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Sixty percent of Ontario's electricity comes from nuclear power. The promise of nuclear power is enticing. It offers cheap, clean, and safe power. It only needs a few dozen tons of nuclear fuel to provide a year's supply of electricity for the whole of Ontario. The requirement for steam powered generators and transmission lines is virtually identical regardless of whether the energy to boil the water comes from coal, gas, oil, or nuclear rods. Clean and safe comes from the comparison with coal fired stations which have been blamed for the poor air quality in Ontario and the attendant thousands of premature pulmonary related deaths each year. Any new technology can be expected to have problems and the first two happened at the Canadian Chalk River experimental reactor. In 1952 there was a partial meltdown of the reactor's uranium fuel core and in 1958, at the same reactor, an irradiated fuel element broke off and caught fire after being removed from the reactor. The year previously, the English Windscale Pile No. 1 had a fire in a reactor, which spread radiation over the local countryside, contaminating a 200-square-mile area. However live and learn. Pickering Nuclear commenced construction in 1965. Pickering is just outside Toronto, Canada's largest city. One and a half million people live within 30 Km of the plant. The decision to locate a nuclear power station so near to Toronto does seem to be playing with fate. Through the 80's the safety of nuclear stations still seemed controversial. In 1979 the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the States had a partial core meltdown of the core and radioactive water and gas was released. At Pickering A, in 1983, a pressure tube in reactor #2 ruptured. However, the escaped coolant was contained in the reactor building. But in 1988, radioactive iodine was vented into the air after an operator error damaged 36 fuel bundles, which lead to contamination of the cooling system. In 1986 the worst nuclear accident, so far, happened when an explosion at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine spread radioactive material over a large part of Europe. Total casualties are unknown. One of the problems of nuclear generation is the large bureaucracy involved and the close association with governments. Large bureaucracies are typically inefficient and governments tend to try and hide their mistakes. The terms for the latter are called spin doctoring or simply a high-level cover-up. The OPG (Ontario Power Generation) web site says: Pickering A - the first four of the Pickering reactors - went into service in 1971 and continued to operate safely until 1997 when it was placed in voluntary lay-up in 1997 as part of what was then Ontario Hydro's nuclear improvement program. In layman's terms the other three reactors did not have a 26-year safe operating record and a nuclear improvement program is a euphemism for shut down because of safety reasons. Even the definition of a safe operating record is suspect as Energy Probe reports that in August of 1992, a tube-break in the moderator heat exchanger on Pickering Reactor #1 dumped 3,000 litres of radiation-contaminated heavy water into Lake Ontario. It was the largest tritium release in CANDU history, causing the shutdown of a nearby water supply plant. Other facts from Black Hole. The good news is that the population of Ontario is still growing and life expectancy increasing. |