Nuclear reliable? Not as claimed
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
All I can say is that consumers, businesses and industry in Ontario are fortunate the weather hasn’t been too hot and sticky, because this province could find itself in a power crunch this summer if an extended heatwave hits. Not only are two nuclear reactors at the Pickering Generating Station out for most of the summer (and that’s after $2 billion in refurbs over the past few years), but one larger reactor at Bruce Power is currently out for a few days — that is, we’ve got about 1,900 megawatts of baseload power offline at the moment, during a season of high demand. And this comes a week after a unit at Pickering B and a unit at Darlington were down for repairs.
So much for stable nuclear.
Fine, this stuff happens. But it goes to show that nuclear isn’t as dependable as the industry claims, and that when problems do occur it leads to a massive chunk of generation being taken off the grid in one shot, leaving us far more vulnerable than a system designed around distributed generation.
BTW: A very insightful article here from the New York Times about the surging cost of building large power plants, whether they be nuclear, coal or natural gas. The culprit is a combination of higher metal and energy costs, but also a worsening shortage of labour that is driving up wages. The lesson in this article is that when a government tells you a project is going to cost $2 billion, it’s more likely to end up costing more than $3 billion. In the context of a nuclear renaissance, it means inflated costs for everything from component manufacturing to transportation to concrete pouring to the hiring of engineers — similar in many respects to what we’re seeing happening in the oil sands, where refineries and facilities there are also competing against the nuclear industry for materials and skills, and where costs have skyrocketed.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
