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The Globe’s May 31st 2011 centre spread article “Getting Nervous about Nuclear” by Shawn McCarthy & Richard Blackwell responds to Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear power. Sadly, the article badly misses the point and it in-effect endorses Ontario’s cowardly decision to stick with unreliable, dangerous, unnecessary, nuclear energy. Nuclear energy, as the Globe’s pages previously confessed this Spring, is a sink hole for public funds, requires legislated liability limits and is a producer of environmentally undesirable long lived radiating waste which cannot be stored safely. Yet Germany’s decision was as much about moving into a new economy. The
Globe
article notes Germany’s
decision to shut down all nuclear plants
by 2022 reverses an earlier
decision
in wake of what has now become “the
Fukushima melt down.” The article
notes the
Green Party is important in Germany. But
this was not the Green Party
speaking.
Also, the article does not mention
Chancellor Merkel’s points about
alternatives to nuclear energy offering
possibilities both of replacing
nuclear
and creating jobs and new technologies for
Germany. This is not
speculation.
Germany has had a decade of economic
experience promoting sustainable
energy
expansion with surprisingly good economic
results so far.
(See
chapter in David Suzuki
& Holly Dressel, More Good News:
Real Solutions to the Global
Eco-Crisis
2010.) The article failed to point out
that Switzerland followed
Germany on May
25, 2011. What the article does note is
that the potential
for
renewable wind energy is better in
Ontario than in Germany. The Globe
article reports the industry as
pointing out that Fukushima
was 40 yrs old and not built for extreme
emergencies. New reactors have
safety
features not in Fukushima. Ontario Power
Generation Corp is quoted as
reporting
that there were no significant safety
issues. Greenpeace notes the
world’s first nuclear accident was in
Canada, 1952,
at AECL’s Chalk River laboratories.
Also, a Greenpeace 2008 report was
highly
critical of the latest CANDU 6 reactor
on safety and security issues.
So the industry views are self serving. On
the impact to climate
change, the article maintains “most
government and industry experts”
have
concluded that nuclear energy is a
critical component of the effort to
reduce
CO2 emissions. Not surprising that big
industry should be wary of the
development of a new crowd of green energy
industries challenging oil
and gas
interests and generally seeking a share of
the tax breaks which boost
corporate
profits. But is nuclear really a “critical
component”? Surely
it
is in the public
interest to give a new economy which
promises new jobs and a greener
future a
chance? On this, the Globe article gives
mixed reports on whether
“renewable”
can
replace nuclear. Yet the green power
industry takes that for granted.
Greenpeace
has done major studies showing how
renewable energy can be phased in as
a
central component. A Globe insert in May carrying an article from the May issue of Harris Backbone Magazine gives startling facts about the status quo: If
every
car
in North America got the same fuel
efficiency as a Toyota Prius, there
would be
no need to import any oil into North
America, no need to drill for oil
in the
Gulf of Mexico and no need to drill in the
Arctic. More than
half a trillion dollars is spent
annually subsidizing oil and gas
companies
worldwide, according to Fatih Birol, the
International Energy Agency’s
chief economist.
Of the top 20 most profitable companies
worldwide in 2009, seven were
oil
companies, and their cumulative profit
was equal to the profit of the
other 13
combined, according to numbers from
Fortune magazine. A McKinsey
& Company study shows that
cutting carbon is highly
profitable: 40
per cent of North American carbon cuts
required to meet the Kyoto
Protocol
targets would generate a profit and, if
that profit were reinvested in
the next
least-cost options, we’d get all the way
to the Kyoto goals at no cost
to
society. Two-thirds of the energy from coal, gas and nuclear power generation in North America is wasted in the form of heat vented up smoke stacks and cooling towers. By contrast, combined heat and power (CHP) or co-generation increases system efficiency from 33 to 90 per cent by using the “waste” energy to heat buildings or homes, or is stored at high temperature underground. Denmark obtains 55 per cent of its energy from cogeneration and waste heat recovery, the highest installation of CHP worldwide. The Globe article ends with critics of the German decision (and now the Swiss decision) and a cynical quote from Sweden’s environment minister – that Germany will turn to coal and imports of French electricity from nuclear power. That’s not my conclusion. The issue is whether we shift to the new generation of green technology or whether we keep wasting public money on tax breaks which boost oil industry profits or on the money sink hole trying to fix up dangerous old nuclear technology. German already produced 10% of its energy needs from renewable energy sources over a 10 year period with economic benefits to boot. Top Click:  |