For this week’s blog entry I painstakingly created the
accurate subtitles for the half of my readers who seem to have English as a foreign language. They will be able to learn something useful about the
Canadian experience with nuclear energy, and understand why nuclear energy is a
technology of the past. Most importantly, they will see that not only is the
nuclear energy era over, but what we are facing now is the fact that, in the
words of Dr. Edwards, “the age of nuclear waste is really just beginning.”
Nations which have been fortunate enough to avoid nuclearization until now
would be wise to heed the lessons of those which have been down this sorry road
already.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, I’m Gordon Edwards, president of
the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. I grew up here in Toronto.
My dad was a pharmacist and I went to the University of Toronto and graduated
in mathematics, physics and chemistry with a gold medal in mathematics and
physics.
At that time, I thought nuclear power
was great because the only thing I knew about it was it was safe, clean, cheap
and abundant, and as a result I thought, “Hey, this is great. It’s going to
save the world.” And in fact that was how it was presented in high school at
that time. That was back in the 1950s. But when I graduated from university, I
discovered that none of these adjectives were in fact true. It is actually one
of the dirtiest technologies that we know.
It creates the most dangerous waste of
any industry ever on the face of the planet and this waste is indestructible and
remains dangerous for literally millions of years and we don’t know what to do
with it except to bury it somewhere and hope that it won’t get out, and that’s
not a very good recommendation for a technology. Secondly, it can undergo, as
we’ve seen at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it can undergo catastrophic failures and
the reason this happens is fundamental. It is because you cannot generate
electricity with uranium without simultaneously generating huge quantities of radioactive
poisons, and these radioactive poisons are all, you might say, transmutations
of the uranium atom.
For example, people have heard about
Fukushima. They’ve heard about the poisons that have come out of that: the
cesium 137, the iodine 131, the strontium 90, the krypton 85, the plutonium 239.
What people don’t always realize is that every one of these elements started off
as a uranium atom and most of that uranium came from Canada. In fact, it came
from Saskatchewan, went over to Japan, was used as fuel, and was transformed
into literally hundreds of different highly radioactive poisonous materials
which are then spewed out in event of the accident and are still leaking today from
the reactor. They’re still pumping—this is four and a half years after the
accident. They’re still pumping almost 400 tons of water a day down into the
cores of those melted reactors, the three melted reactors, and then back up to
the surface again. By the time they get to the surface they are saturated with
these radioactive materials and the water is so radioactive it can’t be
released so they’ve stored it in 1,500 tanks, huge tanks, each one containing
about 300 tons, and they are building more every week because they need them.
And so this is the legacy of the
nuclear industry. Now here in Ontario, and here in Canada we got started into
this project through the World War II atomic bomb project. Canada was one of
the three countries involved in the project to develop the world’s first atomic
weapons. And in fact there was an agreement signed in Quebec in 1943 between
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the invitation our prime
minister, Mackenzie King at the time, for these three countries to cooperate in
building the world’s first atomic bombs. And the reason why Canada was involved
is because we had the uranium. The uranium is the key material for all nuclear
weapons. There wouldn’t be any nuclear weapons of any description if we didn’t
have uranium to start with. So Canada got involved very early and in great
secrecy.
CD Howe, who was the power behind the
throne in Canada at that time, told parliament that there was a secret project
underway and he would appreciate it if nobody asked questions, and so nobody
did, and so parliament from that day to this has never really questioned our
commitment to nuclear power or to uranium mining in this country.
That’s one of the reasons why in my
organization, which was founded in 1970, one of the first things we asked for
was for there to be a national debate on the benefits and hazards of nuclear
power. We were quite willing to have everything out on the table, both the pluses
and the minuses so that people can judge for themselves. That’s never happened
in Canada, so what happened is when they started building nuclear reactors in
Ontario with the Pickering reactors, in Quebec with the Gentilly reactors, and
in New Brunswick with Point Lepreau reactor, nobody knew at that time that the radioactive
waste problem was a serious difficulty. Everybody thought that it was just like
any industry that has garbage. The garbage men take it away and it’s gone. Nobody
thought of it as being a particularly great problem, so my organization was one
of the first ones to blow the whistle on this question.
I remember being on television here in Toronto
and Morton Shulman, who used to be the coroner of Toronto, and who then had a
radio talk show and television talk show, had me on the show along with an
executive from Ontario Hydro, and I said, “Well, we have this problem with
nuclear waste,” and he asked, “So what’s the problem?” and the Ontario Hydro
guy said, “Well, I mean, every industry has waste so I don’t see the problem.
We look after our waste better than any other industry I know of.” And Morton
Shulman turned back to me and he said, “So what is the problem?” I said, “Well,
ask him where we’re going to put it and he turned back and said, “Where are you
going to put it?” and the guy went beet red, and he said, “Oh! You don’t know!”
And that that’s when really, literally, you might say the shit hit the fan because
they had a Royal Commission of Inquiry into nuclear power.
It was actually into electricity
planning. It was called the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Electric Power Planning
in Ontario and it was called the Porter Commission. It lasted for three years and
they devoted a lot of that time into looking at the nuclear question, and they
were very impressed by the dangers of this nuclear waste, and I’ll explain a
little bit more about the danger in a second, but what they concluded, one of
their major conclusions was that unless they can solve this problem by 1985,
there shouldn’t be any more nuclear reactors built. This was in 1978 when that
report was written. Unless they can solve this nuclear waste problem, there
shouldn’t be any more nuclear reactors, and in fact there have not been any new
nuclear reactors ordered anywhere in Canada since 1978. So, in fact, we have
brought the industry to a standstill simply by asking the question: where are
you going to put it? They don’t have a place to put it.
Now why is it so important? Well, the
reason why is because they had a chart in this Royal Commission report which
showed the toxicity, the danger to humans and to other living organisms of
these nuclear wastes, and what they did was they took one year of waste from
one CANDU reactor, just one year, one CANDU reactor, and they looked at how
dangerous that waste would be after one year, and they said well, since we don’t
have a very easy way to measure, let’s ask the following question: how much
water would you need to dilute that waste to the maximum level of contamination
allowed by law? So how much water would you need? It turns out to be almost
exactly equal to Lake Superior. That’s one reactor, one year, and multiply that
now by the number of reactors, which is twenty, multiply it by the number
years, which is thirty, and you’re talking about 600 Lake Superiors. That’s a
lot of Lake Superiors. We don’t have that much water in the whole world, so
what they were basically saying is that this material is so dangerous that if 1
percent or 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent of this material leaks into the environment,
it’s a disaster. Whereas in most human affairs you’d think that 99.9 percent
containment would be wonderful. In this case, it would be a disaster, so that’s
what’s fundamentally wrong with nuclear power. It creates poisons that we don’t
know how to destroy. Nobody knows how to turn off radioactivity. Nobody knows
how to shut it off.
And what is radioactivity? Basically,
these atoms that are broken pieces of uranium atoms or else transmuted,
heavier-than-uranium atoms like plutonium, these atoms are unstable, which
means that they are like little miniature time bombs. They explode and when
they explode, they give off damaging subatomic shrapnel which is called atomic
radiation, and this exists in three major kinds: alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha
and beta are not very penetrating but they’re extremely dangerous inside the
body. In fact, they’re much more dangerous than the more penetrating gamma
radiation.
Gamma radiation is very dangerous, too.
In fact, one fuel bundle, which is about this big. It’s about the size of a log
for a fireplace. One of those fuel bundles, before it goes into the reactor,
you could look at it and handle it with gloves and it wouldn’t harm you. When
that same fuel bundle comes out of the reactor, it would kill any human being
standing within one meter’s distance without protection in twenty seconds. So
that’s how... and that’s just because of the blast of gamma radiation coming
off that spent fuel rod. In fact, those spent fuel rods, those spent fuel
bundles when they come out of the reactor, they’ll never be handled by human
hands again. They will only be handled robotically, by robots or by remote
equipment.
So how did we get into this? How do we
build so many nuclear reactors? The fact is people were lied to. They were told
that this was a clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy source and that’s what I
thought when I was in high school. If that’s all you know about nuclear power,
who could possibly be against it? So these were built on false premises, these
reactors. And I think now the time has come when people are more and more
realizing that this is all a big lie, and that we made a big mistake in
swallowing that lie, and going along with it because we trusted the scientists,
thinking scientists were sort of like gods. Because they are scientists they
are devoted to truth, they are devoted to honesty, and that a scientist would
not say anything that was untrue, but they’re forgetting that scientists are
human beings, and all human beings are fallible and all human beings have
vested interests. If your whole career, and in fact the dream of your career, is
really this technology, you can’t afford to tell the whole truth about it.
This is the way the nuclear industry
has always behaved. It’s paternalism written with a capital P because they
believe that “we scientists, we nuclear scientist, we can, in fact, look after
these wastes. We can prevent reactors from exploding. We can prevent all the
bad effects. For example, we can prevent these materials from being used in atomic
weapons.” In fact, they cannot do this. This is beyond human power.
Because they thought that they were
able to control this, they thought that it’s no harm to tell people reassuring
lies, to tell people it’s perfectly safe because “we’re going to make it
perfectly safe, the waste is not a problem because we’re going to solve it,” but
what they were doing was putting on their shoulders a kind of an arrogance that
is beyond their powers to actually realize, so we’re now at the showdown stage,
and we have countries like Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden and a few
other countries who are totally phasing out nuclear power.
Germany had seventeen nuclear reactors.
The moment the Fukushima reactor accident happened and after that triple
meltdown, they shut down seven of those reactors permanently and they’re in the
process of shutting down the remaining ten. By the year 2022 they should have
them all shut down.
Here in Canada, although we haven’t
said that we’re phasing out nuclear power, in fact, we seem to be because at
Pickering, where we had eight nuclear reactors, two of them are now permanently
shut down and the other six are going to be shut down by the year 2020, so
eight of those reactors are going to be gone permanently by 2020, and even
though the government of Ontario has said they’re going to build new reactors,
they have not, and they have postponed and postponed it because the cost is
absolutely exorbitant.
It turns out that they spent billions
of dollars in refurbishing some of the old reactors, and these refurbished
reactors are operating at about a percent capacity factor. That means they’re
only operating a little more than two-thirds of the time compared with what
they’re designed to operate at, so more and more the planners and the
government authorities are beginning to catch on to the idea that this is a bad
deal, and at the moment we’re trying to convince the government of Ontario, and
there already have been talks between the premier of Quebec and the premier of
Ontario, one-to-one talks, [suggesting] rather than taking a further risk on
refurbishing the Darlington reactors, the four big reactors outside of Toronto at
Darlington, rather than refurbishing these at a cost of billions of dollars, why
not buy surplus hydro power from Quebec? We’ve got huge surpluses of
water-generated hydro power.
Now that was not environmentally innocuous
at all—there was a lot of damage done to the environment building those dams, but
now that they’re built we do have surplus hydro power. There’s no harm in using
that surplus hydro power, as long as it isn’t used to justify more damage of the
same kind. In the meantime, Ontario can actually do itself a favor. It would
cost far less to buy the surplus hydro power than it would to refurbish those
reactors. They can also do Quebec a favor because they are now selling that
surplus hydro power to the United States at a loss, and you could also do the
people of the country a favor by getting rid of this liability.
Many people still believe that the
CANDU reactor is really a good reactor, and it is. It’s really one of the best,
but it’s the best of a bad lot. Just because you’re the best of a bad lot doesn’t
mean you’re good. The fact of the matter is that a CANDU reactor can melt down
just like any other reactor can. It can have catastrophic failures just like
any other reactor because the fundamental problem is not the mechanism of the
machinery. That’s not the problem. The problem is that while it’s producing
electricity it is also creating this enormous inventory of poisons. Anything
that disrupts that, whether it’s an earthquake, whether it’s sabotage, whether
it’s terrorism, whether it’s an industrial accident, whether it’s an
unanticipated explosion, whatever it might be that allows that stuff to leak
into the environment is going to create catastrophic results, so it’s
fundamental to the technology. It is not based upon the machinery. It’s based
on the poisons which are created. So a nuclear reactor is not just a machine
for generating electricity. It’s also a warehouse of a fantastically large
quantity of radioactive poisons. That’s the fundamental problem.
Would you want to have in your backyard
a warehouse full of the most dangerous radioactive poisons you can imagine? And
I think the answer is no, we don’t want it. And as a matter of fact even
nuclear scientists, for example, I heard Alvin Weinberg, one of the deans of nuclear
energy—he was the head of the Oak Ridge nuclear division down in the United
States which developed the first enriched uranium atomic bomb—and he said we
nuclear scientists—this was back in 1977 even before Three Mile Island—he said
that we nuclear scientists have made a big mistake in thinking that nuclear
power is just another form of generating electricity. We should not be building
these near large cities at all. Now he was pro-nuclear. He said we should build
them but we should build them behind a wall which society is shut off from, and
this wall should be a very large and it should include a lot of waterfront so
that we can have enough water to run the reactors, and that’s where the
reactors will melt down into the ground, and he didn’t think about the fact
that this stuff will come over the wall and contaminate the food supply, but he
thought that it was definitely a mistake to build these reactors.
Look at what we have done here in
Ontario. We’ve built reactors right along the shores of the Great Lakes. Can
you imagine anything more stupid? Because if you look at what’s happening at
Fukushima right now all the water that’s pouring into the Pacific Ocean from
the Fukushima reactors. Imagine if that wasn’t the Pacific Ocean but only the Great
Lakes. We would be contaminating the water supply for forty million people, and
not just for one generation but for several generations to come. So it seems
that people are beginning to wake up and realize that this is not the way to
go.
Although Canada was the world’s largest
supplier of uranium in the early years, up until 1965, all of our uranium
production… from 1942 to 1965 there was a tremendous amount of uranium mined in
Canada, and it was all for bombs. It all went into nuclear weapons. There were
military contracts. In fact, that was the only market there was for it. We
also, by the way, sold all of our plutonium for bombs to the United States from
the Chalk River reactors that we built. Then in 1965 Prime Minister Pearson
said from now on we’re only going to be selling uranium for peaceful purposes.
Well, it sounds good but the problem is
when you sell uranium for peaceful purposes, what happens to it? You put it
into a nuclear reactor, the uranium atoms get chopped up and create all these
poisons we talked about, but some of the uranium atoms actually absorb a
neutron to become a little heavier, and they turn into a substance called
plutonium which has a 24,000-year half-life and which is the nuclear explosive
that is most useful in all nuclear weapons. There isn’t any nuclear weapon that
doesn’t use uranium or plutonium, and every atom of plutonium starts off as an
atom of uranium.
So here in Canada, even though we are
thought of worldwide as being like the Saudi Arabia of uranium, in terms of how
much uranium we have in, for example, the province of Saskatchewan, we already
have two provinces that have banned uranium mining altogether: British Columbia
has declared a permanent ban. There will never be uranium mining in the
province of British Columbia. By the way, way back in around 1980, it was the
British Columbia Medical Association who led the charge on that particular
score, although there were many other people who played a role in it—the fruit
Growers Association, the Landowners Association, the Small Business Association—an
amazing agglomeration of different segments of society which brought about that
moratorium which was originally a temporary moratorium but now it’s become a
permanent one.
In Nova Scotia we had a ban on uranium
mining declared in 1985 which again was a temporary ban which extended right up
until a couple of years ago and when it was made into a permanent law. And so
now it’s illegal in Nova Scotia to even explore for uranium, and by the way, if
you’re exploring for something else and you happen to come across uranium, you’ve
got to stop. That’s according to the law.
Right now in Quebec we have a temporary
moratorium on uranium mining and we’re hoping—in fact we’re just at the end of
a process of a public hearing, a year of public hearings on uranium mining in
Quebec. We’re hoping that the Quebec government—the first government to phase out
nuclear power completely in North America—will ban uranium mining also from
Quebec.
So we’re waiting to hear from that, but
in April of this year we had an international symposium on uranium with people
coming from Australia, from China, from Mongolia, from Europe and from Africa,
and from all over the United States and Canada to meet together and have three
days of intense discussions about uranium. Out of that symposium came an
international declaration calling... and again led by the physicians... the
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)—they won the
Nobel Prize Peace Prize in 1985—and they have the led the way on this, calling
for a worldwide ban on uranium mining.
They’re saying that like asbestos,
which we have found to be such a dangerous mineral that it should really be
left in the ground altogether, there’s no way you should mine asbestos. Yes, it’s
natural. So is arsenic, but arsenic is actually safer to mine than asbestos is.
So asbestos should just be left in the ground, and uranium is of the same
character, even more so. Asbestos threatens the health of anybody who comes in
contact with it. Uranium threatens the entire planet. It threatens the entire
survival of the planet, in terms of its ultimate use in nuclear weapons, and
even when you use it for peaceful purposes, it breeds the material which can be
used for the next ten thousand years, twenty thousand years, 100,000 years for
nuclear weapons, so we’re calling for a ban on uranium mining worldwide, and we
don’t think this is pie-in-the-sky. We think this is just plain common sense.
Of course that doesn’t mean that it solves
the problems that are already there, but it means that you have put a cap on
them. We talk about putting a cap on carbon emissions, so let’s put a cap on a
weapons of mass destruction. And of course the main weapon of mass destruction
really is not chemical weapons, bacteriological weapons—horrible as they are—but
nuclear weapons which include all the worst characteristics of those two
together with further dangers.
It’s been calculated by the same
scientists who work on climate change, using the same models that are used in
climate change, that if you were to have an exchange of nuclear weapons. (They
like to use the word “exchange” ... “Would you like to have my nuclear weapon?”
“Oh, good thank you. I’ll take one of yours...”) If you had a war involving
only a few dozen nuclear weapons on each side, this would affect the entire northern
hemisphere and cause a nuclear winter which would mean that it would be
impossible to grow food, and it would have devastating consequences for the
entire northern hemisphere. That’s a small nuclear war. If you had a big
nuclear war, it’s totally game over much faster, and not only human
civilization is gone but most higher forms of life as well. So why would you
want to bring that material to the surface?
Let’s just think about it for a moment.
What is uranium needed for? What is uranium used for. Well, basically, you can
count them on the fingers on one hand, and have extra fingers left over. Nuclear
weapons is the only use for uranium which absolutely requires uranium. With no
uranium there’s no nuclear weapons. OK, so that’s number one. Number two is
electricity generation, but we have many ways to produce electricity. We’ve got
wind power, we’ve got solar energy, we’ve got hydro power, we’ve got...even
peddling your bicycle generates electricity. Turning a wheel will generate
electricity... and geothermal power. So uranium is not really needed for
electricity. It is just one of many ways, and we don’t really need it.
As matter fact, the contribution of
nuclear to electricity production worldwide has declined steadily since 1995. In
1995, it was about seventeen percent of world electricity that was produced by
nuclear. Now it’s down to eleven percent and still falling.
In fact, even the most optimistic
pro-nuclear people are admitting that nuclear will continue to decline in
importance for the next twenty to thirty years at least because no matter how
many new reactors you build, they’re going to be shutting down the old ones
faster than they can build the new ones. Most of them are old and most of them
are falling apart, and they’re being shutdown much faster. So there’s no way
that nuclear power can make a dent in global warming in the time frame were
talking about.
On the other hand, if you take a look
at the specific examples such as Germany...Germany decided basically that
while...especially since 2011... they’ve decided to phase out nuclear power. In
only eight years, they built 30,000 megawatts of wind power. Now that’s twice
the entire installed capacity of nuclear power in Canada:15,000 megawatts. If
all the reactors were running and producing at top capacity, we’d have 15,000 megawatts
of nuclear electricity. Germany built 30,000 megawatts of wind power in eight
years. There’s no way you could build that amount of nuclear power in eight
years. It’s impossible.
When you think about it, you realize...
let’s imagine that you could build, 30,000 megawatts of nuclear in eight years,
and during that entire eight years you would have no benefit. In fact, you
would be adding to global warming because building the concrete structures, mining
the uranium, refining the uranium, enriching uranium—greenhouse gases would be
emitted big-time in building these reactors. You would get no electricity until
after the eight years was done. Then you would start producing electricity.
With wind power you build some windmills now and you get immediate benefits. Next
year you get more, next year you get more, next year more, more, more, and
after eight years you build your way up to 30,000 megawatts, but you’re getting
benefits all the way along the line, so you can see the difference here is that
these renewables are much more flexible, they’re light on their feet. They are
like boxers that can, you know, float like a butterfly sting like a bee. And
they can sort of solve the problem whereas nuclear is lumbering along and is
really unable to respond quickly enough to make a difference.
There’s another thing, too. If after a
while you decide you don’t like those windmills, what do you do? Take them
down. No problem. You can’t do that with nuclear power. By the time a nuclear
reactor is finished or you decide you don’t want it, you’re stuck with it because
it’s a radioactive hulk, even after you take the nuclear waste out of it, the
structure itself is so radioactive you have to let it cool off for about forty years
and then you have to dismantle it, and all the rubble becomes radioactive
waste. So you end up with a huge cost in the future even after all the benefits
have been squandered. So you don’t have that with any other energy technology that
I’m aware of, so that’s where I think that that simple economics combined with
simple common sense combined with a real sense of responsibility to the future is
combining to really put an end to the nuclear age.
I have to warn people, though, that
while the nuclear age in terms of nuclear energy may be winding down, the age
of nuclear waste is really just beginning, and people are going to have to get
more involved, not less involved, more involved to make sure that these wastes
are handled properly and that doesn’t mean abandoning them. What the industry
wants to do is to abandon these wastes. They want to dig a hole, put them down
a hole and then tiptoe away and say, “There, that’s done,” and of course it’s
not done. Those wastes are there and they’re going to remain dangerous for millions
of years, or certainly hundreds of thousands of years and they want to put
these right beside the Great Lakes right now. They’re talking about building a
deep geological repository less than a mile from Lake Huron. That’s about 1.5
kilometers, and so people are fighting this not out of a sense of fear, but a
sense of responsibility. We don’t feel that it’s ethical or scientifically
justified to abandon these wastes because nobody knows, if you put them down
there, whether they’re going to stay there.
They could very well leak out over the
hundred thousand years of danger that they admit to, but when they say a
hundred thousand years they’re talking about plutonium which has a 24,000-year
half-life and when you multiply that by ten you get 240,000, so there’s your
hundred thousand years. The reason you multiply by ten is because it takes ten
half-lives to get it reduced by a factor of a thousand. But what they don’t think
about, even the people the nuclear industry, who should know better, or at
least they don’t want to admit it, is that when plutonium disintegrates because
it’s unstable, it turns into another element which is radioactive for seven hundred
million years, and so in fact it doesn’t disappear. It transforms into
something else which is even longer-lived than plutonium itself.
What’s happening here is that when you
start totaling up the benefits you find out that nuclear power can’t do the
job. When you total up the costs you figure out that they’re never-ending, and
by the way that’s why they want to bury them and abandon them. It’s so that
they can cut their liability, so the corporation can draw a line and say we’re
no longer liable because we have quote-unquote “disposed of this.”
They thought they had disposed of
poison gas in the Black Sea until it started bubbling up to the surface again
after a while. Dow Chemical in Sarnia [Ontario, Canada] thought that they had
disposed of chemicals that they’d injected deep into underground holes until
they came up in the St. Clair River as toxic blobs in the sediment, and we’ve
heard about various other incidents where, you know, the Love Canal [Niagara
Falls, New York State] where there were toxic waste dumps which have come back
to haunt people and really endanger the lives of people.
So this is where we’re at, and I think that
we’re at a very good juncture because people are awakening, and people are
realizing that they have been misled. They were taught that nuclear power was
essential. They find out that not only is it not essential to have nuclear
power but rather it is essential to get rid of it.
Dr. Gordon Edwards
Toronto, Canada
July 25, 2015
