Why Dion should have pushed nuclear in Calgary

This isn't a follow up to Thursday's post but rather to Far and Wide's entry about Stephane Dion's speech on energy in Alberta during the week. I was posting in response to another comment by someone called "Sceptical Environmental":
Answer me this: if Dion were sincere in wanting us to use less gas, why did he vote against California-style mandatory emissions standards last year? Dion also said his solution to climate change in the oil sands is to have nukes power the whole thing. Who says this guy's an environmentalist??
Dion said the absolute opposite - that while energy generation is a provincial matter, he does not believe nuclear is a viable option. I disagree. Given the size of the comment my disagreement seemed to be generating, I opted to move it here.

Please note at this point - I believe in aggressive conservation, supply management and innovations like Deep Lake Cooling but this is a province where peak demand has grown 20% or 1646MW in the four years from 2001-05 due to the oil sands but also to inward migration. Treading water would be a superb achievement at this point. Putting multiple small baseload reactors in Alberta would
  • remove the need to use fossil fuels to produce heat for bitumen extraction and processing
  • facilitate electrification of high speed intercity, freight and commuter rail and the expansion of existing urban light rail in the Calgary-Edmonton-Fort Mac corridor
  • backstop the Alberta wind power industry which will be limited by the need to provide reserve balancing power, which displacing base load gas generators to reserve would provide
  • co-fund the next generation of reactors with Ontario to lower both provinces costs
  • kill existing plans to expand or add coal generation and close all existing coal generators
  • sell low-GHG power into the interconnectors to MT, SK and particularly BC grids, given Gordon Campbell's insane rush to coal
  • reduce or reverse Alberta's energy deficit (net electricity imports about $125m in 2005 alone)
Alberta Generating Capacity [MW]
Coal 5,840; Gas 4,335; Hydro 900; Wind 287; Biomass 183; Fuel Oil 12 - Subtotal 11,557
Planned expansions include: 170MW bitumen in Fort Mac, 30MW + 160MW coal plant upgrades, 900MW coal in Luscar, 450MW coal at Keephills No.3.

Coal is the primary enemy - in addition to carbon dioxide, conventional power stations release mercury, radioisotopes, particulates and sulphur oxides, and despite "clean-coal" promises the same kind of coal plants keep being built. If I were Dion I would advocate building six or seven 700MW ACRs and maybe an 1200MW or two and if really ambitious some SLOWPOKE-3s in the 2-10MW range for distributed power. By using Canadian uranium and using AECL designs adding to Canada's national energy deficit is avoided.

If you don't want to throw the Alberta coal miners out of work (though more for the impact on their communities than the lack of labour opportunities elsewhere in the province) but don't want to send the product to China to end up as a beige-stained cloud on the Pacific Ocean jetstream heading back towards Canada, use the reactors to power syngas processes. This would produce SNG or low-sulphur diesel out of the coal but without releasing the radioisotopes, sulphur and mercury from burning it.

In addition to producing nuclear energy such stations should facilitate other energy options such as wind and solar power, biogas/waste-to-energy, pumped storage and so on to leverage grid connections and provide peak load capacity.

Dion is going to have to face facts - he can oppose nuclear power and fail utterly or he can follow the lead of ex-Greenpeace founder and president and now hated apostate Patrick Moore and realise that while it would be nice to wake up one morning to find the world powered by deuterium-tritium or (p + 11B) fusion or better still vacuum energy that we can't leave things as they are.

No matter what people say in surveys, they answer more truthfully in their purchases of 50" plasma screen TVs. Even with conservation of residential and industrial power, the electrification and expansion of public transit and railfreight and the Liberal policy of 1% immigration per annum will continue to increase net power requirement even as residential per capita use drops. Simply pushing up electricity pricing tends to impact disproportionately on low income communities housed in ageing facilities where electricity is both ambient heat and water heat.

The long term goal should be a fully interconnected National Electricity Grid where provinces with abundant hydro and wind and with the money to invest in nuclear, displace both coal and baseload gas, from other Canadian provinces but also the US, whose coal plants are also expanding and whose exhaust also tracks over Canada.

Comments

Steve V said…
mark

Great post! I saw a CBC feature on Moore, and it was amazing to see how hostile people were towards his ideas, particularly his old allies.
Ron M said…
It would appear that Mr. Dion is throwing a bouquet to the Green lobby. The problem with appeasing the Greens is that they won’t be satisfied until nuclear is replaced by wind like in Europe except for France where 80% of the power is nuclear. Then what? We freeze in the dark when the wind doesn’t blow? The Germans went down the green road and passed laws to shut down their nukes. They are now building coal plants at home and nukes in Romania and sending the power home. The Russians are building nukes to save gas to sell to the Germans. The French are feeling warm and secure. It was irresponsible of Dion as a leader of the Federal Opposition to put his stinking red herring on the table and threaten Canada’s investment in nuclear along with the jobs and exports. While Dion was federal environment minister, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization come up with a plan to manage Canada’s used nuclear fuel. After three years of consultations and deliberations, the NWMO settled on an Adaptive Phased Managed Approach which in time may see the fuel stored in underground caverns similar to what other countries are doing. Canada has spent $700 million studying underground storage. If Canada’s then environment minister was that concerned about the direction the NWMO was taking why didn’t he speak up at the time? Meanwhile under the Liberal Government Canada sold nuclear reactors to Romania and China. Why didn’t Mr. Dion speak out against the deals? Do the Romanians and Chinese have better plans for managing the fuel than Canada does? Meanwhile the Ontario Liberals have cut 2400 MW of nuke power from Ontario’s energy plan. The plan doubles natural gas power generation capacity to 12,000 MW. Some of that capacity will be needed to back up the 4000MW of inefficient wind mills planned for southern Ontario. The wind-gas combo puts out 10 Mega tons more CO2 eq. emissions than 4000 MWs of nuke energy would. Is the wind-gas power mix a greener more sustainable option than nuclear? Does wind-gas ensure cheap, secure, reliable power for Ontario’s industry? Ontario’s Liberal energy minister Dwight Duncan seems to think so. Remember the Avro.

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