(July 31, 2009) Cost overruns, delays in building reactors are sapping a nuclear revival
In a throwback to its tumultuous past, nuclear power is teetering on the brink of renaissance or relapse, waffling between a return to its golden age and a slow demise. Continue reading
Kathryn Blaze Carlson
National Post
July 31, 2009
Cost overruns, delays in building reactors are sapping a nuclear revival
In a throwback to its tumultuous past, nuclear power is teetering on the brink of renaissance or relapse, waffling between a return to its golden age and a slow demise.
The world’s relationship with nuclear has long been unstable, beginning in the 1960s when governments first embraced the energy source, then declining in the 1980s after projects grew grossly over budget and two major nuclear disasters rocked confidence. But the quest to quash climate change coupled with a hunger for energy security, have helped resuscitate nuclear power. The industry built better, more reliable reactors, and governments gave nuclear a starring role in their long-term energy plans.
Recent events, however, have put nuclear back on the defensive, bringing into question the future of the industry in Canada and beyond.
Today’s debate pits proponents, who laud the technology for its ability to supply baseload demand, against those who tout renewable energies as both enviromentally friendly and economically responsible.
Onlookers from both camps are keeping a close eye on Ontario after it recently suspended plans for two nuclear reactors at its Darlington station, citing the reported $26-billion cost and the murky outlook of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the arms-length federal body which produces CANDU reactors and whose bid was the only proposal to meet the province’s terms.
The New York Times recently called the Darlington price tag and the subsequent delay a setback for AECL, a company that also faced criticism earlier this year after it was forced to shut down its Chalk River research reactor because of safety concerns.
Indeed, the Ontario situation is being watched by many — from the Saskatchewan government, to London’s Daily Telegraph, to a high-profile report by an American economist — read by some as a cautionary tale that paints nuclear energy as more costly and less feasible than initially anticipated.
“The rest of the world has been looking at what we do on our own turf,” said Neil Alexander, president of the Organization of CANDU industries, which represents more than 100 companies in the nuclear industry in Canada.
Globally, half of the 45 reactors currently under construction have encountered construction delays and many are over-budget, according to an analysis recently tabled to the German government. These delays and hefty cost overruns, together with the recession’s decreased energy demand, have prompted a closer look at what was just years ago considered the world’s favourite energy source.
The Point Lepreau station in New Brunswick — Atlantic Canada’s only nuclear facility and the first CANDU-6 reactor to undergo a complete rebuild — has been under refurbishment since March 2008 and is now seven months behind schedule. The province is on the hook for roughly $150-million in additional replacement fuel costs, and will rack up another $20 million for every month the project is delayed.
In Finland, a massive power plant touted as the poster child of the nuclear renaissance has been under construction for four years. While the reactor was scheduled for completion this summer, Areva, the French company building it and one of three bidders on Ontario’s Darlington project, is now unwilling to predict when it will go online. The reactor, slated to be the biggest in the world with an excavation site the size of 55 football fields, is today roughly 50% over budget.
Russia announced last week that it will rein in construction of new reactors because of the financial downturn and a decline in electricity consumption. Though the government planned to build two units each year over the next several years, it has “corrected” that plan by halving production to one unit per year.
Officials in the U.S. announced in April it would suspend construction of a $6-billion nuclear project in Missouri. Two months later, the country’s largest nuclear power generator, Exelon, said it was “ramping back” plans to build a proposed nuclear plant in Texas.
“The industry has predicted that new cheap reactors, in a world searching for silver-bullet solutions to climate change, would revive an industry moribund since Chernobyl,” said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, spokesman for Greenpeace Canada, referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster that left an entire Ukraine city uninhabitable. “Ontario’s delay shows the industry is failing to deliver on cheap reactors.”
Of course, rethinking nuclear would be no small thing.
Since the first station went online in Russia in 1954, another 440 nuclear reactors have popped up in 32 countries, the bulk of which are scattered across the United States, France, Japan and Russia.
Nuclear power generated 16% of the world’s electricity in 2006, making it the fourth-largest source of electricity worldwide behind coal, hydro and gas.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), world demand for uranium — the atoms of which are split during the production of nuclear energy — has at times outrun supply, so much so that decomissioned Russian warheads today satiate much of the world’s appetite for uranium.
It is significant, then, that the global industry appears very much at a fork in the road, with two camps vying to steer its course.
In one corner is the nuclear lobby, which maintains that nuclear energy — albeit expensive, with costs rising– is the only reliable source of baseload supply and is far more environmentally friendly than its coal counterpart. They argue that green technologies, however noble in their eco-friendliness, are immature at best, weather-reliant, and pricey. Though wind is on the cheaper end at roughly 8 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, solar is pegged closer to 40 cents per kilowatt hour.
Among the pro-nuclear governments are Sweden and Italy, both of which recently overturned decades-old prohibitions on new power stations. Spain is likewise working to reverse a policy that phases out nuclear. China and India are going ahead with ambitious building programs, while the United Arab Emirates is fielding bids from South Korea, France and Japan to build a US$40-billion fleet due to be commissioned starting 2017.
Mr. Alexander, the CANDU president, argues that governments like these are wise to look beyond today’s energy lull. “I would be very surprised if demand didn’t pick up after the economy turns around,” he said. “We need to make decisions today so that we have options 10 years from now.”
Nuclear opponents, meanwhile, claim that wind, solar, and cogeneration are less expensive than nuclear in the long run, can be turned up or down depending on demand, and can help tackle climate change.
Indeed, for nuclear power to have a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gases, an average of a dozen reactors would have to be constructed worldwide each year until 2030, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency at the Organization for Economic Development. Currently, however, there are not even enough reactors under construction to replace those slated for retirement.
Mr. Stensil said governments once wooed by the idea that nuclear is cost-effective, are today forced to “face the bills” — bills that, by some estimates, are 130% higher than they were in 2000. The delays and suspensions that inevitably ensue, are more proof that the nuclear renaissance is “dead on arrival,” he said.
Not so, said Mr. Alexander, who argues that nuclear will work through its challenges and, when it does, Canada should be there to reap the benefits. “Every day we delay, we are prejudicing our ability to be at the forefront of the nuclear renaissance,” he said.
But whether a nuclear revival is, in fact, on the horizon is a prediction that is today hotly debated around the world.
Two weeks before the Darlington project was put on hold, economist Mark Cooper of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School released a report stating that recent cost projections are “four times as high as the initial nuclear renaissance projections.” Utilities, the report said, are embarking on “an ominous repeat of history.”
Nuclear’s difficulties began in the 1970s, a decade that saw costs balloon and was capped by 1979’s Three Mile Island — the most significant accident in the history of commercial nuclear-power generation in America.
After the devastation at Chernobyl, nuclear power was poised for extinction: Two-thirds of all nuclear plants ordered after January 1970 were eventually cancelled.
Whether this decade will be marred by cancellations is yet to be seen. In the meantime, governments appear more cautious than ever.
Shortly after the announcement of the Darlington delay, Saskatchewan’s Energy and Resources Minister Bill Boyd — who is considering a proposal for a nuclear reactor in Northern Saskatchewan — said Ontario’s situation adds “additional questions about the whole area of nuclear power.”
And just as governments, think-tanks, and the media are keeping an eye on the future of nuclear, so too are the markets.
On June 25, US credit-ratings firm Moody’s Investors Service reported it may take a more negative view of power companies looking to build new nuclear powerplants, pointing to the risk incurred by developers. Moreover, in 2008, Moody’s noted that traditional technologies have fixed designs whose costs are rapidly increasing. Renewable technologies, it said, are still undergoing advancements in terms of energy-conversion efficiency and cost reductions.
Said Energy Probe’s Lawrence Solomon: “Better late than never to bail out,” he said. “This is a question of throwing more good money after bad.”
Editor
http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoutils/globalfiles/VideoPop.cfm?spot_id=5653&sitefolder=theagenda
May 13, 2008
Lawrence Solomon appeared on TVO’s the Agenda to engage in a discussion alternative views to mainstream science. "Rational inquiry, the scientific method, or sheer ignorance: Is science itself to blame for the backlash against scientific inquiry?" Watch the Video.
May 21, 2009
Dennis Miiller show description: Lawrence Solomon, an anti-nuclear environmentalist, has written an important new book which explains how politics has has deviously mixed with science to drastically distort what "facts" are getting out to the public. Dennis Miller interviews him in what turns out to be a very interesting discussion.
CBC Radio’s ‘Ideas’ – Lawrence Solomon
July 27, 2009
The science is settled” is now the mantra of climate change activism. Those who disagree are either in denial or in the pay of an oil company. But long time environmentalist and energy activist Lawrence Solomon says no, the science is not settled on global warming. Ideas producer David Cayley breaks the unofficial media blackout of skeptics in this courageous and path-breaking broadcast.
(Jul. 24, 2009) One month into Toronto’s municipal strike marked by growing mounds of garbage, a majority of Torontonians — supported by some councillors — want the city to fire the striking garbage collectors and contract out garbage collection. Private contractors are unlikely to strike, they reason, and would also cost a lot less. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
July 24, 2009
One month into Toronto’s municipal strike marked by growing mounds of garbage, a majority of Torontonians — supported by some councillors — want the city to fire the striking garbage collectors and contract out garbage collection. Private contractors are unlikely to strike, they reason, and would also cost a lot less.
Those reasons are good and sufficient to can the striking workers, but hardly the only ones. Private service best protects the environment, best promotes an entrepreneurial economy and most contributes to the quality of life. Private service providers do so partly because they cost less, partly because they care more and entirely because they need to compete.
Garbage collection in cities ordinarily costs less than in the suburbs or rural areas because of the economies of scale that cities offer — in cities, garbage trucks have shorter distances to travel, saving time between pickup stops. By all rights, garbage collection should cost much less in Toronto.
Amazingly, Toronto’s costs are higher than those of its lower-density neighbours — heaps higher. According to two Ontario Waste Management Association studies produced over the last decade, Toronto spends almost 30% more than the average of its neighbours to collect a ton of trash, and almost 60% more than its most efficient neighbour, Markham.
Why are Toronto’s costs higher instead of lower than its neighbours? Salaries are one factor. Toronto’s unionized work force averages more than $30 per hour in wages and benefits, fully 50% higher than the private sector average. More important than the compensation, however, is the productivity of the workers. Private sector workers handle a staggering two-and-a-half to three times more waste per hour than Toronto’s union workers. The private sector does this by working smarter and harder: Private managers tend to be cleverer at developing efficient routes and private workers tend to have more endurance because they are younger — 32 years old on average compared to 44 for city workers. As private sector workers age, private sector managers move them up and over to positions that are less physically challenging. In the city, with its dead end union positions, there’s no place to move.
Residents of Toronto and other big cities pay the price directly for such inefficiency through their taxes, and they pay the price indirectly through garbage-driven policies that degrade the city environment in multiple ways. At one time, garbage collection was dominated by private firms that conscientiously picked up garbage directly from the homeowner’s property, returning the bins to their allotted place without leaving litter behind on either street or sidewalk. Homeowner’s weren’t required to bring garbage to the curb ,and pedestrians weren’t confronted by noxious smells on their jog in the morning or their stroll the evening before.
In the name of cutting costs, cities turned sidewalks over to garbage processing, requiring garbage bins to be put out at the curb. To further cut costs, they then reduced the frequency of garbage pickups. To obtain economies of scale, they then super-sized the garbage trucks. To allow the super-sized garbage trucks to travel unencumbered, they required the street plans of new subdivisions to accommodate the turning radius of super-sized garbage trucks. Throughout it all, city amenities became progressively lost while the costs of garbage collection and disposal steadily rose. Along the way, we also lost the conservation ethic. Recycling once came naturally, now we have artificial one-size suits-all recycling systems that waste more resources than they save, and at great cost to the taxpayer. And we produce more garbage than ever before.
The attempt to salvage city-run garbage systems through ever-greater centralization continues today. To overcome the low productivity of the city’s aging garbage workers, the city of Toronto now requires each household to use uniform, city-supplied garbage bins that garbage trucks can lift for disposal. These ungainly bins — one for food wastes, one for garbage and one for recyclables — have become the chief aesthetic on front lawns and porches throughout the city. The sole relief from this aesthetic occurs on garbage day, when Toronto’s workers leave the emptied bins strewn on sidewalks, creating a hardship for people in wheelchairs or mothers pushing baby strollers, and an eyesore for all.
Toronto’s garbage strike creates hazards to the public health and inconvenience to all, but it does have some saving virtues. It highlights the self-centredness of the unions, which have again timed their strike for summer to maximize the fetidity of the garbage and the distress of the citizenry. And it reminds us of the resiliency in our society, through the entrepreneurship that instantly sprang up in response. Within hours of the strike’s commencement, numerous providers emerged to offer garbage services at a reasonable price and, more importantly, with a smile. In my neighbourhood, Milton appears on request to remove my garbage for $4 a bag. To save on fuel — a large factor for public and private haulers alike — Milton ferries garbage from his customers to his parked truck by a hand wagon. Every neighbourhood in Toronto now has its own Milton.
The polls don’t ask the public if it would like a return of the personalized garbage services we once had but they should. With more Milton’s cities would become more civil and more civilized.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Energy Probe, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation, and author of Toronto Sprawls (University of Toronto Press).
Lawrence Solomon
July 17, 2009
Billionaire energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens has a two-step plan to cash in on climate change. Today: step two
In the 1970s and 1980s, T. Boone Pickens made millions as a corporate raider through takeovers of poorly managed corporations. In the process, he became scorned throughout the world.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Pickens upped his take to billions, and this time without suffering public scorn. The former greenmailer became known as an environmentalist and, instead of raiding corporations, he took to raiding government treasuries.
Now he is in the midst of his most ambitious project yet — getting federal and state governments in the United States to sign onto a $1-trillion-plus scheme called the Pickens Plan. Under this plan, designed to combat global warming
and achieve energy independence, the United States would use natural gas instead of gasoline to run its cars and trucks. To free up natural gas needed for vehicles, wind power from Texas would replace the natural gas now used to produce electricity. To allow that wind power to leave Texas and serve far-flung electricity markets, the United States would construct an immense north-south electricity transmission corridor that ran from Texas through to Canada.
Pickens bristles when critics accuse him of being self-serving in promoting his Pickens Plan. So what if his 400,000-acre Pampa Wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, the world’s largest, could not get wind power to market without the transmission line he wants government to provide? So what if Pickens remains a major natural-gas developer, and is developing natural-gas vehicles and is the largest builder of natural-gas fuelling stations for vehicles?
“What I’m doing, I’m doing for this country,” Pickens insists. ”I’m doing something I want to do because I think it’s the right thing to do. Let’s get rid of the question that this is some way Boone Pickens is trying to make money. That’s not true.”
Pickens, ranked by Forbes as one of the world’s richest men, is never shy about spending money to make money. In his previous career as an oilman and a corporate raider, he spent money prospecting and on corporate acquisitions. Nowadays, as raider of the public purse, his money goes to prospecting for changes in laws that will give him a leg up on the competition.
To promote the Pickens Plan, he has spent some $60-million in TV, radio and Internet advertising and also got to make his pitch formally to Congress. Last year, in an unsuccessful ballot-box bid to get California taxpayers to subsidize his natural-gas fuelling stations, he spent more than $3-million promoting Proposition 10. To make himself palatable to the Democrats whose support he now needs, he gave up his lifelong support of Republican political campaigns.
More often than not, when he drills for political favours, he gets a gusher. Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, flanked by Pickens, announced legislation to lower the cost of driving a natural-gas vehicle. Last year, Rahm Emanuel, then-House Democratic Caucus chairman, introduced a bill with tax credits for natural-gas fuel pumps and cars, praising Pickens in the process.
In Texas, where Pickens has accumulated 200,000 acres of land atop the Ogallala Aquifer, making him the largest private owner of water, legislators also obliged: Thanks to the efforts of his lobbyist, he has the right of eminent domain in building a pipeline to carry Ogallala water through the property of neighbouring landowners to metropolitan areas like Dallas. Just one piece of Congressional legislation alone — production tax credits for wind — was estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to his project.
Pickens suffers setbacks, too — last year’s collapse of oil and gas prices make wind less attractive, for example, dealing a blow to his wind plans. But Pickens has a way of landing on his feet, even when he seems to fail. The punch line to one of his favourite jokes explains why:
A banker called in an oil man to review his loans. “We loaned you $1-million to revive your old wells,” the banker said, “and the wells went dry.” The oil man replied, “Yeah, but it could have been worse.”
“Then we loaned you another $1-million to drill new wells, and they went dry.”
Again, the oil man replied, “it could have been worse.”
“Then we loaned you another $1-million for drilling with some new equipment, and that equipment broke.”
The oil man said “Yeah, but you know, it could have been worse.”
And then the banker got upset. He said, “Listen, I’m getting tired of you saying that. How could it be worse?”
The oil man said: “Hell, it could have been my money.”
Financial Post
lawrencesolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
Read nextor previous article in the Climate Profiteers series.
Other Climate Profiteers articles:
Jay Bryan
The Gazette
March 10, 1998
There are so many good things that can be said about the proposed Quebec-Newfoundland hydroelectric mega-project on Labrador’s Churchill River that it seems almost churlish to point out that it seems to make no economic or environmental sense.
The project would, after all, bring upwards of $9.7 billion in investment to Newfoundland and doubtless hefty spin-off benefits for Quebec’s makers of electrical equipment, provide an estimated 16,900 person-years of employment to two provinces whose unemployment rates are cruelly high and perhaps help reconcile the bitter political differences that have divided these provinces for years.
But at what cost? The first and most obvious cost will be exacted by the Innu community of Labrador, which has had 27 years to contemplate the heavy price it paid when huge tracts of its traditional lands were inundated by the reservoir that spreads out from the original Churchill Falls hydro project.
What amount of compensation might eventually be negotiated is impossible to predict, but it is already evident that the Innu are unlikely to settle quietly for a token amount. Premiers Bouchard and Tobin were reminded of this yesterday as they were blockaded by protesters on the way to their elaborate staged announcement, then pursued and interrupted relentlessly as they sought to improvise a more discreet press conference.
Perhaps more important, the Innu have already lined up a significant number of environmentalist allies in the project’s most promising potential markets, New England and New York state. A coalition of 19 such groups announced yesterday that unless Innu demands are satisfied, they will lobby against any U.S. bond issue to finance the project and any purchase of power from it.
This flexing of aboriginal muscle, which calls to mind the successful campaign by the Cree of northern Quebec against the Great Whale hydro project, means that no investor can be at all certain that the project will be built within its 10-year construction schedule or at its budgeted construction cost.
Such opposition would be a significant factor even for a very promising hydro project. For one whose economics are as marginal as those of the huge lower Churchill complex, it could well prove to be the last straw.
That doesn’t mean that the project won’t go ahead, of course, just that the politicians who back it will have to work a little harder to conceal its real costs from the taxpayers who will ultimately pay the tab if this massive investment goes sour. Such pessimism might seem unwarranted if you accept the assurances of senior officials from both Quebec and Newfoundland that hydro power from the Churchill River is ridiculously cheap compared with the price of electricity in the U.S.; that any form of hydro power is environmentally superior to power generated by other means; and that such multi-billion-dollar projects are a good way to provide employment. But these assurances are mostly hot air.
Let’s take the last point first, since it is mostly on the basis of employment that this project will be sold. Quebec and Newfoundland have issued an estimate that this project will create 16,900 person-years of employment, which sounds like a lot. But if you spread this over the project’s 10-year lifespan, it works out to an average of 1,690 full-year jobs in each year.
If all of these jobs had existed at the end of last year, and if they had been distributed in Quebec and Newfoundland in proportion to the size of the labour force in each province, they would have pushed down the unemployment rate in each province by 4/100ths of one per cent.
If you accept the project promoters’ calculation that there will also be so many spinoff jobs that total employment will swell to 49,000 person-years, the average number of jobs over the project’s lifetime jumps to 4,900 jobs, but unemployment in Quebec and Newfoundland still drops by a mere 12/100ths of one per cent.
Is this project good for the environment? Far from it, suggests Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe. While hydro power can lower the carbon-dioxide emissions blamed for global warming by replacing other forms of generation that require the burning coal, oil or natural gas, this isn’t worth doing at absolutely any cost.
Adams calculates that the new Churchill River complex will cost well over $3,000 for each megawatt of installed generating capacity. By comparison, smaller-scale hydro sites are available much closer to the population centres that will use the power, and their cost per megawatt of installed capacity is as little as half this amount.
Indeed, even natural-gas-fueled generators, which cost a fraction as much as hydro stations, can more economically reduce carbon-dioxide emissions than the Churchill River project. This is because they replace dirtier power generated from coal or heavy oil.
Finally, the notion that power is so expensive in the U.S. that Canadian utilities can sell everything they can generate is wildly optimistic.
Hydro-Quebec president Andre Caille was quoted yesterday as saying that power from the new Churchill River project can be delivered to the U.S. for 4.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, while no U.S. producer can generate power for less than 5.7 cents.
It’s hard to know what statistics Caille is relying on, but independent researchers from both Energy Probe and the Helios Centre have calculated that Hydro-Quebec is actually losing money on energy exports. The Helios Centre concluded in a recent study that the utility can’t deliver power to the U.S. for less than about 4.4 cents, while it received only 3.16 cents per kilowatt-hour for this power in 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Adams notes that today’s spot wholesale price for power in states bordering on Quebec is between 2 and 3 cents. He believes that even if energy prices in the U.S. rise, as they probably will, there is only a thin chance that they will rise enough to make the Churchill River project profitable.
"This is a really risky project," he concludes. Of course, that needn’t cause Premiers Bouchard and Tobin to lose any sleep. By the time the real costs and benefits are evident, they’ll already have reaped the credit for highly visible, if temporary, jobs. Others will be left to pay the price.
Michelle MacAfee
The Evening Telegram
March 11, 1998
CHURCHILL FALLS — A new hydroelectric project in Labrador would be “economic craziness” for the Newfoundland and Quebec governments, as well as for Ottawa which is being asked to provide up to $2 billion, says a national energy watchdog.
“This deal has the makings of a major financial mistake,” said Tom Adams of Energy Probe, a consumer and environmental lobby group.
“It will be generating high-cost power at a time when we are coming into a glut of low-cost power.”
Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin meets today with Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard in this small Labrador town to outline how formal negotiations will proceed on a second power project on the Churchill River.
It’s believed the negotiations will be framed around a $12-billion development that includes the construction of two dams and a $2-billion, 800-megawatt transmission line to the island of Newfoundland. Power would flow by 2007.
A source close to the project said the plan will involve a large hydraulic generating station about three-fifths the size of Churchill Falls that will be built downriver closer to Goose Bay.
The source said two additional units will be built, increasing the station by about one-fifth, and some major water diversion dams will be built in Quebec to bring more water into Churchill Falls.
Even with few of the details announced, Adams says such a massive undertaking is simply not feasible given the current market and expectations for the future.
Small, local power stations throughout Quebec, Ontario and the northeastern United States would be able to produce power at about half the cost — and with less risk of transmission problems — of their Churchill competitor, Adams said from Toronto.
Newfoundland and Quebec are out of step with international power players, who are trying to reduce their exposure to financial risk, he added.
“They would have to cut their costs by about half to make this deal even start to appear attractive enough to be worth talking about.”
Newfoundland Energy Minister Chuck Furey countered that two important external factors helped make this the perfect time for such a mammoth power project:
• a hydroelectric project the size of the Lower Churchill would push the Canadian government as much as 20 per cent closer to meeting its international commitment to reduce greenhouse gases.
• the American power market was recently deregulated, which is expected to make the industry more open.
“As you see a displacement of old forms of energy based on new-world realities, the new power entering the marketplace will be received in a very timely, very positive and very competitive way,” said Furey.
At the heart of any new deal is the $2-billion transmission line. Among other things, the line would provide power to a nickel smelter expected to be built on the island by Inco.
Tobin has said he is seeking the federal government’s help, and a source within the provincial government said today’s announcement will include a commitment from Ottawa to at least formally explore the issue.
It could be a tough sell, however.
Some fear Newfoundland could be seen as getting more than its share of federal dollars, since it is also seeking continued aid for unemployed fishermen.
Added to that is a continued reluctance by government to invest in so-called megaprojects.
Adams said such an investment of federal tax dollars would be terrible and unnecessary because the island of Newfoundland has enough power sources without the underwater link.
“If the province was offered $2 billion for a transmission line or $1 billion for schools and hospitals, I’d take the $1 billion because it’s worth more in cash than a transmission line,” said Adams.
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