A pro-nuclear power activist confronted Canada’s new environment minister at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow on Wednesday and tried to question him about his anti-nuclear stance before entering politics.
Chris Keefer, President of Canadians for nuclear power (C4NE) asked Steven Guilbeault if he had reassessed his anti-nuclear stance in light of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) analysis suggesting that an increase in nuclear power is in line with 1.5 C.
Guilbeault sidestepped the question, stating: “It will not be up to the government to decide which technologies will flourish,” but it will depend on the market, and “I support what my government is trying to do, which is to find the best technologies.”
In 2018, Guilbeault tweeted that “it’s time to shut down Pickering #Nuclear Plant and go for #renewable. “Before running for federal office, he was involved with Greenpeace for ten years and was a founding member of Équiterre, two organizations that oppose nuclear power.
Canadian for Nuclear Energy President Dr. Chris Keefer questions new Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault about his previous life as an anti-nuclear activist. Via Decouple Podcast / Youtube
Keefer described Guilbeault’s response as “very evasive” and an attempt to “try to hide his anti-nuclear ideology and (possible) anti-nuclear agenda.”
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If Guilbeault still opposes the development of more nuclear power sources in Canada, he will be at odds with his own party’s policy on the power source.
The federal government expressed its support for nuclear power when invested millions of dollars in small modular reactors or SMRs, and the party’s climate plan, A healthy environment and a healthy economy, touts SMRs as a way to help decarbonize heavy industry.
Former natural resources minister Seamus O’Regan openly supported nuclear power. Keefer says that as a minister in a department, Guilbeault, will not be able to dictate all energy and climate policies. However, Keefer says he is concerned that Guilbeault incorporates “ideological commitments” into his role as environment minister.
The president of @CanadiansEnergy says he is concerned that @s_guilbeault is incorporating anti-nuclear sentiments from his days as an environmental activist into his new role as environment minister and confronts Guilbeault at # COP26 #cdnpoli
He adds that the anti-nuclear stance is “outdated and not consistent with the IPCC decarbonization pathways”, referring to the four decarbonization pathways established by the IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5 ° C which projects nuclear power use to increase from 150% to 468% relative to 2010 levels by 2050.
However, these are not the only scenarios presented in the report. He notes that, “Many scenarios … project an increase in nuclear energy use, while others project a decrease.”
In fact, some of the 1.5 C pathways he describes “no longer see a role for nuclear fission by the end of the century.”
The report says that the pace at which nuclear power is currently being deployed is hampered by accident fears and radioactive waste management.
In Canada, environmental groups, three political parties and more than 100 women in leadership positions have opposed the development of nuclear power in Canada, citing concerns about the toxic waste it produces and the lack of options to deal with it, as well as for a long time. construction schedules that threaten to miss the short period of time left to address the climate crisis.
Nuclear waste storage problems
An October survey indicated that Canadians in the Toronto area are concerned about how radioactive waste is stored.
When residents of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) were asked whether a new nuclear reactor should be built in the GTA before establishing a permanent safe storage facility for nuclear waste, 82 percent said no, according to a survey conducted. by Oraclepoll Research Ltd. The survey was commissioned by the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, a provincial group that led the campaign to phase out coal power in Ontario and is now pushing for a 100% renewable electricity system.
Keefer believes that “waste is not an issue that we need to address immediately” and that it can be addressed once the urgent issue of climate change is addressed.
He says that with more funding, the industry could seek technology that would result in nuclear by-products with less longevity.
Underground storage proposal
Another solution to the nuclear waste problem, he says, is to store the waste in something called a “deep geological repository,” which is a network of underground tunnels and storage rooms for used nuclear fuel containers built several hundred meters away. or more below the surface in a stable rock formation.
These solutions are not without “challenges and problems from an engineering perspective, but they are highly solvable,” Keefer said.
This idea that we can solve the nuclear waste problem in the future is not shared by Brennain Lloyd, public interest researcher and founding member of Northwatch, an environmental group in northeastern Ontario.
“If the last 40 years are any indication, the industry is not doing a good job of finding out,” he said. “They just keep fighting the same old idea.”
She says that much of her research focuses on nuclear waste and geological deposits.
“I started working on this in the 1980s. And at the time, the industry was saying that there was an international consensus, that geological repositories … were the way to go in terms of dealing with radioactive waste in the long term,” he said. Lloyd.
No answers yet
“That was in the 1980s. Here we are in the 2020s. And there is not a single operational geological repository for high-level (radioactive) waste anywhere in the world.”
She says the question is not whether repositories fail, but when, how much will be released, and what the effects will be.
Then he says there are more immediate questions about environmental and health concerns when it comes to actually moving radioactive waste from dry storage to shipping containers.
Ultimately, nuclear power gets in the way of renewables, “it’s expensive, slow, and prone to shutdown,” Brennain said.
“Nuclear power takes up a lot of space in our grid … (that) means there is less incentive, less demand, less space in the market for renewables.”
The problem with wind and solar power, Keefer says, is that “they are intermittent sources of energy and require backup, and around the world that backup is coal and gas” and therefore we need nuclear power in addition to renewables.
Reactors take time to build
There is no doubt that many environmentalists would agree with Keefer’s claim that it is bad to rely on coal and gas as a back-up for renewables, but with 2030 just around the corner and strong emission reductions required across the globe. world, some, like Jack Gibbons, president of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, say that the timelines do not coincide.
The IPCC report noted that the current time span between the date of the decision and the commissioning of nuclear power plants is observed to be 10 to 19 years.
“We need to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas pollution in the next 10 years,” Gibbons said. “A new nuclear power cannot do that, because a new nuclear reactor cannot be built in 10 years.”
Natasha Bulowski / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada National Observer
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com