Speech about Nuclear Power Oct, 2009

Nuclear Power and Water: the Implications

by Brenda Brochu

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this conference of the Keepers of the Athabasca. I’m not a scientist, but I have spent a lot of time over the past 2 ½ years researching various aspects of nuclear power. That’s because there have been several proposals to build a nuclear power plant within 30 kilometers of where I live in Peace River.
This is still very much a possibility. Although Bruce Power Limited has withdrawn its application to build a nuclear power plant on a shallow slough called Lac Cardinal, it is now hoping to submit an application to build a plant right on the Peace River about 30 kilometers north of the town. The company is just waiting for the Alberta government to announce that it will allow nuclear power in this province. The provincial government has said it will announce a policy on nuclear power by the end of 2009.
Nuclear power has enormous implications for water in this water-poor province. It uses more water than any other method of generating electricity—even more than coal-fired power plants. That’s because the process of splitting atoms produces an enormous amount of heat. It takes a huge amount of water to cool a nuclear generator and prevent a nuclear meltdown. According to the Pembina Institute in its 2009 report Heating up in Alberta: Climate Change, Energy Development and Water, nuclear plants require 205 litres of water to produce one kilowatt hour of electricity, while fossil fuel plants require 140 litres to produce the same amount of electricity.
That report goes so far as to say that, “Given the large potential for renewable energy, and the large water requirements for nuclear power (quite apart from the issues around the risk of radioactive contamination and nuclear waste), there is no justification for considering the development of nuclear energy at this time.”
The nuclear power plant being considered for the Peace River area is a whopper. It would produce 4,000 megawatts of electricity, nearly half the electricity now used in Alberta in a year and more than the amount used in all of Saskatchewan in a year. According to Bruce Power’s own document, “Bruce Power New Build in Alberta”, this facility would require six cubic meters of water per second. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you do the math and find out that that works out to 518,400 cubic meters a day or 189,216,000 cubic meters a year. That is more than the City of Edmonton treats in a year and 19 times as much as the City of Edmonton actually consumes. Water consumed is water that is not returned to the water body from which it came.
It so happens that more than half the water taken in by the proposed nuclear facility in Peace River would be consumed. That’s because it would be deadly to all living things to return such a large quantity of heated water to the river. Bruce Power is proposing to build cooling towers which would cause 3.7 cubic meters of water a second to be discharged into the air in the form of evaporation. That works out to 319,680 cubic meters a day or 116,683,200 cubic meters a year.
Keep in mind that one cubic meter of water will fill six standard-sized bathtubs. An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds just 2,500 cubic meters of water.
I ask you consider how much sense it makes to use such a vast quantity of water when Alberta has only a small fraction of the fresh water in Canada. Most of the rivers in southern Alberta are already fully allocated for agricultural, industrial and municipal use, and there is great pressure on the rivers in central Alberta. The glaciers that feed our rivers in Alberta have lost 25 per cent of their mass over the past century, and global warming will increase the pace of this melting. Global warming will also increase evaporation, causing the arid area in this province to increase and droughts to become more frequent.
All of the rivers in Alberta have seen a decline in the volume of their flow. As most of you probably know, the flow of the South Saskatchewan is now less than 20 per cent of what it was a century ago by the time it reaches Saskatoon. Less well known is the fact that the flow of Alberta’s northern rivers has already declined by 40 per cent in the last century.
There has also been a decline in precipitation in Alberta during the past century. According to Dr. David Schindler, a scientist who specializes in water in the Prairie Provinces, almost half the Alberta sites in a recent study received 14 to 24 per cent less precipitation than they did a century ago. None saw increases in rain and snow.
What will happen if 319,680 cubic meters of water are taken out of the Peace River in a day and never returned? One result will certainly be an increased drying of the Peace/Athabasca Delta in northern Alberta, which already experienced significant drying after the opening of the WAC Bennett Dam in northeastern BC. As you probably know, the Peace/Athabasca Delta is a globally significant wetland for water birds where all four of North America’s major flyways converge. A large nuclear plant on the Peace River will be one more stressor on these precious birds.
Another result will be a dramatic increase in humidity in the immediate vicinity of the plant. This could make the kind of farming which exists in the area now unviable. It would be hard for grain to ripen in such a humid environment. As well, because the climate of the area is so cold, fog and icy roads would become an increasing problem, posing dangers for vehicles and airplanes, including airplanes using the Peace River Airport.
But nuclear power is not only a gluttonous consumer of water, it is a significant polluter of water as well. According to the 2006 Pembina Institute report Nuclear Power in Canada: An Examination of Risks, Impacts and Sustainability, “Each stage of the nuclear energy production process generates large amounts of uniquely difficult-to-manage wastes that will effectively require perpetual care, imposing costs and risks arising from current energy consumption onto future generations”. Imposing costs and risks on future generations for current energy consumption does not fit any definition of sustainable development that I have seen.
What are these wastes? The 18-or-so nuclear reactors generating power in Canada in 2006 produced 85,000 waste fuel bundles per year. These zirconium-clad bundles contain uranium when they are put into a nuclear reactor. When they come out, they are thousands of times more radioactive than before. They contain more than 200 radioactive substances, some of which are not found in nature and are produced only through nuclear fission. One of these is plutonium, the deadliest substance on earth.
One millionth of a gram of plutonium is enough to cause lung cancer if it is inhaled. A piece of plutonium the size of a grapefruit is enough to make a bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Right now there is no known way to safely store spent fuel bundles. They are so “hot” when they are removed from nuclear reactors with robots that they have to be placed in pools of water for seven to ten years. They are then stored on site at nuclear plants in concrete silos, which have a life expectancy of just 50 to 60 years. The federal government has been trying for several years to develop a site for deep burial of fuel bundles in the Canadian Shield, but so far no site has been found. The Americans have abandoned their proposed site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada after spending billions of dollars and discovering that the site is too vulnerable to earthquakes. It is also just 80 miles north of the highly populated city of Los Vegas.
Spent fuel bundles are not the only waste product of nuclear reactors. Even when there is no malfunctioning, nuclear reactors routinely discharge radioactive substances and other toxins, including heavy metals, into the environment. All that steam coming out of the cooling towers of a nuclear reactor would contain such substances as carbon 14, tritium, iodine 131 and inert radioactive gases called “noble gases”. Carbon 14 and tritium, which is radioactive hydrogen, are emitted in very large quantities and are of particular concern. Both enter the cells of living things and give off radiation from within the organism.
Carbon-14, which is created when neutrons bombard the air in a nuclear reactor, replaces non-radioactive carbon in the cells of plants and animals. Tritium is formed when the radioactive fuel is cooled by water. It combines with oxygen to form radioactive water. This is also incorporated into the cells of living things. From inside the body, both carbon 14 and tritium cause cancer, DNA damage and birth defects. Our own Canadian CANDU reactors are known to discharge more tritium into the environment than any other reactors.
I can tell you that farmers in the Peace River area don’t want tritium or any other radioactive substance falling on their land or getting into their groundwater. They are concerned that their produce would become radioactive, causing sales to plummet. As well, about 7,500 households in the Peace River area get their water from the Grimshaw Gravels Aquifer. If tritium gets into the aquifer, there is no way to screen it out. The water would become unusable, and those 7,500 households would have to get their water somewhere else.
Iodine 131 is a radioactive isotope of iodine, and most of it is normally contained by the fuel rods in a nuclear reactor. However, the cladding of the fuel rods can crack, causing large releases of this toxic substance. It replaces non-radioactive iodine in the thyroid gland. This process can cause thyroid cancer, which is why residents in the vicinity of a nuclear plant are frequently given iodine pills to take in case of a large accidental release of iodine 131.
The noble gases xenon, krypton and argon, although inert, meaning they don’t enter into chemical reactions, tend to accumulate in the fatty tissues of the body near the ovaries and testicles. From here they can cause mutations of genetic material, leading to reproductive failure and birth defects.
They also break down into dangerous radioactive substances like cesium 137, which concentrates in the muscle tissue of animals. This can get into the meat tissue of livestock and game animals, rendering them unfit for human consumption. Following the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986, reindeer as far away as Scandinavia had to be destroyed due to contamination with cesium 137. There are still farms in the United Kingdom where the sheep are not allowed to enter the food chain due to fallout from the Chernobyl accident 23 years ago.
There is no doubt that some radioactive substances would get into the Peace River if a nuclear plant were to be built nearby. Those substances would enter the aquatic ecosystem of the river, affecting the viability of all species, plant and animal. They would travel with the river to the Peace/Athabasca Delta and beyond down the Slave River to Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River. From there they would enter the Arctic Ocean.
It should be noted that there is probably already some radioactive contamination of the Slave and Mackenzie watersheds due uranium mining on the eastern shore of Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan.
Nuclear reactors also produce what are called low- and medium-level solid wastes. These are such things as mops, rags and various mechanical parts that are used inside a reactor. All of these become radioactive and cannot be placed in an ordinary landfill. In Ontario, this waste is taken to a special site near the Bruce reactors on Lake Huron. In Ontario, there is serious concern that this waste could leach into Lake Huron and the surrounding groundwater.
Nuclear plants themselves have to be decommissioned after 30 or 40 years and become part of the nuclear waste. They too are highly radioactive and have to be dismantled with great care, using robots. So far, all decommissioned reactors are simply left on site. What Peace River would have after the decommissioning of a nuclear reactor would be a huge nuclear waste dump that would have to be managed for hundreds of thousands of years. This dump would likely contain the spent fuel rods with their plutonium and 200 other radioactive substances, pools contaminated with tritium and other radioactive substances, a storage facility for low- and medium-level radioactive wastes and a radioactive building whose parts cannot be used for anything else because of that radioactivity. Do you want your descendants to have to pay for the management of such a site for countless generations? More to the point, do you really think we can keep such substances out of the surface water and ground water for such an extended period?
Although the risk of a major nuclear accident is considered to be low, it can’t be left out of the equation. Nuclear power plants are designed, built and operated by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) has not been able to get its Maple reactors to operate safely, and that is why we are still using the leaky old National Research Unit reactor to make medical isotopes in this country.
A new-generation AECL reactor called the ACR 1000 is one of the reactors being considered by Bruce Power for the Peace Country. This is an experimental reactor which has not been built anywhere in the world. The design work has not yet been completed, and we still don’t know if it will work.
One new-generation reactor designed by AREVA of France is under construction in Finland. However, it is three years behind schedule and $2.2 billion, or 55 per cent, over-budget. Inspectors have found numerous flaws in the construction, which is one of the reasons for the delays.
The risk of an accident at a nuclear reactor in the Peace River area is heightened by the fact that the proposed site sits on the most seismically active geological structure in the province. This is called the Peace River Arch, and it produced an earthquake right across the river from the proposed site this February which measured 3.4 on the Richter scale. The risk of earthquakes in our area is increased by the large amount of drilling and bitumen extraction that is taking place there.
A nuclear plant in the Peace River area could also make an attractive target for terrorists. That’s because such a plant would primarily benefit Americans. We Albertans do not need the power from such a plant to meet our own needs. The only uses for such power would be to fuel tar sands production, primarily for American consumption, or to export electricity directly to the United States. Either way, we will effectively be exporting hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water a year to the United States without one drop crossing the border!
There is an urgent need for Albertans and others with an interest in protecting our water to speak out. The Coalition for a Nuclear Free Alberta is a coalition of 10 citizens’ groups from across the province seeking to keep our province nuclear-free and promoting the use of renewable energy sources and energy conservation. The more groups we have in our Coalition the better!
One action we are planning is a demonstration at the Legislature in Edmonton during the noon hour on Tuesday, Oct. 27th. Buses are being chartered from several cities to take demonstrators to the event. I hope many of you will consider joining us. I also brought some green ribbons with me, which are available for $2 each. Wearing one of these ribbons signifies that you oppose nuclear power and want to see an expansion of truly green, renewable energy in this province.
I believe we can keep nuclear power out of Alberta. But it will take a lot of action from a lot of people like us to accomplish this.
Thank you for letting me speak. Are there any questions?


October 10, 2009
Slave Lake, Alberta