TheStar.com - Nuke plan's dark tunnel

It has taken the McGuinty government a mere week to lose all credibility on the nuclear file. That's fast work.
In this post-Enron era when "due diligence," "transparency" and "accountability" are supposed to have evolved from buzz words to principles, we are headed into a long, dark tunnel as we follow Ontario's new happy plan for energy.
Given that the "plan," as announced last week by Energy Minister Dwight Duncan, is meant to ensure that the lights stay on for future generations, the image of the darkling tunnel emerges as richly ironic. Yet the sidestepping of the province's Environmental Assessment Act and an attendant bypassing of the province's Environmental Bill of Rights — moves condemned Monday by Gord Miller, environmental commissioner of Ontario, and echoed yesterday by four environmental groups — will only contribute to the miasma. That aphorism oft-quoted in business circles springs again to mind: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
If there was any moment when the government should have adopted a tear-open-the-shutters-and-throw-up-the-sash strategy, surely nuclear is it. In committing the province to two new nukes — a "new build" strategy premised on the unproved feasibility of refurbishing others in the nuclear fleet — the energy minister has embraced a go-big plan for nuclear.
The energy minister says otherwise. He says — or he did in his press conference — that the province's reliance on nuclear would be "modest" relative to other components of the electricity supply mix (renewables, gas, conservation).
Outside of our own little burg, observers see Ontario's nuclear strategy as, let's say, robust. This week, The Washington Post reported that the McGuinty government's decision to build new reactors "puts Canada at the leading edge of what the nuclear industry calls a `renaissance' of support for nuclear power."
This may come as a surprise. There has been so much burbling of late about this putative nuclear renaissance, it's easy to forget that few nukes are planned, let alone under construction, outside of China, which has five on the go, and India with eight. In the nuclear race, if that's what it is, Ontario has suddenly leaped to the front of the pack.
It is true, as The Washington Post rightly noted, that U.S. President George W. Bush "is pushing for the resumption of construction of nuclear power plants in the United States." In May, Bush used the backdrop of the Limerick, Pa., nuclear generating station to exalt the new future for nuclear as abundant, affordable, clean and safe. Tax credits, loan incentives and risk insurance structured to help protect builders were all enacted as part of the energy bill the president signed into law last year as enticements to reboot the industry. "[O]nce you get the plant up and running," said the president in Limerick, "the operating costs of these plants are significantly lower than other forms of electricity plants."
The operative words, of course, are "once you get the plant up and running." Though the majority of U.S. nukes were licensed in the `60s and `70s, memories are long enough, as they surely are here, to recall cost over-runs. The Nuclear Energy Institute, based in Washington, says the last U.S. nuclear plant to be permitted was the Shearon Harris 1 facility, near Raleigh, N.C., which received its construction permit in January 1978.
The institute places much of the financial blame on a licensing process that, it says, was flawed, cumbersome, and fixed in 1989. But no new reactors have since been built, so the test of that — and of the president's assertion — is still in play.
As it now stands, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has before it three early site permit applications. Adrien Heymer, senior director for new plant deployment at the energy institute, describes the site permit as one that covers all the "ologies." As in, meteorology, seismology. Such a permit, Heymer continues, "only banks the site. It's not a definite statement that the plant is going to be built."
That explains why Ontario's home-grown news that new nuclear will be built is seen as groundbreaking — and hugely appetizing to the likes of Westinghouse and Areva of France and our own AECL.
(AECL was engaged in pre-application discussions with the U.S. regulatory commission dating back to June 2002, over its design for the ACR-700 reactor. Dominion Resources Inc. had approached the company to be its partner for a proposed reactor in Virginia. Still untested, and using technology untried in the U.S., which predetermined a prolonged review, AECL was ultimately dropped in favour of General Electric. AECL has since focused on developing the larger capacity ACR-1000, which has not yet been licensed. The company reminds that in 2001 and 2003 it brought two Candus in China in on time, and in the case of the second unit, under budget.)
The home-grown nuke news is groundbreaking, too, relative to the U.K., where Prime Minister Tony Blair has set what critics contend is a too aggressive timetable for a nuclear energy review, and Australia, where Prime Minister John Howard announced earlier this month the creation of a nuclear task force to examine whether that country should go bigger into nuclear. As it stands, Australia has a single reactor, Lucas Heights. Last week, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation announced three incidents of radioactive leaks at the site.
While minor, the incidents are inflaming what is shaping up to be a mighty brawl over that country's energy future. Australia is rich in both coal and uranium.
Both Howard and Blair have let their personal pro-nuclear sentiments be known, particularly Blair who said in May that nuclear power was "back on the agenda with a vengeance."
Temperatures are rising in both those countries. And here? Well here we are, at the leading edge apparently. Readying to jump right off that cliff.
Additional articles by Jennifer Wells