(Dec. 22, 2007) An industry expert says the recent Chalk River reactor fiasco is raising doubts that Ontario will purchase new nuclear reactors exclusively from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the federal Crown corporation at the centre of the controversy.
Tyler Hamilton
Toronto Star
December 22, 2007
An industry expert says the recent Chalk River reactor fiasco is raising doubts that Ontario will purchase new nuclear reactors exclusively from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the federal Crown corporation at the centre of the controversy.
Adding to AECL’s problems, sources say Candu’s heavy-water reactor technology didn’t score top marks in two recently completed reports, one jointly prepared by Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power and the other by consulting firm McKinsey. The reports – not yet public – are meant to assist the provincial government in assessing reactor designs.
“This changes the cards on the table in my view,” said David Butters, president of the Association of Power Producers of Ontario.
The federal nuclear watchdog found last month that AECL had been operating its NRU or “National Research Universal” reactor for 17 months while some safety measures required by its operating licence were incomplete.
When the reactor was shut down, creating a global shortage of medical isotopes used to detect and treat many diseases, it drew attention to two replacement reactors that are nearly 10 years late and tens of millions of dollars over budget.
Others have questioned why AECL didn’t disclose the reactor problem sooner, giving the government and health-care community more time to find alternatives.
“Controversy is never helpful,” said Jerry Hopwood, vice-president of reactor development at AECL. But he said comparing an isotope-producing research reactor to a power reactor, such as the company’s Advanced Candu Reactor, is comparing apples to oranges. “We think AECL and Team Candu and the ACR 1000 will be the best deal for Ontario.”
Hopwood said AECL will be seeking an independent review of the Chalk River incident and the “miscommunication around the circumstances.” Norman Rubin, director of nuclear research at think-tank Energy Probe, said Ontario Energy Minister Gerry Phillips will have to consider the latest events, and how they reflect on the company’s reliability, in the selection process for new reactors.
When it comes to building a new reactor, “it’s not an easy job for good managers to meet a deadline, meet a budget and keep the lights on, but when you add bad management to it, and an organization with a record of making promises it can’t keep – then watch out,” Rubin said.
Phillips will have to proceed with caution, Rubin added. “We’ve gotten burned so many times, either as federal taxpayers by owning the technology or as provincial taxpayers for buying it.”
The minister said earlier this week that the province’s reactor choice will be based on “best technology” and take into account “reliability, the ability to deliver on time and the right price.”
Whereas former energy minister Dwight Duncan always said the government’s preference was to use Canadian technology if it got the best deal, Phillips wouldn’t say whether AECL’s home-team advantage would count.
“It goes without saying that AECL would be one of the front-runners,” he said. “But we are not going to limit the consideration to them.”
The government will consider the recommendations of Ontario’s two nuclear operators. Sources say OPG and Bruce Power don’t rank either AECL’s older Candu 6 reactor or its ACR technology as their top choice.
The report leans toward light-water reactor technologies, offered by companies such as Areva, Westinghouse and General Electric, and also assesses them on availability.
The province has said it will limit new installations to 1,000 megawatts, but that number could go much higher if it’s decided that the reactors at Pickering B can’t be economically refurbished.
Experts say it’s possible, and increasingly likely, that the government will choose Candu technology for one site, such as OPG’s Darlington station, and permit construction of a light-water design at Bruce Power’s site.
(Dec. 7, 2007) Coal, chock-full of substances of known toxicity, epitomizes dirty fuel. The perils in coal burning – and this is an abbreviated list – include fly ash and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, sulphur., vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, molybdenum, zinc, selenium, radium, uranium and thorium. If these substances and their byproducts are not controlled in coal burning, to keep emissions within safe levels, human health and the environment can suffer. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 7, 2007
Coal, chock-full of substances of known toxicity, epitomizes dirty fuel. The perils in coal burning – and this is an abbreviated list – include fly ash and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, sulphur., vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, molybdenum, zinc, selenium, radium, uranium and thorium. If these substances and their byproducts are not controlled in coal burning, to keep emissions within safe levels, human health and the environment can suffer.
Coal burning also produces one substance that may be entirely benign or even positively beneficial. That substance is carbon dioxide
, a highly stable gas that is indispensable to all plant and animal life.
Ironically, it is this one emission from coal that many in the Western environmental movement now attack, while the other emissions receive relatively little attention. Ironically, but not illogically.
From the Garden of Eden to Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia, man has dreamed of an idyllic society. The early 19th-century utopians campaigned to depopulate cities, which they saw as wicked and dehumanizing, and to create vast conservation areas that would be off-limits to industrial activity and conducive to man’s communion with nature.
In the last half of the century, in reaction to the excesses of the Consumer Society, utopians espoused that we go Back to the Land, practice Voluntary Simplicity, recognize that Small Is Beautiful, and accept the teachings of the Club of Rome, whose computers reported that the world was about to run out of resources. These were moral movements above all – by exhausting the world’s store of non-renewable resources instead of living within the budget provided by renewable resources, these utopians argued, we were living beyond our means, selfishly making merry at the expense of future generations through a one-time plunder of nature’s stores.
To end the plunder and see the dawn of a righteous society, requires, above all, an end to the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. For this reason, prospects of an end to oil are in perpetual vogue – “peak oil” theories being the most recent manifestation. Such utopians are also warmed at the prospect of running out of natural gas. In both cases, official estimates of remaining reserves, and the high prices that these fuels command in the marketplace, signal that the end could be near.
Coal provides no such signal. Its price is low and its supply effectively inexhaustible – utopians face the bleak prospect of centuries of coal burning, with only the most utopian among them believing predictions that peak coal is also upon us. To eschew non-renewable resources and live within our means – today we call it “sustainable development” – coal must be outlawed.
Soot, or solid fly ash, once represented excellent grounds for curbing coal. Horrendous breathing conditions in centuries past claimed countless lives, and even in the last half of the 20th century coal was capable of blackening our skies. The exhaust from today’s smokestacks is altogether different. Soot has been negligible for decades and has been becoming more so with every passing decade – the current U.S. standard, now being phased in, bans particles larger than 2.5 microns in diameter, about 1/30th the width of a human hair. Soot remains a problem for society, but not one that can be laid at the foot of a coal bed.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.
Karen Howlett
November 29, 2007
Two of Ontario’s largest wind-power projects are in limbo, raising questions about the government’s ambition to have renewable energy play a key role in meeting the province’s electricity needs.
Enbridge Inc.’s plans to erect 110 giant wind turbines on the shore of Lake Huron have been blocked by a group of local residents. Critics say that without this 189-megawatt project, which is now headed for a hearing before the Ontario Municipal Board, the government will have difficulty meeting its goal of having new renewable energy sources supply 5 per cent of the province’s electricity next year.
The government has also told companies looking to erect wind turbines in the province’s lakes to put their plans on hold until it studies the potential environmental impact of such projects. Trillium Power Energy Corp. was planning to build a 710-megawatt wind farm in Lake Ontario, the largest in Canada.
Tom Adams, executive director of Toronto energy watchdog Energy Probe, said the reigning Liberals’ plans on renewable energy are reminiscent of their poorly thought out campaign promise to close the province’s coal-fired plants by 2007 – a pledge they have since broken.
“Yet again, the Ontario government finds itself with the consequences of an ill-considered policy,” Mr. Adams said.
“What makes [Energy Minister Dwight Duncan] think he knows anything more about conservation, about wind power, about gas than he knows about coal?”
New Democratic Party Leader Howard Hampton said the government is committed to spending billions of dollars on nuclear energy to the exclusion of other energy sources.
“The McGuinty government gives a lot of speeches about wind energy and renewable energy and green energy but in fact most of that is superficial,” he said. “The real energy policy is go nuclear and go big.”
Ontario now has just more than 400 megawatts of wind power generation, more than any other province. By 2025, the government plans to double the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources.
Mr. Duncan denied that the roadblocks in front of the wind-farm projects will prevent the government from achieving its goal for 2007.
“We feel confident we’re going to hit our target according to the timeline we’ve laid out,” he said.
But Enbridge is just the latest wind project to run into opposition from the “not in my backyard” forces. Enbridge addressed its critics by agreeing to set the turbines farther back from property lines – to 121 metres from 50 metres. But Bill Palmer, a member of the Windfarm Action Group, said that is still not far enough in the event a blade falls off during a storm.
Mr. Palmer, a former engineer at the old Ontario Hydro, said he does not think government officials have studied wind turbines closely enough.
“We thought we would have had our shovels in the ground prior to this,” said Debbie Boukydis, a spokeswoman at Enbridge. Now, however, Ms. Boukydis does not expect construction to being until the spring of 2008.
At Trillium, chief executive officer John Kourtoff said he thinks his company’s project has been unfairly lumped in with others that plan to have wind towers closer to the shore. Trillium plans to erect 140 wind turbines between 15 and 25 kilometres offshore.
Despite the setback for his company, he praised the government’s renewable-energy policy.
“We feel they have done more in the past three years than was done in the previous 13 years,” Mr. Kourtoff said.
Saul Chernos
Business Edge, Vol. 7, No. 23
November 16, 2007
For the full story, please click on Source.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 15, 2007
Antarctica – a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada – is the world’s coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world’s windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.
It is also the world’s most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.
Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge “allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica to be explored in detail for the first time,” stated David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. A decade ago, Dr. Bromwich was embarking on a major research project for the National Science Foundation to begin to understand this frozen continent, which is the primary heat sink in the global climate system, and “plays a central role in global climate variability and change.”
His mission, in part, dealt with the science of global warming, which could not be settled until Antarctica gave up its mysteries. “The validity of global change scenarios remains controversial,” he said at the time.
A decade later, despite accumulating research, the validity of climate change scenarios continues to be controversial, and the unknowns surrounding the role of Antarctica continue to overwhelm the little that’s known. As Dr. Bromwich reported earlier this year at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco, “It’s hard to see a global-warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now.”
Dr. Bromwich presented his findings shortly after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with new findings in February that pointed to catastrophic consequences if mankind didn’t change its ways. The science is settled, the IPCC indicated, its global models reliable.
Yet Dr. Bromwich found that the global models that the IPCC relies on are at odds with his own findings. Antarctica’s temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as global climate models predicted.
“The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica,” he stated, adding that “We’re looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment.”
A 2006 study by Dr. Bromwich and others, published in the journal Science, again found the accepted climate-change models to be wrong. According to those models, snowfall in Antarctica should have been increasing. Instead, the study found, there has been no statistically significant increase in the snowfall trend over the past 50 years. Instead, snowfall patterns in Antarctica varied widely from year to year and decade to decade. Dr. Bromwich’s findings – considered to be the most precise record of Antarctic snowfall yet – also point to the need for decades of more data from satellites to determine Antarctica’s patterns.
Complex computer modelling is notoriously unreliable, yet there are exceptions. One is the model that helped save the life of Ronald Shemenski, a physician stationed at the U.S. South Pole Station in April, 2001. Dr. Shemenski, who had developed a life-threatening pancreatic infection, needed to be airlifted in a season of high winds, extreme cold and near 24-hour darkness, when plane travel doesn’t normally occur. The unprecedented rescue effort succeeded, thanks to the aircrew of Canada’s Kenn Borek Air Ltd., who flew a Twin Otter in and out of the South Pole, and Dr. Bromwich’s model, which helped predict the best time for the perilous rescue effort.
“The forecast model used to predict air-craft-landing conditions at the South Pole for the rescue was optimized specifically for Antarctic conditions,” Dr. Bromwich explains. “The model was only run for short periods, about two days at a time,” to approximate the time required for the rescue mission.
The optimization for Antarctic conditions also succeeds where global models fail. “Global climate models that are having some trouble at predicting the long-term behaviour [over decades] of Antarctic near-surface temperatures are not optimized for the unique atmospheric conditions over Antarctica, probably the most pristine place on Earth,” he elaborates. “The primary reason is connected with cloud formation. The global models treat the clouds like those in mid-latitudes, whereas they are very different in reality.”
That global models fare poorly in remote parts of the world doesn’t surprise him. “These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,” he explains, adding that “until the global models get the polar regions right, they won’t get the global climate right either.”
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.
CV OF A DENIER
David Bromwich is head of the Polar Meteorology Group of the Byrd Polar Research Center and Professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the Department of Geography of Ohio State University. He is president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology, the chair of the Polar DAAC Advisory Group, a member of the Arctic Climate System Study Working Group on Reanalysis, and a past member of the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data. The author or co-author of numerous papers, he received his PhD in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1979.
September 6, 2007
Energy Probe Research Foundation, one of Canada’s leading environmental organizations, is pleased to announce the appointment of Lawrence Solomon as executive director of its Energy Probe division. Mr. Solomon, a founder of the foundation in 1980, remains its managing director and the executive director of its Urban Renaissance Institute. His Energy Probe book, Breaking Up Ontario Hydro’s Monopoly, led to the demise of Ontario Hydro, one of the western world’s most polluting power utilities.
"With Canadian governments about to embark on a new wave of ill-advised energy megaprojects, the need for sound policies based on competition, conservation and renewable energy are greater than ever," states Mr. Solomon. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Solomon’s model for electricity reform was adopted in the UK and earned the backing of leaders from all three political parties in Ontario.
"The failures in the power system that Ontario faces today stem from the mid 1990s, when the provincial government failed to follow through with the reforms that it was elected on," Mr. Solomon states. If Ontario is to avoid power blackouts and polluting technologies, and if Canada is to pursue sound energy policies, today’s governments must stop subsidizing energy-intensive industries and they must start to act as impartial regulators rather than as energy promoters."
Norm Rubin, also a founder of Energy Probe, remains Energy Probe’s Director of Nuclear Research and its Senior Policy Analyst.
Energy Probe thanks out-going executive director Tom Adams for his 19 years with the foundation. Mr. Adams recently decided to leave the foundation for new challenges.
For more information, contact:
Lawrence Solomon at LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Norman Rubin at NormanRubin@energyprobe.org
Tom Adams
January 11, 2006
PRESS RELEASE
Subsidies to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), the federal nuclear promotion agency, are responsible for 12% of today’s federal government debt, according to a new study from Energy Probe. Since its inception in 1952, $74.9 billion of today’s federal debt is attributable to subsidies provided to AECL.
In a related analysis, the study established that, had our federal government’s nuclear subsidies been invested in the Canadian economy, the value today would be $194.6 billion – an amount equal to 11.5% of the value of the Canadian companies traded on the TSX.
In addition, AECL has amassed a variety of contingent liabilities, some of which could confer very large future costs on taxpayers. These liabilities have been amassed through reactor export financing, guaranteeing the business outcomes of large nuclear refurbishment projects in Ontario and New Brunswick, and a troubled reactor partnership with the medical products firm MDS Nordion.
The study’s author, Tom Adams, Energy Probe’s Executive Director, concludes that subsidies to AECL are a significant drain on the national resources of Canada and there is no prospect of Canadian taxpayers recovering their investment in AECL. Adams urges slashing Canada’s nuclear technology support program to a tiny fraction of the current subsidies and reorienting toward radioactive waste management, basic scientific research, and scientific support for international peace and security efforts.
For the complete study, please see: "Federal government subsidies to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited".
Daniel McHardie
Times & Transcript
March 1, 2005
New Brunswickers should brace themselves for a hefty increase in their monthly electricity bills with NB Power poised to announce its annual rate increase today.
"I would not be surprised by a 10-per-cent increase because of the trends in fuel prices and the troubled liabilities that the utility is carrying related to Orimulsion and (Point) Lepreau," said Tom Adams, executive director of the Toronto-based Energy Probe.
NB Power officials would not confirm the pending rate hike, but David Hay, the utility’s president and chief executive officer, has been foreshadowing a major surge in power prices for months. During a December interview Hay said "it will be difficult not to exceed the three per cent rate cap."
Under law, NB Power is forced to explain any power price increases of three per cent or higher to the Public Utilities Board. Rates haven’t exceeded the cap since 1992-1993 when the utility sent bills soaring with five per cent hike.
A regulatory hearing would likely take six months to unfold, so it is possible that NB Power could boost its rates by 2.9 per cent for April 1 and then petition the Public Utilities Board for the remainder of the necessary increase to come into effect later this year.
Brian Lee Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institution for Market Studies, said Hay needs to lay out a detailed multi-year plan for the utility that outlines how NB Power is going to raise rates and cover its expenses. Crowley said it is "shocking" that NB Power has run deficits in recent years by failing to increase rates enough to cover their expenses.
"I think that this policy of artificially lowering the price of electricity has been very bad for New Brunswick," the think tank president said. "We are going to start learning just how bad the price is when we see the rate increases that will be proposed."
Driving the demand for a rate spike is a projected $70-million deficit attributed to rising fuel prices, such as coal, oil and natural gas.
Through his early retirement initiative, Hay announced last week he was able to shave $40 million from the utility’s balance sheet.
The president’s cost containment scheme doesn’t account for inflationary pressures, which have forced NB Power to augment power prices by almost three per cent in each of the last three years.
Each NB Power rate hike of one per cent generates $10 million in new revenue. When power rates grew by 2.9 per cent in April 2004, it meant an average New Brunswick home using 1,200 kilowatt hours of power paid an additional $5 per month or $60 per year.
NB Power isn’t the only utility looking for significant boosts in monthly bills as Ontario ratepayers are in rough shape as well. Energy Probe’s Adams said when the final tally is in, the Ontario government will have hiked industrial power hikes between eight per cent and 12 per cent and rates for homeowners will jump between seven and 10 per cent.
NB Power has been besieged by controversy in the last year thanks mainly to the Orimulsion fuel fiasco, where Venezuela’s state-owned oil company refused to honour a 20-year contract to supply the Coleson Cove Generating Station with the cheap fuel. Not only has Hay been forced to deal with the fall-out surrounding the botched fuel deal, the president has also had to gear up the utility for its restructuring last October and the negotiations with Ontario-based Bruce Energy and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. regarding the future of the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor.
And if the current files weren’t tricky enough, energy analysts are quick to point out the corporation has a $3.5-billion debt.
"I hope people have begun to understand that there is something rotten in the state of NB Power," Crowley said.
The AIMS president believes Hay can get New Brunswickers on his side if he can convince them these future bouts of rate hikes are necessary.
"He did not create these circumstances, he is there to clean it up."
Crowley added, "If he is open and honest with people and has a credible plan for fixing the problem I’m not saying people will enjoy it, but I think if they think it is going to result in positive change we will put our shoulder to the wheel."
Energy Probe’s executive director said also said Hay needs to stickhandle the rate file carefully but believes the new president is up to the challenge.
"Hay has a financial background, he is independently minded and I think he can see the crisis that is building on the utility’s balance sheet more clearly than most people," Adams said. "So I’m hopeful that he will start the process of coming clean."
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