Ontario's plan to increase nuclear power production in the face of growing energy needs has charged a heated dispute over the controversial energy form.
On one side stand those who regard nuclear energy as a clean alternative to the high-polluting coal-fired electricity generation, and believe nuclear energy is the only reliable way to meet the province's 1.3 percent per year rise in energy consumption. On the other side, there are those who remain skeptical of man's ability to deal with nuclear waste and those who call nuclear energy a costly option for power generation.
"We've had years of cost overruns, poor performance, safety problems, and the unresolved problem of nuclear waste," says Greenpeace Energy Campaigner Shawn-Patrick Stensil, referring to Ontario's old nuclear projects that went over budget.
Even Premier Dalton McGuinty admitted that he is no fan of nuclear energy. Speaking at a gathering of provincial Liberal members last week, McGuinty said, ""I don't like nuclear energy," but to meet the province's energy demands and to avoid relying on coal and making more pollutions, he said, it is the best alternative.
Currently, Ontario uses 25,000 megawatts of power on a hot day, and the province is anticipating a 10,000-megawatt rise in demand within 20 years.
Under the new energy plan, the province will refurbish existing nuclear units and build new reactors, and also focus on conservation and renewable energy. Currently, nuclear energy provides about half of the province's electricity needs, and the new plan will maintain that level as overall energy production grows.
"The best advice we got was that even if we do as much as we can with respect to renewables and even if we are as aggressive as we can be when it comes to conservation, we're still going to come up short," McGuinty said.
But the premier's remarks do not sit well with some environmentalists.
"We believe that conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy, can solve the problems of electricity generation much more quickly, more reliably and more cost effectively than any other option," says Jose Etcheverry, a research and policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.
According to a report prepared by the David Suzuki Foundation and five other environmental organizations, energy efficiency and low-impact renewable energy sources have the potential to provide more than double the province's projected electricity needs in 2020.
But there are some among environmentalist who don't think renewable recourses and conservation are enough to meet the province's energy needs.
"It is completely unrealistic to argue—as some activists do—that we can replace existing nuclear and coal-fired plants, which currently make up 70 per cent of Ontario's electricity production, with renewables and conservation measures alone," said Dr. Patrick Moore, chair and chief scientist at the sustainability consulting firm Greenspirit Strategies Ltd., in a statement. Moore was a founding member of Greenpeace.
"Nuclear energy represents the only practical means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while meeting increasing global energy demand," Moore said.
Dale Coffin, a spokesperson with the pro-nuclear Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) agrees. He says that nuclear energy is clean, affordable, and reliable, and that more and more countries in the world "are going towards that route."
China and India together have over a dozen nuclear reactors under construction. France and Finland are building new nuclear plants, and in the U.S., where new nuclear plant construction came to a halt after the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, President George Bush is pushing for nuclear energy.
Steve Kerekes, a spokesperson with the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Energy Institute, anticipates that there will be new nuclear power plants in the U.S. online and operating by 2015.
"There is a lot of preliminary work that's being done right now with about roughly nine companies having announced over the past year or so that they're preparing license applications to submit to the nuclear regulatory," says Kerekes.
In Ontario, pro-nuclear energy groups have launched an aggressive campaign to win public support for nuclear energy, and have aired commercials about benefits of nuclear energy during primetime TV hours and Stanley Cup playoffs.
A recent poll done by Ipsos-Reid for the Canadian Nuclear Association shows that the majority of Ontarians (about 60 percent) support the use of nuclear energy. But Etcheverry points out that the support for renewable energy recourses on the same poll was in excess of 90 percent.
"People want clean electricity, from renewables, from efficiency, and from conservation," he says, "and nuclear power is simply not a clean source."
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