Canadian Press
CTV.ca
April 19, 2006

Nuclear power may be the best option to fulfil Ontario’s future electricity needs, despite its obvious downsides – including Chornobyl-type accidents and the need to store radioactive waste, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Wednesday.

"That’s an issue," McGuinty said of the risks associated with nuclear power, including the devastating Chornobyl accident in 1986 that led to thousands of deaths.

"But I think we should look at our particular history in this country," McGuinty said, noting that there have been no major nuclear accidents in Ontario where reactors have operated for more than two decades.

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear meltdown. The catastrophe killed thousands of people, mostly in Russia, but also in Ukraine and Belarus.

McGuinty’s government is about to issue a formal response to recommendations in December that called for $40 billion in nuclear refurbishments and expansions over the next 20 years to ensure Ontario has an adequate electricity supply.

The premier denied he’s waiting until after the Chornobyl anniversary to respond.

Critics say there have been some close calls when it comes to the safety of Ontario’s nuclear stations, including two incidents at the Pickering station – a coolant leak in 1983, and brief problems with computers that operate a reactor in 1991. In both cases, safety systems kicked in as they should to prevent potentially devastating accidents.

But industry observer Tom Adams of Energy Probe called those incidents "near misses" that should have deterred governments from considering nuclear as an option again.

"To use an air traffic control analogy . . . when a Cessna sweeps in front of a 747 and they miss each other by a few hundred metres, the air traffic controllers don’t say, ‘Oh well, that was nothing.’ They say, ‘We’re never going to let that happen again.’"

China and India have embarked on nuclear energy programs in recent years. But Adams noted that the western world is largely shying away from nuclear plants with the notable exception of Finland, which is constructing a nuclear station to reduce that country’s reliance on Russian gas.

This week, a Greenpeace report predicted the fallout from Chornobyl was grossly underestimated.

The report predicts that 270,000 cancers will have been caused by Chornobyl fallout, 93,000 of them fatal. The report also notes that there have been 60,000 additional deaths in Russia in the last 15 years due to the Chornobyl accident, and that the total death toll for Ukraine and Belarus is another 140,000.

"Nuclear power is just as dangerous for Canada in 2006 as it was for Ukraine in 1986,” said Greenpeace Canada’s Dave Martin. "A catastrophic accident has a low probability, but devastating consequences. Canada should phase out nuclear power – conservation and renewable energy are safer, cleaner, and cheaper."

McGuinty acknowledged nuclear energy isn’t without its problems.

"The downside is, of course, that it does produce nuclear waste. The upside is, we can contain it. The downside, again, is, we’ve got to contain it for a thousand years," he said.

But McGuinty has long argued that nuclear has the ability to generate clean, affordable and reliable baseload electricity compared to its alternatives.

Natural gas is too expensive, wind power is unreliable and Ontario’s hydroelectric potential has largely been maxed out, McGuinty said.

That leaves nuclear, which already generates half of the province’s electricity, and coal power. But the Liberals have promised to shut down Ontario’s four remaining coal plants by the end of 2009 due to air pollution concerns.

Proponents of coal say plants that generate electricity from the cheap, abundant commodity can be upgraded with cleaner technology at fractions of the cost of building more nuclear stations.

"This is just pure politics. There is no environmental justification," said Adams, who in a recent study found that two of Ontario’s coal-fired plants are among the cleanest in North America.

Adams said shutting them down would mean Ontario will have to import more electricity from "dirtier" coal plants in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.