Bruce Livesey
Eye magazine
July 13, 2000

Will the troubled Pickering A nuclear power station be properly assessed before it fires up its reactors again next year? And is it too old and hazardous to be turned on at all?

This is what worries Lorenzo Berardinetti. The Scarborough city councillor introduced a resolution at Toronto’s city council last May calling on the federal government to set up an independent panel to conduct an inquiry into whether Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG) — formerly Ontario Hydro — should start up Pickering A’s four reactors sometime in 2001. The resolution was passed unanimously. "[OPG] wants a low-level assessment," says Berardinetti. "We’re saying that before we start Pickering A we must have a high-level assessment and an independent inquiry."

Two weeks ago a similar resolution was passed by Pickering’s city council. As Pickering city councillor Maurice Brenner observes, "There are a lot of unanswered questions — like why is there a higher rate of leukemia and various cancers in the Durham region than any other area of Ontario? Why is that? And you know, we don’t know."

Located just east of Toronto on Lake Ontario and opened in 1971, Pickering A is Ontario’s oldest nuclear reactor (combined with Pickering B, the entire station has a total of eight reactors). But in 1997, Ontario Hydro was forced to close down Pickering A because of a backlog of maintenance problems, a dearth of manpower and for barely meeting minimum international safety standards.

Now OPG is spending $1.2 billion to overhaul the four reactors. And all was going well until the federal nuclear regulator, the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), demanded an environmental assessment.

But anti-nuclear critics and the cities of Toronto and Pickering say the scope of this assessment is too narrow and the AECB is not arm’s-length enough to carry it out objectively. They even say restarting Pickering A is a bad idea, given the station’s history of safety, health and cost problems. "We’re taking the position that Pickering A should not be restarted," says Irene Kock, an activist with the anti-nuke Nuclear Awareness Project. "They haven’t got a good record on preventative maintenance."

In many respects, Pickering A symbolizes the failure of nuclear power to live up to its promise of being a cost-effective, safe and environmentally benign source of energy. As the anti-nuke group Energy Probe has long pointed out, nuclear power stations are enormously expensive to build, wear out much faster than expected and never pay back their initial investment. And, of course, they’re dangerous.

Three years ago, when Pickering A was closed down, the public utility had spent so much money on nuclear stations it had a stranded debt of $23.3 billion, a net negative value of $6 billion and Ontario’s utility rates were among the highest in Canada. Ontario Hydro once estimated it would cost $18.7 billion to phase out all of its nuclear stations.

"Nuclear plants are supposed to be cheap to operate and extremely expensive to build," says Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research at Energy Probe. "Owning a nuclear station is like owning a Ferrari that costs $100,000 but gets good mileage. The problem is, when it breaks down you keep having to pay back the loan for $100,000 and pay for taxi cabs to get you where you want. So you pay through the nose in both ways."

Pickering A has had a long history of problems. For starters, when they built the four reactors, the utility installed only one emergency fast-shutdown system instead of the two that subsequently built reactors have. In 1983, Pickering had a loss-of-coolant accident after a pressure tube ruptured, causing the entire station to be turned off and necessitating a $1 billion retubing job.

In 1988, radioactive iodine was released at Pickering after an error caused the damage of 36 fuel bundles. Four years later, the station had a heavy water leak from a heat exchanger that resulted in a release of 2,300 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium into Lake Ontario. In 1994, Pickering had another major loss of coolant resulting in the spill of 185 tonnes of heavy water — the emergency cooling system was used for the first time to prevent a meltdown. By the time Pickering A was closed, it was operating at a bare minimum of standards.

When OPG indicated it wanted to restart Pickering A, initially it did not want to carry out an environmental assessment. Still, when the AECB persisted, the agreed-upon assessment turned out to have a limited scope and is being conducted behind closed doors.

Anti-nuclear advocates have fought against these restrictions. Moreover, they argue that the AECB has been long an apologist for nuclear power and is therefore not objective enough to conduct a proper review. "They’re too close to the operator," notes Brenner.

Not surprisingly, the AECB is refusing to hold public hearings for the environmental assessment. They gave community groups only 60 days to make written submissions, turning down requests to have this period extended. Moreover, the assessment is not looking at the possibility of a Chernobyl-like meltdown scenario, nor examining safer, cheaper alternatives to nuclear power like solar, wind or high-efficiency natural gas plants. "They are assuming the safety systems work, which is an absurd assumption because safety systems have a long history of problems," says Kock. "And there’s no discussion to alternatives or to the need of starting the plant at all."

Both Toronto and Pickering have demanded that an independent panel be established to do the assessment, along with public hearings. They want federal environment minister David Anderson to step in and order this.

Meanwhile, in their submissions to the AECB, Energy Probe and the Nuclear Awareness Project have criticized OPG for overlooking the age of Pickering A, ignoring the fact that radioactive toxins are emitted persistently from the plants, and that the emergency-shutdown systems are inadequate. "They haven’t incorporated the improvements in designs of nuclear reactors that have been made since the ’60s," says Rubin.

OPG spokesperson Ted Gruetzner says they have improved the shutdown systems and made other modifications to Pickering A. He says they conducted a cost-benefit analysis and found that reopening the station was the cheapest way to obtain energy at this time. Says Gruetzner, "For the type of energy needed based on current technology and costs, this was the best way to go."