperate to find a place to put it all.
Even with the many risks and no site yet chosen for burial, industry and governments are looking to expand nuclear power, not just with conventional power plants but also with “small modular reactors,” meaning they could be spread more widely throughout the country.
Nuclear power is enormously expensive and projects always exceed budgets. It also takes a long time to build and put a reactor into operation. Disposing of the radioactive wastes creates numerous risks. Energy from wind, solar and geothermal with energy storage costs far less, with prices dropping every day, and comes with far fewer risks.
Industry must find ways to deal with the waste it’s already created, but it’s time to move away from nuclear and fossil fuels. As David Suzuki Foundation research confirms, renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar is a far more practical, affordable and cleaner choice.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
Is Manitoba willing to accept nuclear waste risks?
ANNE LINDSEY. 2 Aug 24.
ANYONE driving Highway 17 from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay will pass through Ignace a couple of hours east of Dryden.
A modest Canadian Shield town with about 1,300 inhabitants, Ignace was built on the forest industry, but like so many northern Ontario towns, today actively seeks other economic opportunities.
The alert traveller will also notice many roadside signs between Kenora and Thunder Bay, proclaiming “No Nuclear Waste in Northwest Ontario.” The issue has reached a critical juncture recently in this area.
Hosting Canada’s high-level nuclear waste repository is one of the economic development opportunities being explored by Ignace.
On July 10, Ignace Town Council voted in favour of being a “willing host” for this massive storage hole in the ground and the accompanying transfer facility for the highly radioactive and toxic “spent” fuel from existing and future reactors.
The taxpayer-funded Nuclear Waste Management Organization or NWMO (consisting of the owners of Canada’s nuclear waste and charged by the federal government to find a repository site) provided Ignace a half-million dollar signing bonus, in addition to NWMO’s many donations and monetary contributions to local initiatives leading up to the vote.
Problems abound with this “willingness” declaration, not the least of which is that the site in question is not even in Ignace or in the same watershed. The Revell batholith site, 45 kilometres west of Ignace, lies on the watersheds of both theRainy River which flows into Lake of the Woods, and thence to the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg, and the English River which flows north through Lac Seul and into Lake Winnipeg.
The waste will remain dangerous for literally millennia. Burying irretrievable nuclear waste in an excavated rock cavern that is deep underground where groundwater flows through the rock and eventually links to surface bodies has never been tested in real life. The industry relies on computer models to persuade us that future generations will not be at risk.
The waste will have to be transported to Revell, mostly from southern Ontario and New Brunswick — several massive shipments daily for 40 years for the existing waste — along the often-treacherous route skirting Lake Superior. It must then be “repackaged” in a surface facility into burial canisters.
Little is publicly known about what this entails, but any accidents and even routine cleaning will result in radioactive pollution to the surrounding waters posing a more immediate risk.
First Nations along the downstream routes have expressed their opposition to this project. Chief Rudy Turtle of Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) was clear in his letter to the CEO of NWMO: “The water from that site flows past our reserve and into the waters where we fish, drink, and swim. The material that you want to store there will be dangerous for longer than Canada has existed, longer than Europeans have been on Turtle Island, and longer than anything that human beings have ever built has lasted. How can you reliably claim that this extremely dangerous waste will safely be contained for hundreds of thousands of years?”
His views are echoed by neighbouring chiefs, and other Treaty 3 First Nations have rejected nuclear waste transportation and abandonment through and in their territories. Wabigoon First Nation, the closest to the Revell site, will hold its own community referendum on willingness to host the site this fall. It’s not known how much money or other inducements NWMO has offered for a signing bonus.
In 1986, a citizens group in the Eastern Townships of Quebec successfully lobbied politicians on both sides of the border to reject a U.S. proposal for a massive nuclear waste repository in Vermont, on a watershed flowing into Canada.
Around the same time, Manitoba citizens convinced our government to oppose another proposed U.S. nuclear waste site — with potential for drainage to the Red River. And eventually, the NDP government of Howard Pawley passed Manitoba’s High-Level Radioactive Waste Act, banning nuclear waste disposal in this province.
Where does Manitoba stand today? We don’t know, even though the Revell site is not far from Manitoba and the water is flowing this way.
No single town should be making decisions with such profound risks to all of our health and futures. People who depend on Manitoba rivers and lakes (including Winnipeggers, via our water supply from Shoal Lake) should be part of this decision. Now is the time for our elected officials on Broadway and Main Street to become active stakeholders and demand a voice in the nuclear waste “willingness” question.
Anne Lindsey is a longtime observer of the nuclear industry and a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba Research Associate. This article was written in collaboration with the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition.
Canada and the Atom Bomb: Remembering As an Act of Resistance
Anton Wagner, July 23, 2024, http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/hiroshima/remembering/
I met Setsuko Thurlow in 1995 when I produced Our Hiroshima for Vision TV for the 50th commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1954, she had received death threats while studying at an American college in Virginia after criticizing the United States’ hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands, one thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But when she settled in Canada with her husband, Jim Thurlow, the following year, she found “a very passive, almost indifferent world here. Maybe Canadians felt they had nothing to do with the nuclear age.”
In Our Hiroshima, Setsuko singled out the Eldorado uranium refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, that enriched all the uranium used by the American Manhattan Project to produce the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. She found Canadians were not informed about their country’s involvement in the development of the atom bomb and failed to recognize that nuclear weapons were a universal, global phenomenon. “We all have to be concerned.”
The documentary showed her speaking to a huge peace rally at the University of Toronto Varsity Stadium in 1982. “Peoples around the world, with their deafening silence, have permitted their government to continue producing and accumulating ever more destructive weapons of genocide,” she told the rally. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on armaments annually “diverted the resources that could feed the starving, heal the sick, and teach the illiterate.”
Setsuko began sharing the horrors she had witnessed as a survivor of Hiroshima with Canadians in “A Silent Flash of Light,” published in Saturday Night in August 1985. She would make these same very detailed, moving personal descriptions for international media for the next four decades. Nine members of her family and over three hundred of her schoolmates and teachers perished. Her family’s house was but ashes and broken tiles. Only an ornate clock in a cast-iron frame (seen in Jim Allen’s photograph above) could be salvaged as a reminder of life before the atomic bombing. “In the Peace Park in Hiroshima, there is a cenotaph with the inscription: ‘Rest in peace; the evil will not be repeated,’” she concluded her Saturday Night memoir. “This has become the vow of the survivors. Only then will our loved ones’ grotesque deaths not have been in vain. Only then will our own survival have meaning.
Thirty-two years later, in December 2017, Setsuko Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Beatrice Fihn, awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for bringing about the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In her acceptance speech, she asked her audience in Oslo, “Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.”
With the approaching 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings in 2020, Thurlow wrote to all the world’s heads of state, including Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had not yet ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In her personal appeal to the Prime Minister, she included my research document “Canada and the Atom Bomb” that provides the factual basis for this “Canada and the Atom Bomb” exhibition.
Setsuko referred to the delegation from Deline in the Northwest Territories representing Dene hunters and trappers employed by Eldorado to carry the sacks of radioactive uranium ore on their backs for transport to the Eldorado refinery in Port Hope. The delegation travelled to Hiroshima in August of 1998 and expressed their regret that uranium from their lands had been used in the development of the atom bomb. As seen in Robert Del Tredici’s photographs, Dene had themselves died of cancer because of their exposure to uranium ore, leaving Deline a village of widows. “Surely,” Thurlow wrote Trudeau, “the Canadian Government should make its own acknowledgement of Canada’s contribution to the creation of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
She stated that an awareness by Canadians of our country’s direct participation in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had all but disappeared from our collective consciousness. Thurlow proposed to the Prime Minister that the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings would be the appropriate moment to acknowledge Canada’s critical role in the creation of nuclear weapons, express a statement of regret for the deaths and suffering they caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as announce that Canada would ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The Globe and Mail headlined her August 2020 op ed about her appeal to Trudeau, “Canada must acknowledge our key role in developing the deadly atomic bomb.”
Justin Trudeau never acknowledged receipt of Setsuko’s appeal, although Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi personally delivered a copy to the Prime Minister’s Office. With Trudeau’s refusal to meet or communicate with Thurlow, she turned her lobbying efforts to Toronto City Council. She had facilitated the creation of a large Peace Garden directly in front of City Hall as a memorial to the atomic bombings and the need for peace in 1984. As shown in the exhibition, City Council hosted Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who turned the sod, beginning construction of the Peace Garden; Pope John Paul II kindled its eternal flame, and Queen Elizabeth II dedicated it as a lasting expression of Toronto’s commitment to peace.
Setsuko was a fierce defender of the Peace Garden when the $40 million revitalization of the City Hall Square resulted in its demolition. She was a leading figure among peace activists and community peace groups who convinced City Council to rebuild the Peace Garden on the civic square. Michael Chambers’ images capture this rededication of the Peace Garden in 2016.
The following year, Toronto City Council honoured Setsuko for her peace activism and reaffirmed Toronto as a nuclear weapons-free zone. The Toronto Board of Health held public hearings that resulted in its recommendation that City Council request that the Government of Canada sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. City Council passed such a motion and sent the text to Justin Trudeau, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Health.
But nothing Canadian peace activists did changed the policies of the federal Canadian government. Setsuko Thurlow’s life-long commitment towards the abolition of nuclear weapons is a challenge to all concerned about the survival of human civilization. How can we transform our yearning for peace and justice into political action that will compel governments to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons? Setsuko donated her family’s precious ornate clock to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa for a small peace exhibition in 2013. Will some survivors of a nuclear holocaust digging in the rubble of what once was Ottawa find a small, charred clock that once belonged to a survivor of the first atomic bombing but whose words of remembrance of that horror were buried by the silence of political leaders?
Point Lepreau nuclear station – a heavy financial burden that keeps getting heavier.
Point Lepreau has become a heavy financial burden
the station will remain at risk of unplanned outages because of aging equipment.
NB Power’s latest financial plan forecasts its debt will continue to grow. In the utility’s base case model, debt will keep rising for the rest of this decade, reaching nearly $6.3-billion by 2029. It keeps rising even in more optimistic scenarios.
Point Lepreau station is among North America’s worst-performing nuclear power plants. Can New Brunswick Power turn it around?
Globe and Mail, MATTHEW MCCLEARN , July 29, 2024
In the early hours of Dec. 14, 2022, New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station lost power after an electrical fault. Just hours later, at 4:40 a.m., an alarm sounded: The plant had suffered a small coolant leak and NB Power, the facility’s owner, detected radioactivity. The station was locked down to prevent that radioactivity from escaping, and an emergency response team was readied.
Somehow, two unrelated pieces of equipment had failed simultaneously, touching off a costly and time-consuming recovery. Workers needed to bring the reactor to a guaranteed shutdown state. They had to regain entry to the reactor building and decontaminate it. And they needed to find the leak and stop it. The station would remain out of service for 42 days.
This outage was just one of several in recent years that, in combination, point to severe reliability problems at Atlantic Canada’s only nuclear power plant. The latest, which was planned to end after 100 days on July 12 and cost more than $100-million, included installing a new 9,000-horsepower primary heat transport pump and motor, which moves heat generated by the reactor to the station’s steam generators.
But NB Power spokesperson Dominique Couture said workers discovered a problem with the station’s main generator, which provides electricity to the province’s grid. At a rate hearing before the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board, company officials said the plant is expected to remain offline until at least September. And the station will remain at risk of unplanned outages because of aging equipment.
It will be many years before we have put those risks behind us,” said Jason Nouwens, the station’s director of regulatory and external affairs.
Point Lepreau is one of North America’s worst-performing nuclear stations. Intending to keep it running until at least 2039, NB Power has struggled unsuccessfully for the past several years to rehabilitate the station and expects to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on it in the next few years.
The utility is not too proud to ask for help: It wants Ontario Power Generation to effectively incorporate the plant into OPG’s large fleet of Candu reactors. Key senior leadership positions at the station are now held by OPG employees.
But there’s no guarantee OPG will agree to take over the stricken station on favourable terms, or at all. And it’s not clear NB Power can afford the steep repair bill.
New Brunswick’s dilemma points to challenges that other provinces, such as Alberta and Saskatchewan, should consider as they look to build new reactors………………………………………………………………………….
According to NB Power, Point Lepreau has roughly 115,000 components. The December, 2022, outage illustrated how the failure of just one of them, however inconsequential it may seem, can knock it out. The culprit for the water leak turned out to be a crack in a small instrument line near the reactor core, about the diameter of a finger. This line had been deemed necessary for the plant’s commissioning more than 40 years earlier, but was useless thereafter.
NB Power concluded that when the station lost power, other systems fired up that increased vibration throughout the plant. “This was essentially the final straw that propagated the crack to a failure point,” Mr. Nouwens explained to the federal safety regulator during a hearing after the incident. “It had been coming for some time.”
Outages are expensive. Point Lepreau’s 900 workers must be paid regardless of how much electricity the plant generates. Each day it’s out of service, NB Power also incurs hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime costs.
NB Power must purchase energy to cover the shortfall as well, at an average cost of $900,000 a day.
Repeated outages have forced NB Power to divert capital to the station. This thwarted efforts to repay debts, most of which were incurred at Point Lepreau. This year’s extended outage also forced the utility to delay work at other power plants…………………………………………………………………..
NB Power’s latest financial plan forecasts its debt will continue to grow. In the utility’s base case model, debt will keep rising for the rest of this decade, reaching nearly $6.3-billion by 2029. It keeps rising even in more optimistic scenarios.
Heeding nuclear’s siren song
When Point Lepreau was still being planned, some experts doubted how suitable nuclear power was for a small province. Andrew Secord, an economics professor at St. Thomas University, found a March, 1972, memo by Myles Foster, an official at the federal Finance Department, that said that NB Power’s decision to go nuclear was “the equivalent of a Volkswagen family acquiring a Cadillac as a second car.”
Since then, Point Lepreau has become a heavy financial burden. At various times, the province has considered shuttering it or selling it. Ultimately, though, NB Power’s board of directors decided in 2005 to double down and extend the station’s life.
Refurbishments compel utilities to make crucial decisions about which equipment to replace, and what to keep. Pressure tubes, the Candu’s main life-limiting components, are a given, but many other components must be carefully assessed. Misjudgments can be costly.
Point Lepreau’s refurbishment began in March, 2008, and was scheduled to wrap up by October, 2009, at an expected cost of $845-million. According to a 2002 NB Power document, even if all two dozen of the worst disasters the utility could envision came to pass – everything from delays to strikes to unexpected additional work – it would add up to a combined maximum overrun of $623-million.
But things went worse – far worse – than NB Power imagined possible. It called in OPG to assist. The reactor finally returned to service in November, 2012, three years late and massively over budget.
Even this might have been salvageable had the plant operated reliably thereafter. NB Power was counting on Point Lepreau reaching a capacity factor of 89 per cent. Instead, NB Power found itself playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with recurring maintenance issues…………………………
NB Power has acknowledged that while the 2008-12 refurbishment focused on the reactor itself, equipment in the rest of the plant – sometimes referred to as the “conventional” side – typically was not replaced. Some of that equipment, such as the problematic generator that recently delayed the station’s return to service, is now breaking down. The utility made bad calls and is now paying a terrible price.
Recovery plan
NB Power is now drawing up a recovery plan for its ailing station, which features greatly increased maintenance spending: more than $87-million in 2025, tapering off thereafter.
But according to ScottMadden, this likely won’t suffice. Spending less than $80-million a year is “slightly more likely than not to result in performance declines,” whereas spending $100-million to $120-million is expected to deliver “the highest marginal returns in expected improvements.” Under current plans, ScottMadden warned, Point Lepreau’s performance will likely decline again beginning in 2030.
OPG sent a delegation to the stricken station last year to assess its condition, examine maintenance plans and interview NB Power employees. Last September, the utilities signed a three-year agreement under which OPG has seconded staff to the Point Lepreau station. NB Power says it has received support from OPG’s chief nuclear officer, a vice-president who’d supervised refurbishments and outages, and a chief nuclear projects officer.
OPG and NB Power are now in talks that might lead to Point Lepreau becoming part of OPG’s reactor fleet. At a hearing before the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board in June, Ms. Clark said OPG would likely assume majority ownership and would bring “some capital to the table to help with some of the investments that are required in the station over the longer term.”
She added, however, that given the difficulty of reaching “even general agreement on things,” a deal likely wouldn’t be reached before late 2025.
Even as NB Power officials struggle to fix Point Lepreau, they continue to offer their services to provinces such as Alberta and Saskatchewan, which possess little prior experience with nuclear technology. At an industry conference in Calgary in April, officials offered to help such provinces evaluate new reactor technologies and work with regulators…………..
They did not share any sense of the pitfalls of nuclear power – a topic for which NB Power has unfortunately gained formidable expertise. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-point-lepreau-station-is-among-north-americas-worst-performing-nuclear/
A New Brunswick reaction to the exorbitant costs of Point Lepreau nuclear power station.
When the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station was refurbished over three years and re-opened in 2012, NB Power did not complete a number of associated repairs, despite the lengthy time and high cost of the refurbishment.
As a result, the nuclear plant has experienced many problems since the refurbishment and has been performing poorly. Since 2023, the NB nuclear plant has been managed by Ontario Power Generation, three managers costing $2 Million per year, under a three-year contract. I’m unsure if these people actually live in New Brunswick and pay taxes here or if New Brunswick is sending the money directly to Ontario.
At the start of April, the Lepreau nuclear plant was shut down for a scheduled 100 days to do the associated upgrades/repairs that NB Power hopes will improve the performance. The cost of the repairs was estimated at more than $300 million including the replacement power for this year’s repairs and another scheduled repair session in 2025. The first repairs were scheduled to end last week but instead of starting up again, the engineers noted a major problem with the main generator. Note that most of these engineers and workers doing this scheduled upgrade / repair are from Ontario, so it’s unclear how much of this cash is staying in the province.
Today we learned that the repair to the generator will cost an extra $70 million and the plant is down at least till September, which they say is a best case scenario.
So, when all this is over, what can New Brunswickers expect? At the end of the story below is this kicker: “Even by 2030, NB Power still thinks the plant will be mired in the basement, performance wise.”
What a F*** disaster. It’s absolutely nuts that our small province with a population of only 800,000 people has a nuclear reactor. In addition to the nuclear waste and other problems the reactor creates, we can’t afford it and we do not have the capacity in-province to look after it!
Point Lepreau nuclear station down till at least September, costing utility extra $71M.
All of this has been costly for the utility, which now carries more than $5 billion in debt, and to ratepayers, who are being asked to swallow the biggest increases to their bills in their lifetimes.
New target is a ‘best-case scenario,’ said expert of 27 years, who added it ‘wouldn’t be appropriate’ to give a worst-case scenario.
Telegraph Journal, John Chilibeck, Jul 22, 2024
The prolonged shutdown at the Point Lepreau nuclear plant is raising alarm, including over how it could affect power bills for residents and businesses.
At a rate hearing in Fredericton on Monday, NB Power officials said the longer-than-expected shutdown would likely last until at least September and cost an extra $71 million. That includes $51 million for buying replacement power and about $20 million for added repair and equipment costs.
Craig Church, a chief modeler for the public utility, said it would cost on average an extra $900,000 for each day Lepreau is shuttered given it is one of the cheapest in NB Power’s fleet of generators to run.
It normally provides one-third of the province’s electricity.
“The loss will have to be made up by future ratepayers?” asked public intervenor Allain Chiasson at the hearing.
After a pregnant pause, Church replied yes.
NB Power is already seeking the biggest hike in electrical bills in a lifetime. If the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board, an independent regulator, grants its request, households will have to pay 9.8 per cent more this year and 9.8 per cent more next year.
According to NB Power’s evidence, the average electrically heated residential customer is billed about $3,087 annually. Adding 9.8 per cent to that bill would be another $303, or a total of $3,390.
Big industry is facing a similar percentage hike, whereas small and medium-sized businesses would face slightly smaller increases.
But the evidence before the board does not take into account the prolonged shutdown of Lepreau, meaning those extra costs will only come into play in future years.
NB Power undertook a 100-day outage of Lepreau, west of Saint John along the Fundy coast, from mid-April to mid-July to overhaul parts of the non-nuclear side of the plant at a cost of $124 million.
It was part of a planned shutdown to renew the plant and make sure it was robust enough for the winter, when it supplies baseload power for the province. According to the plan, the upgrades were supposed to be completed last week.
But on Monday, an expert on the NB Power panel, Jason Nouwens, the director of regulatory and external affairs at Lepreau, said on June 29, the team discovered a problem with the main generator on the non-nuclear side of the plant.
Specifically, one of 144 stator bars in a giant rotor had failed, but NB Power isn’t sure why. To get to the failed equipment, workers must painstakingly take apart the generator piece by piece, a job that will take at least two weeks.
Then, Nouwens said, the troubleshooting team that includes outside experts from the Canadian nuclear industry will try to figure out why the stator bar broke and possible remedies to prevent such a failure from happening again.
The expert, who has been working at Lepreau 27 years, said the plant coming back online in September was a best-case scenario. When asked by one of the interveners, Nouwens said it “wouldn’t be appropriate” to give a worst-case scenario.
Besides the extra costs caused by the delayed re-start, questions have been raised about possible spillover.
On Friday at the same hearings at the Fredericton Convention Centre, a lawyer working on behalf of J.D. Irving, Limited asked NB Power officials repeatedly how the longer-than-expected outage at the nuclear generator would affect other important power plants in the electrical system.
The lawyer Glenn Zacher had before him Phil Landry, NB Power’s executive director of project management offices, who answered questions about other power plants in the system.
The other plants are also supposed to undergo regular outages for maintenance and repairs to ensure they are safe and reliable.
But some of the maintenance work has already been delayed because those plants need to be running when Lepreau is down, otherwise people’s lights and air conditioners wouldn’t work.
“When is it too late to do undertake maintenance elsewhere?” asked Zacher. “It seems to be an important question to be answered.”
Landry, however, didn’t have any firm answers and struggled to give any specific timelines, given the uncertainty at Lepreau
Landry explained to the board that NB Power has been running the Belledune Generating Station – which belches out emissions from high-polluting coal – and Coleson Cove, which burns similarly polluting heavy oil, to replace the energy lost at Lepreau.
Belledune was supposed to undergo maintenance and repairs right now, at a cost of $17.1 million, but its 46-day outage has been indefinitely delayed………………………………….
Pushing out the maintenance to later in the year, closer to the winter months, is not an ideal scenario, Landry said, because they need to be running smoothly when people heat their homes and electrical demand is greatest.
NB Power refurbished the nuclear side of the plant in 2012, at a cost of $2.5 billion, a project that was over-budget by $1 billion and took 37 months longer to complete than expected. But NB Power didn’t do similar work to other important parts of the plant, leading to frequent breakdowns.
All of this has been costly for the utility, which now carries more than $5 billion in debt, and to ratepayers, who are being asked to swallow the biggest increases to their bills in their lifetimes.
NB Power CEO Lori Clark has promised Lepreau will no longer be neglected in the hopes of improving its performance. The utility has partnered with Ontario Power Generation, which has more expertise with nuclear plants, to ensure the next phase of the overhaul is done right.
A benchmarking study showed Lepreau is one of the worst performers out of 38 similar nuclear power plants in the world, consistently in the bottom quarter.
On Monday, Nouwens said NB Power was committed to improving the plant’s performance but cautioned it would take years of extra spending and repair work to get to the average performance of most nuclear plants. He pointed out that Lepreau has 115,000 different components, many of which have to be replaced or repaired with age.
Even by 2030, NB Power still thinks the plant will be mired in the basement, performance wise.
“In the past, the work hasn’t been comprehensive and intrusive enough to reach the performance we need,” the executive said. “We’ve under-invested, causing unreliability.” https://tj.news/new-brunswick/long-shutdown-of-nuclear-plant-would-have-knock-on-effect-warns-lawyer
80 CANADIAN ORGANIZATIONS CALL ON FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO RESCIND APPOINTMENT OF NUCLEAR REGULATORY AGENCY PRESIDENT.
Ottawa, 17 July 2024 .- www.nuclearwastewatch.ca
Over 80 civil society organizations from across Canada are speaking out and calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Mary Simon to rescind their recent appointment of Mr. Pierre Tremblay, a long time senior nuclear industry executive, as President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).
In a joint letter citing conflict of interest and failure to adhere to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines, the groups -a range of organizations that include in their ranks scientists and retired nuclear officials- also call on the Federal Government for an urgent reform of the CNSC and nuclear governance in Canada.
Mr. Tremblay has been a long-time senior business executive at Ontario Power Generation (Canada’s largest nuclear operator and contractor of nuclear businesses), reported co-owner of a private nuclear business involved in the Plutonium trade, and most recently president of AECOM Canada Nuclear Services -a key contractor for two questionable projects expected to report billions of dollars to the nuclear businesses involved, and impact populations for centuries: a nuclear waste dump (“Near Surface Disposal Facility”) by the Ottawa river and a project to abandon high-level nuclear waste underground in Northern Ontario, both of them expecting CNSC licenses.
The groups also call on the Federal Government to take the opportunity to initiate a long-needed reform of the CNSC, which has often been described by observers as an “industry-captured regulator”.
The request notes that the CNSC has a communications branch with 60-plus staff but no dedicated human health and environmental protection branch, and has not turned down a single nuclear industry application in more than a decade. It has also actively lobbied to weaken impact assessment legislation to exclude a range of nuclear reactors and processing facilities.
Mr. Tremblay’s appointment follows other appointments to the Commission of industry insiders, and two troubling assessments of the CNSC’s performance by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -a June 2024 follow-up to an initial 2019 IAEA mission highlighted several problem areas; despite the CNSC’s positive spin on the IAEA missions, the findings are a cause of deep concern for independent observers and experts.
Given the CNSC’s often-stated priority and legal mandate to protect the environment and the health of Canadians, the groups are requesting the Federal Government consider recruiting CNSC senior ranks from within the health and environmental protection communities, including perhaps Environment and Climate Change Canada and the federal Health Portfolio.
The signatory organizations note that the appointment contravenes both IAEA guidelines and the Federal Government’s own guidance on the independence of regulatory bodies, and compromises the public’s expectation of neutrality, objectivity and independence of Canada’s nuclear regulatory body and reinforces the public perception of industry capture of that body. Rescinding the appointment would be a significant step towards a much-needed reform of the CNSC and towards restoring public trust in that critically important agency.
Quotes: The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is supposed to be a neutral body, carefully safeguarding the health of the Canadian public and the environment from the risks associated with the use of nuclear energy. Senior executives from the nuclear industry should be disqualified from positions at the CNSC.” – Dr. Ole Hendrickson.
“Having a nuclear business executive whose companies have pushed for questionable projects placed in charge of the very agency that would now regulate and approve them, is an obvious conflict of interest” – J. P. Unger, science writer and policy analyst. “The Government should abandon any pretense of having a watchdog and true regulator for nuclear matters -or carry out its urgently needed reform.”
First Nation challenges nuclear waste decision in federal court
By Natasha Bulowski & Matteo Cimellaro | News, Urban Indigenous Communities in Ottawa | July 12th 2024Observer
A First Nation concerned about approval of a nuclear waste disposal facility near the Ottawa River was before federal court this week to challenge the decision.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission greenlit the project on Jan. 9 and less than one month later, Kebaowek First Nation filed for a judicial review.
Kebaowek’s legal challenge is centred on the United Nations Declaration Act (UNDA), which enshrined the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into Canadian law. The declaration specifically references the need for free, prior and informed consent when hazardous waste will be stored in a nation’s territory.
Kebaowek argued in court that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories — the private consortium responsible for managing the Chalk River nuclear site — did not secure the First Nation’s free, prior and informed consent during the licensing process, as mandated under Canadian law, when it was looking to store the waste at a site about a kilometre from the Ottawa River. The Ottawa River (known as the Kichi Sibi in Algonquin) holds immense spiritual and cultural importance for the Algonquin people and is a source of drinking water for millions.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories wants to permanently dispose of one million cubic metres of radioactive waste in a shallow mound as a solution to waste accumulated over the last seven decades of operations and into the future. The company said the containment mound will only hold low-level waste.
A former employee at Chalk River told Canada’s National Observer a portion of the waste destined for the mound is a “mishmash” of intermediate- and low-level radioactivity because prior to 2000 there were inadequate systems to properly label, characterize, store and track what was produced at Chalk River or shipped there from other labs. Intermediate-level waste remains radioactive for longer than low-level waste and requires disposal deeper underground.
“It’s such a huge project that I don’t think most people are aware of just how big this is,” Coun. Justin Roy of Kebaowek First Nation told Canada’s National Observer in an interview after a press conference in Ottawa on July 10.
“We’re not talking about a pipeline that might not be there in a couple dozen years, or a mine that’s going to be up and running and close in 20 years, or a bridge that might be torn down one of these days. We’re talking about a huge mound that has a life expectancy, expectancy upwards of 500 years,” Roy said.
The First Nation is asking the Federal Court of Appeals to reject the nuclear safety commission’s decision to greenlight the facility and declare that the commission breached its duty to consult Kebaowek.
Kebaowek was in federal court July 10 and 11 to make its case that the project approval should be set aside or reconsidered. The First Nation argued two main points: First, that the nuclear safety commission refused to take the Canadian UNDRIP act into consideration, and that means the consultation process was flawed from the outset.
Second, the nation argues the project will rely largely on a forest management plan that has yet to be created to mitigate environmental impacts, Coun. Justin Roy of Kebaowek First Nation told Canada’s National Observer in an interview.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ lawyers argued the commitment to create a forest management plan and have it approved by the nuclear safety commission is appropriate, and disagreed with Kebawoek’s description of it as a “blank piece of paper,” saying it is intended to be a “living document” and respond to different situations yet to arise. The company’s testimony on July 11 also highlighted different instances — letters, phone calls, in-person meetings — where it engaged with Kebaowek First Nation.
Justice Julie Blackhawk will issue a decision at a later date.
A ‘litmus test’
When Parliament was in its consultation process regarding the United Nations Declaration Act, First Nation leadership across Canada spoke up because chiefs thought the legislation “needed to have teeth,” Lance Haymond, Chief of Kebaowek First Nation said in an interview. However, the legislation was never re-written to give it weight, leading to a “failure of implementation from the beginning,” he explained.
“Here we are stuck with a piece of legislation that could be stronger,” Haymond said of testing the United Nations Declaration Act (UNDA) in court over the nuclear waste facility. The success or failure of the judicial review will serve as a litmus test of how much sway the new Canadian law holds in the courts, Haymond said.
“Our case will hopefully demonstrate how it can be applied in a real world situation,” he added.
This judicial review is one of three legal challenges against the near surface disposal facility.
At a July 10 press conference, Sébastien Lemire, Bloc Québécois MP for Abitibi-Témiscamingue, emphasized his party’s support for the legal challenge. Lemire also promised continued support at future press conferences, in Question Period and in work at committees like the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is run by a consortium of private companies (including AtkinsRéalis, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin) and is contracted by the federal government to operate its laboratories and deal with waste.
Over 75 years, Chalk River Laboratories developed CANDU reactors, did nuclear weapons research, supplied the United States’ nuclear weapons program with plutonium and uranium, and at one time was the world’s largest supplier of medical isotopes used to diagnose and treat cancers.
About 60 people attended a public rally in front of the Supreme Court on July 10 to support the First Nation, according to Vi Bui with the Council of Canadians.
It’s not the first time the public has given their support.
Kebaowek’s legal fund has been largely crowdfunded and supported by Raven Trust, a charity that raises legal funds for Indigenous nations, Haymond said.
If Kebaowek loses, it’s still unclear if they will appeal the decision, he added.
“Our ancestors would probably roll over in their graves if they were to hear that we would just allow a nuclear waste dump that’s going to hold one million cubic metres of waste adjacent to the Ottawa River,” Roy said. “We are people who have been here since time immemorial; this mound, if it proceeds, it can maybe outlast all of us here.”
First Nations and allies resist proposed radioactive waste repository
The site-selection process has been riddled with controversy. The nuclear industry funds the NWMO and appoints its board members. As a result, despite being structured as a not-for-profit corporation, the NWMO is effectively controlled by industry. In some cases, the large sums of money the NWMO has paid Indigenous and municipal governments as part of its site selection process have led to accusations of governments being bought off by the nuclear industry. Communities downstream from the repository site, as well as the many along the transportation route, are effectively excluded from the ‘willingness’ decision.
the process is unfolding in the context of ongoing poverty and economic deprivation in many Indigenous communities in Canada, making it incredibly difficult for many First Nations to say “no”
If Canada is to have a just transition away from fossil fuels, then it cannot be based on nuclear power
Canadian Dimension, Warren Bernauer, Laura Tanguay, Elysia Petrone, and Brennain Lloyd / June 28, 2024
On April 30, 2024, First Nations leaders organized a rally in Anemki Wequedong (Thunder Bay) to protest a proposed nuclear waste repository in northwestern Ontario between Ignace and Dryden. The speakers included representatives of Grassy Narrows First Nation, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation, Gull Bay First Nation, and Fort William First Nation.
Michele Solomon, Chief of Fort William First Nation, welcomed all the participants to her traditional territory and stated that her community is “strongly opposed to the transportation of nuclear waste through our territory and we will stand by that, we will continue to stand by that, and we stand with all those who are also opposed.”
Another leader from the Robinson-Superior Treaty area, Chief Wilfred King of Gull Bay First Nation, told the crowd, “We fully support the First Nations that are against the burying of nuclear waste in our territories. …. we vehemently oppose the transportation of any nuclear waste through our territory.” According to King, his community’s position was grounded in concerns with potential accidents along the transportation route. “We have many rivers and tributaries that intersect the Trans Canada Highway and we feel that this will have a very serious impact to our resources and our territory should there be a spill.”
A similar position was expressed by Rudy Turtle, Chief of Grassy Narrows, whose traditional territories are situated in Treaty 3 and downstream from the proposed repository. “[A]s Grassy Narrows First Nation we are saying no to nuclear waste. We are saying no to any kind of dumping within our traditional territory.” Turtle continued, “I’m thinking ahead I’m thinking of two, three, four, generations ahead and I know I won’t be around, but I hope that one day one of my great-grandchildren will say great-grandpa stood up for us, great-grandpa stood up for us spoke up for us now we’re able to enjoy our Earth.”
Environmental injustice by design
The proposal for a repository in the Ignace area is being advanced by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a not-for-profit corporation comprised of the nuclear power companies that generate and own the radioactive wastes. The 2002 Nuclear Fuel Waste Act required Canada’s nuclear power generation companies (Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Corporation and Hydro-Québec) to establish and fund the NWMO and tasked them with the long-term management of Canada’s used nuclear fuel. After an initial study, in 2005 the NWMO submitted a plan to the federal government to dispose of Canada’s used nuclear fuel in a deep geological repository (DGR). Two years later the federal government agreed.
The NWMO’s process to select a site for the DGR officially began in 2010, when it opened calls for “expressions of interest” from potential host communities. After initially examining over 20 communities, in 2020 the NWMO short-listed two Ontario municipalities as potential “hosts” for all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste: Ignace and South Bruce. Both municipalities have signed hosting agreements with the NWMO, and have committed to deciding whether or not they are “willing hosts” by the end of 2024.
In both cases, the NWMO has indicated that the proposed DGR would only move forward with the support of adjacent Indigenous communities. South Bruce, neighbouring the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, lies within the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, which includes Saugeen First Nation and Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation. Ignace, located on the Trans-Canada Highway, is a small community reliant on forestry and eco-tourism. It lies on the traditional territory of the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen.
The site-selection process has been riddled with controversy. The nuclear industry funds the NWMO and appoints its board members. As a result, despite being structured as a not-for-profit corporation, the NWMO is effectively controlled by industry. In some cases, the large sums of money the NWMO has paid Indigenous and municipal governments as part of its site selection process have led to accusations of governments being bought off by the nuclear industry. Communities downstream from the repository site, as well as the many along the transportation route, are effectively excluded from the ‘willingness’ decision. In the case of the proposed DGR in northwestern Ontario, the NWMO’s “host” community of Ignace is 45 kilometres east of the proposed DGR site and is not just upstream but in a different watershed. There are smaller communities closer to the site who are not part of the NWMO’s “willingness process.” While the NWMO has stated that the DGR would not proceed without the support of Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, other First Nations with historic and ongoing land use near or overlapping the project area are not being afforded the same respect.
The process is an example of structural injustice. By seeking ‘expressions of interest’ from individual communities, the industry made it inevitable that the poorest communities—including those with the fewest resources to represent their residents’ interests vis-à-vis the nuclear industry—would be the first to step forward. And the process is unfolding in the context of ongoing poverty and economic deprivation in many Indigenous communities in Canada, making it incredibly difficult for many First Nations to say “no” to most proposals for what is presented as development or the more benign sounding advance funding agreements to “learn more” about the project. The fact that a nuclear waste dump appears to be an opportunity to some people and municipalities in northwestern Ontario says more about the deplorable track record of capitalist development in the North than it says about the actual benefits associated with the NWMO’s proposal.
Environmental risk
One of the nuclear industry’s favourite promotional lines about deep geological repositories is that there is an “international consensus” about DGRs being the best option for containing nuclear fuel wastes. But it’s a consensus largely limited to the nuclear establishment, while the reality is that there is no approved and operating DGR for high level waste anywhere in the world, despite decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in pursuit of an operating licence. These nuclear waste burial schemes create substantial risk—risk to the environment, and risk to human health—at each of the several steps between current storage and any eventual stashing of these hazardous materials deep underground.
Those risks will begin at the reactor site, when the waste must be transferred from the current storage systems into transportation casks. All of Canada’s commercial reactors are the CANDU design, where 18 months in the reactor core turns simple uranium into an extremely complex and highly radioactive mix of over 200 different radioactive ingredients. Twenty seconds exposure to a single fuel bundle would be lethal within 20 seconds. As a result, the fuel bundles are handled so there is no exposure to air. The bundles are moved underwater from the reactor core into the irradiated fuel bays. After a minimum of 10 years, dry storage containers are submerged for loading into that same pool that has been cooling and shielding the wastes until the temperature is low enough for transfer. The dry storage containers are then moved to on-site storage buildings.
However, the NWMO has been silent on how the transfers from the dry storage containers to the transportation containers (for shipment via road or rail) would be carried out, saying only that it’s up to the “waste owners.” Keep in mind that there has been no internal monitoring of the fuel bundles, and their condition after as long as several decades in dry storage is unknown. At this and later stages, defects in the fuel bundles is a significant concern, as the more damaged a fuel bundle is, the higher the radiation dose will be, potentially affecting both workers and the environment.
According to the NWMO’s conceptual transportation plans, the wastes will be shipped in two to three trucks per day for fifty years, in one of three potential containers. One, the “basket container” is still in the conceptual stage. The second potential container was designed for moving dry storage containers very short distances within the reactor stations. The third was designed by Ontario Hydro in the 1980s and subjected to limited and not wholly successful drop tests of a half-scale model before being certified by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. This third design has since been warehoused by Ontario Hydro (with its certification renewed by its replacement utility, Ontario Power Generation) before being taken over by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. None of these transportation packages have been subject to full scale testing.
There are two sets of risks during transportation. During normal operations there will be low levels of radiation emanating from each shipment. The NWMO did calculations in 2012 and 2015 and concluded that the levels of radiation exposure will be “acceptable.” Yet radioactive exposure is a combination of dose, distance and duration, so if any of the variables are different than those NWMO plugged into their calculation, the risk factors change. The second set of risks during transportation are those that would result from an accident, particularly one where the container was breached.
When the waste arrives at the repository site it will again be transferred, this time from the transportation containers to the containers for underground placement. Those transfers will happen in a facility euphemistically named the “Used Fuel Packaging Plant,” employing a series of hot cells in which the waste bundles will be exposed to air for the first time since they were created in the reactor core. These transfers will be technically challenging and potentially highly contaminating.
During operations of the deep geological repository, water will become contaminated during the washing down of the nuclear waste transportation packages. Contaminated water will be pumped from the underground repository. Operations will also generate low and intermediate level wastes, both solid and liquid.
Once deposited underground, the nuclear waste itself will contaminate the deep groundwater in the near or long term and that contamination will eventually reach surface water in the vast watershed.
The NWMO’s candidate site in Northwestern Ontario is located half-way between Ignace and Dryden. Because it is at the height of land for the Wabigoon and the Turtle River systems, there are concerns about releases to the downstream communities, including Rainy River and Lake of the Woods. If and when the radioactive releases occur from the deep geological repository, there will be no means to reverse the impacts.
Decades of opposition
This is not the first nuclear waste repository proposed in Northwestern Ontario. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL)—a federal Crown corporation focused on nuclear technology—was directed by the governments of Canada and Ontario to develop a repository for spent nuclear fuel. Northern Ontario, with its supposedly stable rock formations, was deemed ideal for a DGR.
However, public opposition repeatedly put a wrench into AECL’s plans. Many municipal and First Nations governments passed resolutions and issued statements opposing the disposal of nuclear waste in the region. In 1998 a federal environmental assessment panel concluded that AECL’s concept lacked public acceptance and had not been demonstrated “safe and acceptable.” The proposal was subsequently shelved, until the NWMO, which was established four years later, revived it, adopting an approach very similar to the previous AECL concept as the basis of its 2005 recommendation to the federal government.
The establishment of the NWMO did not quell Indigenous, municipal, and grassroots resistance to nuclear waste disposal…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A number of grassroots groups opposed to the disposal of nuclear waste in Northern Ontario have emerged over the past decade, including No Nuclear Waste in Northwestern Ontario, the Sunset Country Spirit Alliance, and Nuclear Free Thunder Bay. These groups have united with other groups and individuals to form We The Nuclear Free North, an alliance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and groups dedicated to stopping the proposed DGR that includes the longstanding groups Environment North and Northwatch, who have decades of experience as critics of the nuclear industry’s various attempts to move radioactive wastes from southern to northern Ontario.
A new Indigenous-led anti nuclear group, called Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki (“standing up for the land”), was established in 2023. With members from Treaty 3, Treaty 9, and Robinson Treaty territories, Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki’s mission is to support grassroots Indigenous activists opposing the NWMO’s proposal.
Plebiscites and online polls
This groundswell of Indigenous and public opposition notwithstanding, the position of the municipalities and First Nations adjacent to the proposed DGR sites is less certain. Ignace and South Bruce have both signed hosting agreements with the NWMO, which commit both municipalities to decide whether or not they are “willing hosts” in the coming months. The City of Dryden has signed a series of “Significant Neighbouring” agreements with the NWMO that includes funding and confidentiality provisions, and is currently in the process of negotiating a Benefits Agreement.
In late April, Ignace held an online poll to gauge local support for the proposed DGR. South Bruce and Saugeen Ojibway Nation will hold formal plebiscites on the issue later this year.
The Municipality of Ignace’s approach to the proposed DGR has drawn significant criticism from some observers. n 2021 the Township Council passed a resolution that it would be Council who made the decision and there would not be a municipal referendum, such as South Bruce is holding. The online poll results (which have not been released to the public) are to be combined in a consultants’ report with findings from the consultants’ interviews, and will then be delivered to an “ad hoc willingness committee” appointed by the township council in February 2024. That committee will then make a recommendation to Council, and Council will make the decision. There’s a $500,000 signing bonus if they deliver a “willingness decision” by the end of June 2024. In contrast, the South Bruce referendum is not until October 28, 2024 and Saugeen Ojibway Nation leadership has recently been reported by the media as saying they are unlikely to make their decision before the end of the year.
Hosting agreements
In March 2024, the municipality of Ignace and the NWMO signed a controversial and divisive hosting agreement for the proposed DGR. If ratified through a declaration of willingness, the agreement would require the municipality to support the DGR in perpetuity. This includes supporting the NWMO’s proposal in all future regulatory processes, as well as attending meetings to speak in support of the proposal at the NWMO’s behest. Even if the scope and nature of the proposal changes significantly, the agreement would still require the municipality to support the DGR publicly and though all future regulatory processes.
The hosting agreement would also give the NWMO significant control over how the municipality communicates with its residents and participates in future regulatory processes regarding the DGR.
…………………………………….Ignace is thereby ceding an excessive degree of control to the NWMO for a rather paltry sum of money. The total payments to Ignace during the life of the project will amount to roughly $170 million…………………………………………
Towards a nuclear phase-out
The NWMO claims that it is solving Canada’s high-level nuclear waste problem by moving it into a DGR. Yet the most dangerous wastes—those that have been freshly removed from a reactor and are too hot to transport for at least a decade—will remain dispersed at reactor sites. What’s more, the nuclear industry hopes to expand rapidly by siting new small modular reactors across Canada, including in remote and rural regions, further dispersing nuclear waste.
The only way to truly solve Canada’s problem with radioactive waste, however, is to stop making more of it. In other words, we need to phase out nuclear power.
………………………………………………Indigenous communities have always been at the forefront of struggles against the nuclear industry on Turtle Island. The current battles against nuclear waste disposal in northwestern Ontario are no different. If Canada is to have a just transition away from fossil fuels, then it cannot be based on nuclear power.
Warren Bernauer is a non-Indigenous member of Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki and research associate at the University of Manitoba where he conducts research into energy transitions and social justice in the North.
Laura Tanguay is a doctoral candidate at York University researching the politics of nuclear waste in Ontario
Brennain Lloyd is project coordinator for Northwatch and member of We The Nuclear Free North.
Elysia Petrone is a lawyer and activist from Fort William First Nation and a member of Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/nuclear-waste-in-northwestern-ontario
Point Lepreau nuclear power plant has a generator ‘issue,’ says NB Power. Utility doesn’t know how long it will take to fix.
Telegraph Journal, :Andrew Waugh, Jul 10, 2024
There’s a problem with the generator at the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant, and NB Power says it doesn’t know how long it will take to fix, or how much it will cost.
The aging facility provides about one third of New Brunswick’s electricity, but has been plagued with problems in the last few years.
“We are currently on day 94 of the planned 100-day outage at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station,” NB Power spokesperson Dominique Couture said in an email to Brunswick News.
“After successfully completing planned maintenance work for the spring 2024 outage, an issue was identified in the generator, which is on the conventional, non-nuclear side of the station, as it was being returned to service.
“The team, along with a number of industry equipment experts, are currently troubleshooting the problem. After investigation and troubleshooting is complete, we will have a better understanding of the impact on the outage schedule and budget………………………………………………………………….
News of the shutdown possibly needing to be extended comes as the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board considers NB Power’s request for the highest rate hikes for its customers in generations. It is seeking increases of 23 per cent for residential and big industrial customers over the next two years, slightly less for small and medium-sized businesses.
NB Power refurbished the nuclear side of the plant in 2012, at a cost of $2.5 billion, a project that was over budget by $1 billion and took 37 months longer to complete than expected. But NB Power didn’t do similar work to other important parts of the plant, leading to frequent breakdowns…………………… https://tj.news/new-brunswick/exclusive-point-lepreau-has-a-generator-issue-says-nb-power
New Brunswick’s nuclear-powered rate hikes
Commentary, by Janice Harvey, July 8, 2024, https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/07/08/new-brunswicks-nuclear-powered-rate-hikes/
The abject failure of this and previous governments’ energy policies is on full display these days. In the 1970s, New Brunswick was one of only three provinces that bought into the federal government’s agenda to build out a civilian nuclear power industry. Quebec has since shut its nuclear generators down, leaving only Ontario and New Brunswick as the nuclear flag-bearers. How has that worked out for us?
NB Power has come to the Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) with a request for the biggest rate hikes in the utility’s history. While the details are buried in thousands of pages of documents filed with the EUB, evidence from previous EUB hearings makes it crystal clear that the utility’s single greatest financial liability driving up power rates is the much-vaunted Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station.
Point Lepreau has been a financial white elephant since its construction ended up costing three times the original price tag. Its planned 30-year lifespan (over which all this extra cost was to be amortized) was cut short by premature aging of critical reactor components, prompting a decision to undergo an expensive refurbishment, which was to extend the life of the plant by a fantastical 40 years. At the time, the then-PUB determined based on the evidence that refurbishment was too big a financial risk for New Brunswickers to handle and recommended against it. The Lord government went ahead anyway.
Like the original construction, the refurbishment went way over the timeline and budget. The result has been very poor performance, a miserable 60 per cent in 2022 compared to the wildly optimistic 90 per cent capacity assumption that the EUB rejected. The costs of replacement power alone during these shutdowns have repeatedly sabotaged annual financial performance projections. Now, Point Lepreau is facing even more expensive upgrades to fix problems that were not dealt with during the refurbishment.
In short, Point Lepreau is the most unreliable and most expensive power generator on the grid, responsible for the lion’s share of NB Power’s debt. It is not going to get any better. Keeping it afloat until 2040, its new end-of-life target, is going to mean more of the same – throwing scarce money down a deep, black hole paid for by ever-rising power rates.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that New Brunswickers cannot afford nuclear power, the Higgs government has doubled down on nuclear, floating an equally fantastical proposition that the next generation of nukes – so-called small modular reactors – will quarterback New Brunswick’s climate change strategy, while an SMR export industry is expected to drive economic growth. To that end, New Brunswick taxpayers have already fronted a total of $35 million to two private nuclear upstarts, neither of which has designed or built a reactor. This is despite lots of reasons to put their rosy promises of “clean” nuclear-fueled prosperity in the same wishful thinking category as JOI Scientific’s power-from-water scheme that so beguiled NB Power executives.
Just as the EUB rate hearings got underway, an entirely predictable hitch in the Higgs’ nuclear dream occurred. It seems like the SMR upstart ARC Clean Energy is on its way down and out, taking $25 million provincial dollars and $7 million federal with it. If we’re lucky, Moltex Energy, propped up by $10 million in provincial and $50.5 million in federal tax dollars, will be close behind, and we can breathe a sigh of financial relief. The longer this nonsense persists, the more of our tax dollars will go into the nuclear black hole, and the greater the delay in meeting our climate change pollution targets.
Even if Moltex hangs on, or some other SMR promoter replaces them, any electricity that might eventually flow from an SMR will be, like Point Lepreau, the most expensive power on the grid – entirely unaffordable and unnecessary. The Higgs government knows this, passing legislation this spring requiring NB Power to buy electricity from the planned privately-owned SMRs regardless of price, a silent admission that electricity from SMRs, should they ever see the light of day, will be more expensive than any alternative. In other words, SMRs will drive up your power bill.
Meanwhile, the June 22nd issue of The Economist features the exponential growth of solar energy worldwide, the cost of which – even with storage – is falling exponentially. Other than home retrofits, this is the cheapest new power on offer.
The nuclear cost numbers are there for all to see. For elected representatives to support this industry, knowing people cannot tolerate higher power rates, is grossly irresponsible and a betrayal of trust. Renewables naysayers are depriving New Brunswickers of the benefits of this global energy transition. This – and our nuclear-powered rate hikes – need to be on the ballot on October 21.
Janice Harvey is the chair of the Environment and Society program at St. Thomas Universit
Ignace, Ontario, betrayed by Council, on nuclear waste decision
Ignace has voted in favour of continuing in the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s siting process, which brings Northwestern Ontario one step closer to being put on the receiving end of all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste.
The NWMO has said it will select a single site by the end of 2024 for a deep geological repository for Canada’s existing stockpiles and future inventory of high-level nuclear fuel waste. The project will include transportation of the waste in 2-3 trucks per day for over 50 years, then processing at the site in a still-to-be-designed waste transfer facility, and finally placement deep underground in a series of tunnels and vaults so radioactive no workers can be present during the emplacement process.
An “ad hoc willingness committee”, appointed by the Township in February, delivered its recommendation in a special meeting of Council this afternoon. Immediately after the presentation by Committee co-chair Roger Dufault, Council voted to continue in the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s site selection process.
The NWMO has been studying the Revell Site, between Ignace and Dryden, since 2010. In 2020 the NWMO narrowed its list of candidate sites to just two: the Revell Site in Northwestern Ontario and the Teeswater site in the Municipality of South Bruce in Southwestern Ontario. The Revell Site is 45 kilometres outside the Township of Ignace and is in a different watershed.
“We feel betrayed”, said Ignace resident Sheila Krahn.
“For the last ten years we’ve been bombarded with promotional messages from the NWMO, and when it was finally time for a decision, we didn’t even get a vote. I don’t believe that the majority of people in Ignace support this project, but so many people didn’t trust the so-called “willingness process” and didn’t participate.”
Instead of a referendum such as the one scheduled for South Bruce on October 28th, Ignace hired a consultant to conduct interviews and run an online poll. The online registration required scans of government ID and asked residents if they supported continuing in the NWMO siting process, rather than asking a more direct question about whether they agreed with the NWMO’s project.
“The NWMO siting process is all about getting to “yes”, so they can claim some semblance of public support”, explained Northwatch spokesperson Brennain Lloyd.
“They missed the mark with this one. They’ve spent an estimated $10 million of electricity ratepayers’ money trying to convince Ignace to support their nuclear waste project, but at the end of the day what they bought was a questionable outcome from a largely unelected council of a community that has no authority and is not even in the same watershed as the NWMO’s candidate site.
The NWMO has deemed Ignace to be the “host community”, despite Ignace’s distance from the site, lack of jurisdiction, and the presence of other communities closer to the site and downstream. In 2020 the Township of Ignace passed a resolution that the Township itself would make the decision on behalf of the people of Ignace, rather than holding a referendum, as the Municipality of South Bruce will carry out on October 28, 2024. In 2023 the Township hired the consulting firm With Chela Inc., which conducted a number of interviews and held an online poll. The consultant’s report was presented in-camera to Ignace’s “Ad Hoc Willingness Committee”, which had been selected and appointed by the Council in February. This “ad hoc” committee recommendation to Council, presented today, is to stay in the NWMO siting process. Minutes later Council voted to accept the recommendation, committing the current and future councils to adhering to the terms and conditions of a “hosting agreement” signed by the Township of Ignace and the NWMO in March 2024.
“At minimum this should be a regional decision, not the decision of one small upstream council”, added Wendy O’Connor, a volunteer with the northern Ontario alliance We the Nuclear Free North.
“There is a growing list of municipalities and First Nations passing resolutions against the NWMO using northern Ontario as the dumping ground for high-level nuclear waste. It will be astounding to see the NWMO select the Revell site, despite the poor decision made by the Ignace Township Council today”.
There is broad opposition to the NWMO project from individuals, community and citizens’ groups, municipalities, and First Nations. In addition to criticism of the project itself due to the negative impacts on the environment and human health during transportation and operation and after radioactive waste abandonment, the NWMO siting process and the Township of Ignace’s approach have also been soundly criticized for being secretive, undemocratic, and lacking scientific and technical rigour.
With global race to decarbonize electricity sector, demand for skilled nuclear workers heats up.
COMMENT. Most (or all?) of the funds available to these companies to hire “skilled workers” is coming directly from the public (taxpayers) through direct subsidies, contracts or tax refunds. For example, the story mentions that AtkinsRéalis is one of the top hiring firms. A few weeks back was another story stating that the AtkinsRéalis nuclear division got a $750M contract for work on a CANDU reactor in Romania. A few months before that was another story that Canada had signed a $3 BILLION “export development deal” with Romania (i.e. a gift) to build its CANDU reactor, and that most of the funds would be spent on Canadian jobs. This all comes back to the nuclear industry’s current core problem: its products (new nuclear reactors) are hulking dinosaurs that suck up funds at an alarming rate and no private investor doing due diligence wants to be part of this costly scheme.
Globe and Mail, MATTHEW MCCLEARN, 8 July 24
Last month, U.S.-based nuclear reactor vendor Westinghouse opened a 13,000-square-foot engineering office in Kitchener, Ont. The company wants to sell its products, including its flagship AP1000 reactor, in Canada while also serving international customers.
Having hired most of its 250 Canadian staff in the last three years, it now seeks to hire 100 more engineers. It’s recruiting at a moment when, after a decades-long lull, skilled nuclear workers find themselves in high demand.
China and Russia have long dominated construction activity, while Western countries stagnated; Canada’s newest power reactor was completed in the early 1990s. But efforts to decarbonize the electricity sector have coalesced into support for designing and building new reactors, even as aging facilities are overhauled – leading to a proliferation of announced nuclear projects.
Whether there’s enough engineering talent to execute them all, however, is a question vigorously debated within the nuclear industry, here and abroad.
According to a survey the Canadian Nuclear Association conducted five years ago, the industry directly employs 33,000 people – up from 30,000 in 2012. Large employers include Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power, which operate large nuclear plants, as well as uranium mining giant Cameco Corp. and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which operates the Chalk River research facility.
That survey is now being updated, and while results have not been finalized, employment appears to have grown another 10 to 15 per cent during the past five years. But the sheer volume of announced projects implies more rapid growth.
OPG recently began early work to refurbish four reactors at its Pickering station. The eight-reactor Bruce station, already one of the world’s largest, is in the early stages of a planned expansion that could add four new large reactors.
AtkinsRéalis, steward of Canada’s homegrown Candu technology, is racing to develop a modernized 1,000-megawatt reactor it calls the Monark. It’s among the most active hirers on Nuclear Jobs Canada, an industry job board.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is hiring at its Chalk River facilities, a Second World War-era facility that has been extensively modernized in recent years. It’s looking to populate its new laboratories and replace retiring workers.
“Nuclear was a little bit quiet for a while, and now it’s coming back,” said Janet Tosh, CNL’s vice-president of human resources.
“So we are having to build up that talent pipeline. But it’s not just science and technology people we’re looking for. We’re looking for technicians, machinists, certified trade workers.”
And then there’s relative newcomers to Canada, such as Westinghouse. Another U.S.-based reactor vendor, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, has partnered with OPG to build up to four small modular reactors at Darlington station.
The picture is similar in other Western countries, including the U.S. and Britain, both of which have seen limited reactor construction for decades. Reports abound that nuclear employers, desperate for talent, have lured long-retired professionals back into the work force.
Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering published a 250-page report examining the potential barriers to a major build-out of new “advanced” reactors. It identifies labour availability as a key constraint.
“Utilities have generally not retained the talent on their staff to execute these large projects given the limited deployment of nuclear technology in the past 30 years in the United States,” the report says.
“This shortfall in talent could become equally limiting across the supply chain, operations, and regulatory organizations that must support any large-scale growth in nuclear deployment.”
Akira Tokuhiro, a professor at Ontario Tech University, which has one of the largest nuclear engineering programs in North America, has noticed major nuclear employers pledging to hire hundreds of workers apiece on LinkedIn.
“And I thought, how can that be?” he recalled during an interview. “Because we’re producing 50 graduates a year.”
Prof. Tokuhiro added up the output from other programs across the continent, and determined that fewer than 1,000 people graduate with a degree in radiation science or nuclear engineering in North America. (He figures that for every such graduate, nuclear employers hire 10 times as many mechanical, chemical and other engineers who’ve not studied nuclear directly.)
He compares that against likely retirement rates for workers at major nuclear employers, as well as the many announced nuclear projects.
“We don’t have enough new graduates,” Prof. Tokuhiro concluded. “There’s a disconnect between what the industry needs, and what the universities are producing.”
Luca Oriani, Westinghouse’s global chief engineering services officer, disagrees. The reactor vendor almost exclusively hires graduates with little or no industry experience, he said, and then trains and retains them as long as possible, typically decades. The company has found the supply of engineering talent abundant, in Canada and elsewhere.
That’s not to say competition isn’t fierce. Westinghouse used to visit campuses a week ahead of job fairs for coming graduates to recruit before they met with competitors; now it’s offering them jobs as early as a year before graduation.
“I have over 2,000 engineers working for me,” Mr. Oriani said. “I still spend at least a week month just going to different universities and discussing with students, and trying to see how do we get them to come to us before they go somewhere else.”
In an interview earlier this year, OPG chief executive officer Ken Hartwick divided the industry’s labour into two groups: engineering and project management on one side; and trades, such as boilermakers and electricians, on the other. Availability of the first group, he said, has not been a problem, an aging work force notwithstanding.
“I’m less worried about the older person losing some of the experience, because the younger people coming through our universities are brilliant,” Mr. Hartwick said.
Tradespeople were another matter. OPG competes for them not just with other nuclear utilities such as Bruce Power, but with many other construction projects, including hospitals and roads.
“Can we ramp up our trades programs fast enough? That’s the biggest challenge.”
Some in Canada’s nuclear industry say talent isn’t as scarce here as it is in the U.S. and Britain, thanks to major multi-reactor reactor refurbishments at Ontario’s Darlington and Bruce stations over the past decade. They’re major capital projects in their own right, requiring significant manpower to execute.
That’s kept a lot of building trades very engaged, and it’s kept the regular work force [of utilities] engaged,” said Bob Walker, national director of the Canadian Nuclear Workers’ Council, an umbrella organization of nuclear sector unions.
He confirmed that retirees are re-entering the work force, but added that most nuclear employers offer generous pension plans, allowing workers to retire relatively early.
“That’s been a running joke for as long as I can remember: No one ever retires, they just change positions,” Mr. Walker said. “The industry plans on people coming back, and people plan on retiring and coming back.”……………….. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-after-decades-of-dormancy-competition-for-nuclear-engineering-talent/
Second review of ARC’s Small Modular Nuclear Reactor not complete, despite layoffs
That’s after ARC Clean Technology Canada said it downsized with that review now over
Telegraph Journal, Adam Huras, Jul 04, 2024
A second design review of a New Brunswick-based company’s proposed small modular nuclear reactor is not yet complete, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
That’s after ARC Clean Technology Canada said it downsized with that review now over.
Brunswick News reported last month that ARC, one of two companies pursuing SMR technology in the province, had handed out layoff notices to some of its employees, citing its latest design phase coming to an end.
That’s as its CEO also departed.
But the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says it’s “months” away from completing its review, and may need more information from the company.
“We have received all of ARC’s major submissions as part of the vendor design review process and our experts are carefully reviewing them,” commission spokesperson Braeson Holland told Brunswick News.
“It is possible that staff will have additional questions for the vendor. In that case, additional information may be requested, and the company will be expected to provide it for the vendor design review to proceed.
“Provided that any additional information requested is submitted in a timely manner and that the company remains in compliance with its service agreement with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, we anticipate that the review will be complete within several months.”
A vendor design review is an optional service that the commission provides for the assessment of a vendor’s reactor design.
The objective is to verify, at a high level, that Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards, will be met.
The company did complete a Phase 1 review of its ARC-100 sodium-cooled fast reactor in October 2019.
An executive summary of that review, made public by the commission, noted that there were requests for additional information, as well as technical discussions through letters, emails, meetings and teleconferences, after an initial submission.
The result of that first review found that “additional work is required by ARC” to address findings raised in the review, specifically around the reactor’s management system.
It then lists a series of technical concerns, but concludes that “these issues are foreseen to be resolvable.”
A Phase 2 design review, which ARC is undergoing right now, goes into further detail, and focuses on identifying fundamental barriers to licensing for a new design in Canada, according to the commission.
That review started in February 2022, and was expected to be completed in January of this year.
It’s unclear why it has yet to be completed.
At a New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board hearing last month into a recent power rate hike, NB Power vice president Brad Coady testified he doesn’t expect SMRs will be ready by an original target date of 2030.
The utility now believes they’ll be ready by 2032 or 2033……………….
https://tj.news/new-brunswick/second-review-of-arcs-smr-not-complete-despite-layoffs
Former New Brunswick energy minister joins nuclear industry after resigning in June
Mike Holland will be joining AtkinsRéalis, formerly SNC-Lavalin
CBC News · Jul 05, 2024
A former New Brunswick cabinet minister who resigned in June is joining AtkinsRéalis, a Montreal-based company previously known as SNC-Lavalin Group.
Mike Holland, who was natural resources and energy development minister and MLA for the riding of Albert, announced at the end of June that he was quitting to pursue a job in the private sector.
Holland will be joining the AtkinsRéalis team as the director of business development for North America.
The company told Radio-Canada the reason it recruited the former minister was to help increase sales of its nuclear reactor models and invest in the development of small modular reactors.
In a statement, the company said it’s “working to accelerate” sales of its Candu reactors in Canada and internationally.
…………………….When Holland announced his resignation from the New Brunswick government, he said the company he accepted an offer from is not a company he dealt with in his role as a minister, nor as an MLA.
However, AtkinsRéalis, then known as SNC-Lavalin, announced a partnership with Moltex Energy Canada in 2022 and Holland was quoted in the news release at the time.
“This agreement contributes not only to the growth of long-term, high-quality jobs in New Brunswick’s energy sector, it also recognizes the leadership role of both Moltex and the province in advancing the next generation of nuclear technology,” he said in the 2022 release.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/energy-minister-nuclear-resignation-1.7255601
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