[ RadSafe ] Who is Jim Harding? Really?

[Roger Helbig]

http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/letters/story.html?id=5d39b29e-0
014-4f0e-aa4f-2a546be2fb81


Technology that's 'old and dangerous'


The Leader-Post


Published: Thursday, October 02, 2008

Duane Bratt's article, "It's time to go nuclear" (Leader-Post, Sept. 15) is
cleverly crafted, but fundamentally flawed. His promotion of the nuclear
industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan is based on a fallacy: that there is a
nuclear revival.

In the midst of this supposed revival, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) projects that by 2030 there will be only 447 to 679 Gigawatts
(GW) of nuclear capacity worldwide. This is only 40 to 60 per cent of what
was predicted to exist by 1990, the last time there was industry-animated
hype about a nuclear boom in the 1980s.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
projected that by 2030 electricity from renewables will double from 18 to 35
per cent of global supply, whereas nuclear will stay flat (16-18 per cent).

This projection already needs updating, for just last year China added more
wind power than nuclear added worldwide. (The same was true for Spain and
for the U.S.) No wonder the U.S.'s Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the same
one that pays ex-Greenpeacer Patrick Moore to preach the nuclear revival,
has recently lowered its U.S. projections to only between five and eight new
nuclear power plants by 2020.

Nuclear revivalists like Bratt err in counting only one side of the ledger,
forgetting that while they focus on a few proposed nuclear plants, many more
are soon facing costly and dangerous decommissioning. According to IAEA
information, there are far more plants approaching phase-out than
construction, and all that is needed for a full phase-out to gain momentum
is the ending of the billions of taxpayer subsidies that keep this
unsustainable industry afloat.

Bratt's arguing that more subsidies are justified because a shift from coal
to nuclear can reduce greenhouse gases continues the legacy of nuclear
deception. From both an energy physics and energy economics vantage,
efficiency, cogeneration and renewables are proving to reduce carbon much
more effectively, and without creating a long-lived toxic waste stream.

Bratt seems to be from another planet when he argues that the Prairies
should be able to get proliferation-prone enrichment technology because
Canada has been a "responsible nuclear country." We've been in the nuclear
weapons game from the start: with Chalk River the original supply station
for US weapons plutonium, Port Hope's plant refining the uranium used in the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and depleted uranium (DU) left from enriching
uranium exported to the U.S. still available to the Pentagon.

His appeal for a nuclear centre of excellence and nuclear industry education
as a means for the region to prosper builds more myth upon his erroneous
analysis. Rather than us facing the prospects of being left behind if we
don't jump on a (nonexistent) nuclear bandwagon, we face being conned into
continuing to pay dearly for an old and dangerous technology, while the
world moves on to sustainable energy.

Jim Harding

Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies and
author of Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global
Nuclear System.

Fort Qu'Appelle