Nuclear reactor

Nuclear reactor

In his letter of Feb. 9, 1996, entitled Nuclear power, Keith Bradley of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited makes several statements nobody would dare make publicly in Canada. I shudder to imagine what he tells Indonesians in private.

For example, he says "Reviews of the safety of Canada's CANDU nuclear power program...by several independent public commissions, including Greenpeace and other NGOs, ...have found that the nuclear power plants are safe and economic." Of course, Greenpeace and other environmental NGOs, including Energy Probe, have found no such thing. Indeed, the only recent independent public commission was canceled before it could issue any report at all. That commission was set up to review Ontario Hydro's plan to build ten more CANDU reactors. It was canceled when Ontario Hydro decided to build none, and formally withdrew its proposal. By that time, the commission had received evidence from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Energy Probe and others, showing that the plants are neither acceptably safe nor economic.

It is true, as Bradley says, that the laws of the province of Ontario required Ontario Hydro to pay the full costs of that hearing, including lawyers and expert witnesses representing both my organization and Bradley's, and that these costs totaled tens of millions dollars. But those tens of millions saved Ontario from wasting tens of billions on more CANDU reactors. Indonesia would do well to imitate Ontario's recent success at canceling nuclear expansion, rather than imitating our earlier mistakes.

Not surprisingly, Bradley doesn't mention that Ontario Hydro has recently admitted that its twelve CANDU reactors are only worth about half of what they paid for them (even after depreciation), or that Hydro has begun shutting down reactors prematurely in order to safe on repair costs, or that Hydro has been forced to pay some of its largest corporate customers' millions of dollars a year to prevent those customers from generating their own cheaper power with gas turbines, instead of buying Ontario Hydro's nuclear-inflated power. And he doesn't mention that Ontario Hydro's recent rate increases, made necessary by the debt on their CANDU reactors, prompted the government of Ontario to set up an Advisory Committee to try to figure out how to introduce competition into the monopoly electricity system. Here in Ontario, we increasingly refer to CANDU reactors as "stranded assets" - stations that could not pay their own interest charges if customers had the right to shop around for power.

Bradley points out, correctly, that Canada's largest city, Toronto, is within 50 kilometers of over half of Canada's nuclear power plants. But he doesn't mention that Canada has a special federal law that prevents the victims of any CANDU nuclear accident from suing for damages.

NORMAN RUBIN

Director, Nuclear Research

and Senior Policy Analyst

Toronto