Nuclear Energy Strategy for Canada a Dead End. Wind, Solar, & Batteries Far Better Investment
A Nuclear Energy Strategy for Canada – as announced by Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgeson is a waste of valuable resources. Nuclear energy in general is a fantastic way to waste funds and slow the transition to truly renewable energy and battery storage (helping American oil and gas corporations in the process). A focus on nuclear is also a great way to benefit the consortium of U.S. companies (tied to the u.s. military) that currently run Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (or CNL).
But nuclear development does NOT help Canadians. In fact, even when it works, it’s more expensive than simply going with renewable energy and storage. Renewables like wind and solar with batteries – contrary to what you may have heard – do NOT need base load power from gas or nuclear to work and could be deployed anywhere in Canada.
As the National Observer reported recently, the Federal Government has no comprehensive plan for wind, solar, and battery storage even though the rest of the world realizes wind and solar are much more efficient, cheaper, and quicker to deploy than all other forms of power. Indeed, “Canada, the Global Electricity Review found, is an outlier to the market trend. Renewable energy plant construction has dropped over the past two years, leaving wind and solar power accounting for just nine per cent of the country’s electricity mix, less than half the average among the G7” – see links under our recent podcast.
The world is going renewable faster than ever in response to the current energy crisis destroying demand for oil and gas in the process and making oil and gas development in Canada economically pointless. Which is all the more reason we need a build out of truly renewable energy like wind and solar.
But by contrast, Canada has poured billions of dollars of money into Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) with little to no progress. Further, as covered in The Energy Mix, there is “little interest in SMRs among banks and other sources of private capital” and “given the high costs… exporting significant quantities of SMRs from Canada is only a slim possibility.”
Meanwhile, as Mark Winfield and Susan O’Donnell also wrote in The Energy Mix about the pointlessness of large scale reactors:
“The last new full-scale nuclear reactor project in Canada, the Darlington nuclear power plant east of Toronto, was completed more than 30 years ago. The enormous cost overruns on that project contributed significantly to the effective bankruptcy of the province’s utility, Ontario Hydro, leading to its eventual break-up…. If the cost of a new reactor (proposed in New Brunswick) were passed on directly to NB Power customers through electricity rates, those rates could double or even triple.”
Canada also lacks a plan for dealing with Nuclear Waste. That is short of the plan to put a nuclear waste megadump near the Ottawa river – which risks contaminating a key drinking water source for Canadians.
Nuclear is good for oil and gas corporations’ profits – corporations that are currently ripping Canadians off at the gas pump and receiving massive public subsidies on top of that – because nuclear diverts resources from real renewable solutions. And oil and gas corporations ARE profiteering right now at our expense (nuclear being just the latest excuse to slow renewables).
Along with oil and gas subsidies, a nuclear energy strategy is bad for Canadians, dangerous to our health, and bad for our wallets.
Your community can also help drive the renewable energy revolution, find out how to take action.
And TALK TO OTHERS ABOUT THESE ISSUES – here’s some advice on how.
See also Management of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories by U.S. Companies, CRED-NB (PDF).
