Thomas Adams & Norman Rubin
Energy Probe
October 20, 1997

Ontario Select Committee on
Ontario Hydro Nuclear Affairs

Background Documents for
Presentation of
Energy Probe

Presenters:

Thomas Adams, Executive Director
Norman Rubin, Director of Nuclear Research

October 20, 1997

EnergyProbe
225 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2M6
Telephone (416) 964-9223
Facsimile (416) 964-8239

Contents of Energy Probe’s briefing binder to the Select Committee on Ontario Hydro Nuclear Affairs

Part One: A Pattern of Unaccountability

Tab 1: Correspondence between Norman Rubin, Energy Probe, and Hugh Macaulay, Ontario Hydro (including Energy Probe press releases), February to April 1981.

Three letters delivered to Ontario Hydro’s Directors before three successive crucial Hydro Board meetings — meetings that could have saved Hydro from its present fate. In the letters, Energy Probe’s Norman Rubin presents Hydro’s Directors with the evidence — most of it from Hydro’s own documents, or from other utilities — that Hydro’s aggressive expansion program (especially the construction of the then-barely-begun Darlington nuclear station) threatened the Corporation with financial ruin. Energy Probe offered to "arrange presentations by one or more international experts on utility forecasting, financing, and expansion." Hydro Chair Hugh Macaulay’s February 16 response, declining Energy Probe’s offer and dismissing its concerns with scorn, is powerful testimony that even a very intelligent person can make, and justify, foolish decisions when put in a position of virtually total unaccountability. In our submission, neither Hydro’s present Directors nor their political masters are significantly more likely to be held personally accountable for today’s nuclear investments than their predecessors.

Tab 2: "The Draft Demand/Supply Planning Strategy Review — Ontario Hydro’s Response to Select Committee Recommendations", by Ontario Hydro, March 1989 (copy of Norman Rubin’s annotated desk copy).

This document, like many others, demonstrates Ontario Hydro’s unaccountability to this Select Committee’s predecessor. Required to respond to the Committee’s recommendations on Hydro’s approach to creating a 25-year expansion plan, Ontario Hydro alternatively ignores, patronizes, and misrepresents the Committee’s generally sensible recommendations. More fundamentally, Hydro avoids actually changing its strategy, even where the Committee has apparently recommended it do so, by finding sections of it strategy that can be interpreted as somehow enveloping the recommendation for change! (Hydro’s annual responses to the recommendations of the Ontario Energy Board are generally similar, though they usually rely more heavily on new information, only made available to Hydro after the end of the O.E.B. hearing.)

Part Two: Costs, Liabilities, and Financial Risks

Tab 3: "Too cheap to be true: Uncovering the real cost of nuclear electricity" by Norman Rubin, Energy Probe, 1989.

In 1989, Energy Probe corresponded with Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Energy regarding Ontario Hydro’s estimates of nuclear cost and the findings of the Ontario Nuclear Cost Inquiry, chaired by Ralph Brooks. This document examines the missing cost factors, the undercounted costs, and the heroic assumptions which made Ontario Hydro’s estimates of nuclear cost too low and the conclusions of the Ontario Nuclear Cost Inquiry inaccurate. In our 1989 analysis of the "business risk" of Hydro’s nuclear investments, we concluded, all too prophetically, "The downside includes items like a chance of a general lack of plant reliability, lack of electrical demand growth, competition from newer sources, need for safety upgrades or shutdown, and many other potentially serious occurrences." (See the last page of Appendix A.)

Tab 4: "Statistical modeling of nuclear performance decline" by Thomas Adams, Energy Probe, 1991.

In 1989, Energy Probe created a statistical model explaining the ongoing deterioration of Ontario Hydro’s nuclear production as a function of aging and presented it to the Ontario Energy Board. The model was subsequently improved and presented in two subsequent Ontario Energy Board annual rate reviews. Ontario Hydro, the Association of Major Power Consumers (AMPCO), and the Municipal Electric Association (MEA) opposed the use of the model and its conclusions, arguing that aging was not a factor driving nuclear performance decline, and that the declining trend in nuclear performance would reverse. This document is the last of the series, and led to an Ontario Energy Board recommendation that Ontario Hydro examine the impact of aging on its reactor performance. Subsequent reactor performance shows our model to have produced a reliable forecast.

Tab 5: "Taxpayers on hook for Hydro mess: Reactor shutdowns make shambles of plan to pay $15B cleanup bill" by Tom Spears. Ottawa Citizen, August 19, 1997.

A summary of the unacceptable, unsustainable situation of Hydro’s totally unfunded legacy of radioactive wastes and reactors. Ontario Hydro has not established an actual fund to finance reactor decommissioning and radioactive waste disposal — despite a recommendation from Hydro’s 1994 Task Force on Sustainable Energy Development (SED) and approval in principle from Ontario Hydro’s Board of Directors on June 13, 1994. We have been informed by Hydro officials that they believed that the fund could not be established without amendments to the Power Corporation Act, and asked the previous Ontario Government for such amendments and were refused. As a result, not one penny has been set aside, of the roughly $2.8 billion collected from ratepayers ($2.601 billion by the end of 1996), or of the remaining $12 billion required to do the job according to Ontario Hydro’s own estimates.

Part Three: Safety — In the Eye of the Beholder?

Tab 6: "Branch Strategic Planning Initiative: Input Regarding Nuclear Safety" and "Safety Report Updates: Issues Addressed, Impacts Arising and Benefits" — two internal Hydro memos by J.C. Luxat, Thermal-Hydraulics Engineer, Nuclear Safety Department, November 1991. (Exhibit 1022 from the Nuclear Liability Act trial.)

In response to criticism from other Hydro staff that Hydro’s Nuclear Safety Department (NSD) looked too hard for safety problems, "generates too many design changes because we retain excessive conservatism in our analyses and do not `sharpen our pencils enough’", a nuclear safety engineer corrects these false impressions. When periodic updates to safety-critical reports find that required safety levels aren’t being reached, actual changes that increase safety "are, generally, considered as the means of last resort to resolve unacceptable results." Another benefit of having a talented Nuclear Safety Department working for Hydro is to prevent the AECB from resolving safety issues "simply by telling us to correct apparent design deficiencies . . ." The impression that CANDU safety analysis is characterized by large amounts of conservatism is false, though it "appears to be prevalent amongst some people not directly involved in safety analysis." (We fear that it is prevalent among AECB Board members as well.) Finally, Mr. Luxat presents a lengthy set of tables of safety problems that could have led, but did not lead, to "design changes, tighter operational limits or modified trip setpoints [a kind of tighter operational limit]." Instead, most were resolved "through additional, more extensive analysis" which in many instances had not yet been formally accepted by the AECB as valid. (According to our recent follow-up, some of these issues still haven’t been resolved six years later, although the reactors continue to operate.)

Tab 7: "Uncertainty, Reassurance and Nuclear Safety", by Peter Fraser (now an employee of the Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology), in Energy Studies Review 1990.

In 1987 and 1988, Peter Fraser, a physicist and former employee of AECL, was the staff scientist for the Ontario Nuclear Safety Review chaired by Dr. Ken Hare. The conclusion of Hare’s report was often quoted by nuclear industry advocates and Ontario government officials as endorsing the safety of Ontario Hydro’s reactors. In this paper Fraser argues that the content of Hare’s report, particularly the extensive evidence in the body of the report about uncertainties in nuclear safety issues, is at odds with the confident tone of its principal conclusion about safety.

Tab 8: The Hazards of Old Reactors, by Tom Slee and Norman Rubin, Energy Probe, 1987.

This document was one of Energy Probe’s four submissions to the Ontario Nuclear Safety Review. It discusses the safety significance of nuclear aging and documents many safety problems created by aging and obsolescence. The document examines deficiencies in the functioning and approach of the Atomic Energy Control Board. The document also examines the problem created by improper liability limitation for nuclear operators and its role in increasing risk to the public.