For the past century, our politicians, the press, captains of industry, and the public have almost universally assumed – with the certainty of a deeply embedded prejudice – that we are entitled to cheap, reliable, abundant power that miraculously appears at the flick of a switch from some distant, benign source. By “cheap” I mean a price far below the actual cost of production and delivery.

Indeed, when Ontario’s charismatic crusader Adam Beck launched what became North America’s first public electric utility a century ago, he assured rapt audiences from Niagara Falls to northern Ontario that an “Electric Aladdin” would instantly appear to fulfil each and every consumer wish. Better still, Beck vowed, future prices would inevitably, magically descend in inverse relation to how much power consumption climbed.

Beck might as well have told his adoring audiences they could have all the cake they wanted, but eat it too, save money, and lose ten pounds in the bargain. What could be sweeter? For the next 80 years, Ontario’s power demand doubled every decade as each premier promised an electric future that looked like the electric past, except magnified in scale and minimized in price.

Huge hydro dams were constructed. Giant coal plants were commissioned, including the largest on the continent at Nanticoke. A fleet of reactors at Pickering, Bruce and Darlington was ordered at breakneck speed. But fatefully, the steeply escalating, highly debt-leveraged capital cost of each new reactor was only blended into the average system generation cost after it was built and started sending juice into the grid.

So the cost of the 20 new reactors was masked by cross-subsidies from six dozen older hydro-electric plants making penny-per kilowatt-hour power, and from cheap but filthy coal plants. And in true Ponzi scheme fashion, the day of debt interest reckoning was always pushed far into the future. All this meant the retail power “price signal” was always decades behind reality. What could be sweeter?

Ontario was still addicted to this fiscal confection when Mike Harris added another thick layer of alluring icing in 1995. He ran for premier on a public promise to freeze power rates for his entire term – without first daring to look at Hydro’s books. He won huge, and kept his word. Four years later our provincial utility effectively became bankrupt under the weight of $38 billion in publicly-owed debt.

It did not require a forensic accountant to discern that Ontario’s nuclear fleet – which then provided almost 70 per cent of grid energy – was the chief cause. Or that this vast debt grew because Ontario industries, commercial enterprises, and consumers were not being charged the actual cost of producing and delivering this new atomic power. In effect, Ontario Hydro’s business model was to lose money on every kilowatt-hour sold, then hope to make the losses up in volume.

So what was the response? The politicians, press and public simply re-arranged their prejudices. The $38 billion in Hydro debt was deftly scattered and buried in several government ledgers. For the next four years, precisely none of the stranded nuclear debt was paid down by the Harris government.

That meant cumulative debts, interest payments and peak electric demand climbed further. Worst of all, the resulting low-ball power rates postponed energy efficiency investments at heavy industries, office towers, factories, farms, hospitals and homes. At the same time, spending on transmission and distribution upgrades and maintenance was cut to the bone. That left every power user exposed to future rate hikes, and grid breakdowns.

Then the blackout of August, 2003 rocked the province. Ten lost days of productivity cost the province an estimated $6.4 billion, largely because our vaunted nuclear fleet was acutely vulnerable to a cascading series of grid failures that began in Ohio. They were among the first to fail, and the last to come back on line.

Fast forward to the 2011 election. Premier McGuinty set the bar by announcing a $1 billion per year plan to subsidize the subsidies already embedded in consumer power bills. Large industries got their own sweet $450 million “rebate” deal. But this was petty political potatoes for Tim Hudak, who vowed to return the province to the “cheap” good old days when Ontario Hydro blithely borrowed billions to build nuclear plants, and ran filthy old coal plants flat out. Andrea Horwath vowed to cut everyone’s power bills further, with a package of just-in-time promises couriered in from Never-Never Land.

I recite this brief history because in my view it shows that the biggest obstacle to attaining the 21^st Century power system Ontario needs is the century-old culture of feckless flummery embedded in our political discourse, our civic mindset, our power sector bureaucracies and unions, our large industry lobby groups, and the press and pundit class.

For those wishing a rough translation of “feckless flummery” think of the “emperor has no clothes” parable. Only in this case, it is our electric empire no one wants to say is naked, or broke in every sense of the word. So here is the main political problem, plain and simple:

Ontario is addicted to being promised cheap, instantaneous, risk-free, reliable power. Despite easily available evidence proving this is akin to promising every child a pony for Christmas, virtually all our politicians cravenly comply during each election cycle. In recent times, the only honourable exception has been Green Party leader Mike Schreiner.

Yet every place in North America or Europe, with a comparable nuclear-heavy generation mix, charges far higher prices for power than Ontario. In virtually all cases, the utilities there also have high debt levels, and poor reliability records. Worse, as the reactors age these problems magnify.

Ontario is not exempt from this reality. Even the best station in our nuclear fleet, Darlington, proves the point. It was originally slated to cost $3.4 billion, but went almost $11 billion over budget and took a decade longer to build than planned. These costs were originally justified on the basis of a 30-year asset life and amortization. But remarkably that has since been stretched – just like Pinocchio’s nose – to 40, then 50, then 60 years by OPG accountants.

Nobody at the time mentioned that mid-life Darlington reactor pressure tube transplants would cost at least another $10 billion, leave four 850 Mw units comatose for several years each, and compel consumers to pay premium prices for prodigious amounts of replacement power.

Worse, no impartial authority has calculated how many billions more it will cost to de-commission 20 fiercely radioactive reactors at Pickering, Bruce and Darlington once they are retired. But Hydro-Quebec’s estimated cost of dismantling its single CANDU reactor during the next 50 years is $1.8 billion.

So just dismantling the Ontario reactors may cost almost $40 billion. It will cost untold billions more to dispose of the latently lethal nuclear wastes the Ontario reactors will produce. Meanwhile, during the past 12 years Ontario ratepayers have paid $20 billion to service the $20 billion stranded nuclear debt that was due on Mike Harris’ watch. Some $12 billion still remains owing, and likely won’t be paid down until 2018 at the earliest.

You don’t need to take my word that this has put our provincial utility, once again, at the edge of a fiscal cliff. An April, 2012  analysis by Standard and Poors concluded OPG’s bonds would be rated ‘bbb’ – that’s barely above junk status – if repayment was not guaranteed by the province. Yet the province itself has been threatened with downgrades by credit rating agencies because of a long-term debt exceeding $270 billion, and a current annual deficit of $14.4 billion.

So this is like Portugal promising to cover off the debts of Greece. Yet astoundingly, the province is on the verge of allowing OPG to borrow and spend $26 billion more on new nuclear plants, despite a baseload surplus, despite no transparent, contractually binding “all in” cost quote from sole supplier SNC-Lavalin, and despite the harrowing lesson of Fukushima.

It took such a tragic, costly event for the Japanese political system, its press, and the public to see the hidden dangers of reliance on a power technology which merely appears to be the cheaper choice. In no small irony, Japan has recently replicated Ontario’s feed-in- tariff model to help salvage its crippled power system and economy with green power. In the first few months, an estimated $2 billion was committed to build new green generation there, including 1,000 Mw of approved solar projects.

The Japanese too suffered from an addiction to unexamined prejudices, including the fiction that atomic power and its apostles could deliver cheap power. No 21^st century power technology can. Every one is expensive. Some generation is expensive and safe. Some is expensive and latently lethal. Some technologies put all the costs and risks on current consumers, while others dump them on our grandchildren. Some rely on tiny but explicit subsidies, some on huge covert subsidies.

The question is: Will deception, dissembling and debt evasion remain normalized? Or will our politicians dare to start telling the truth about this in public, and thereby put a higher value on both electricity and civic honesty?

Only then will Ontario start actually thinking with clarity about how to build a sound 21^st century power system, instead of re-arranging reckless prejudices falsely packaged as prudent planning.

QUOTE FROM DBRS REPORT NOV 2/2012

This is because India presents a past, present and future danger as a nuclear weapons proliferator. It betrayed Canada in 1974 by detonating its first atomic bomb, using plutonium covertly created in a research reactor we donated under an ‘atoms for peace’ agreement. With macabre triumph, the blast was code-named “Smiling Buddha”.

Later, authoritative histories, memoirs, and de-classified documents would confirm India’s bomb plan had been put in play in the late 1950’s. And that key Indian scientists involved, including their revered leader Homi Bhabha, had gleaned many fateful secrets by apprenticing at the Chalk River research reactor north of Ottawa. They learned it produced a high ratio of plutonium, which is precisely why they requested its’ replica be donated to India.

India’s 1974 bomb blast compelled Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia, among others, to enact a strict nuclear materials embargo against India which lasted for decades. India was also implored, with zero success, to sign the U.N- sponsored Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.

The reason soon became obvious: India was determined to not only be the first developing nation to build an atomic bomb, but to stealthily develop far more powerful hydrogen bombs, and a triad of long-range delivery systems (air, land and sea-launched missiles) which could strike deep inside regional rivals Pakistan and China.

To obtain the secrets, skill-sets, exotic metals and precision equipment needed to build and deliver sophisticated nuclear weapons, it bought, bartered or simply burgled in the manner of atomic outlaws like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. In 1998, despite diplomatic pressure and a widely-observed embargo on sales of uranium and nuclear components (which Canada honoured) post-test atmospheric fission signatures confirmed India had attained elite hydrogen bomb status.

That provoked another round of international condemnations; Canada, the U.S. and Australia once again re-affirmed that India was off-limits for reactor and uranium sales. Since then, India has acquired jet fighters, long-range inter-continental ballistic missile technology, and cruise missile guidance systems, with the help of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Its’ Agni ICBMs can now strike Beijing or Karachi, and in recent months it has begun test trials of a nuclear submarine capable of firing atomic warheads from anywhere beneath the Indian Ocean.

The facts confirm that India has acquired some 100 weapons of mass destruction, and can deliver them with pin-point precision a distance equal to that between Toronto and Calgary. Like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Libya, it has used the cover of peaceful uses to seek nuclear bomb status, and intermingled civilian and military fuels, reactors, expertise and key components.

But the one thing India lacks is significant uranium reserves. So to skirt the embargo, it has proposed an accounting trick to segregate its civilian and military facilities and fuels. This is akin to convicted con artist Bernie Madoff vowing to keep his family fortunes separate from those he swindled, by keeping two sets of books.

Uranium companies from Canada, France, Russia, Kazakhstan, Niger, Namibia and Australia have leapt to exploit this flimsy ruse, and heavily pressured their governments to end the embargoes and sign blockbuster deals with India. They are particularly desperate since the harrowing accident at Fukushima, which prompted nations like Germany, Sweden, Italy and Japan to forswear nuclear power. This has caused global uranium demand, and spot prices, to collapse.

Canada’s largest uranium exporter, Cameco, is particularly desperate. It owns vast global uranium deposits, its’ share value has been slashed, and potential customers are vanishing. One of them is the Japanese utility that owned and operated the Fukushima reactors.

So Cameco has set up a sales office in India, and enlisted Stephen Harper to sanction uranium deals there with revised bi-lateral accords nominally intended to prevent repeating what India did to Canada in 1974. The result is a contorted ‘parallel universe’ of nuclear fuels and facilities within India, kept separate only by solemn assurances from Delhi politicians.

But the sinister properties of uranium, four decades of relentless Indian nuclear proliferation, and its refusal to sign global treaties reducing atomic weaponry, tell us such vows are virtually worthless.

The scientists who worked on the original U.S. bomb program that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 warned soon after that the only dividing line between peaceful and military atoms is intent. They also warned that uranium (and its derivative, plutonium) is so latently lethal that it should be kept under U.N. quarantine, and excluded from global commerce.

This wise, science-based counsel was ignored, and by the 1980’s some 60,000 warheads imperilled our planet and all its people. Now that total has been reduced to 19,000, as former Cold War enemies like the U.S. and Russia collaborate on destroying atomic stockpiles. They are on track to reduce warheads to about 1,500 each by 2018. Yet India has defied this hopeful trend by building ever larger numbers of ever more sophisticated nuclear bombs and delivery systems. This has provoked Pakistan, and perhaps Iran, to seek atomic parity.

By gutting global non-proliferation accords, re-writing bi-lateral versions in Orwellian double-speak, and selling uranium to such a defiant outlier, Mr. Harper is telling Canadians – and other nations – that closing a deal with immense danger hiding in plain sight is more important than global security. This is outside the bounds of honest international trade. It is commerce without any conscience.

David Suzuki
Scientist and broadcaster

“Far from our image of a “boy scout” nation working to promote a more peaceful world, McKay uncovers a side of Canadian public policy driven by greed, secrecy, deceit and a willingness to put global safety at risk for the sake of commercial opportunity.”

Peter Prebble
Former Saskatchewan Cabinet Minister, MLA

“This is an impeccably detailed account of Canada’s role in arming the world with nuclear technologies and fuels, from the first moments of the arms race to today’s rogue states and their bitter rivalries.”

Bilbo Poynter
Executive Director
Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting

“Atomic Accomplice is informed by in-depth research, fired by passionate conviction, and peppered with journalistic one-liners. A thorough and fair-minded primer on the politics of nuclear technology versus renewable alternatives, it is a powerful page turner.”

Maxine Ruvinsky
Chair, School of Journalism
Thompson Rivers University
Author of “Investigative Reporting in Canada”

IT WAS JUST before Christmas in the Capital City

When The Boss broke the news. He said:

“Boys – this ain’t pretty.

I just got a fl ash from our western-most post.

There’s a shortage of cash on the Vancouver coast.

It could be an error, or it could be a crime,

But there’s no doubt we’re missing a ‘55 dime.”

The second he said that a gasp fi lled the place.

There was anger and outrage on everyone’s face.

Computers stopped clicking; talking went dead.

Just the clock kept on ticking, till one of us said:

“It can’t be the records; they all check out right.

There’s no way that coin is a mere oversight.”

The Boss nodded grimly and he surveyed the room,

Which was frozen in silence, like a dark dusty tomb.

“Cancel all leaves!” he said. “Stop all vacations!”

“We’re facing a Code One cash violation.”

“Put a team on those records; I don’t care ‘bout the cost,

“I want every coin checked out to see what’s been lost.

The rest of this text is filler…

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BASIC CHOREOGRAPHY

With the floor lit to appear like shimmering water, dancers dressed as stylized paper cranes move with floating, classical precision and poise to the solo piano, then shudder with the minor chords as the shadow of an airplane appears above.

A flash appears, then the dancers shatter and flatten in slow motion in an outward concentric circle.

Sadako appears, running first with joy, then in slower and slower motion, circling the cranes, then re-assembling the dancer/cranes who come to life as she repairs and kisses the next one.

Visibly tiring, she sinks slowly to the floor as the cranes whirl around her, then majestically fly offstage.

In the interim, if you need to contact me, please post a reply in the area below. My webmaster will pass the message on to me.

Thanks,
Paul

by Paul McKay

With the clandestine nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran drawing deserved condemnation at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review in the United Nations, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged a leadership role for Canada in devising a diplomatic exit strategy from the perils of proliferation.

He should start by ending Canada’s exports of reactors and uranium.

The reason is physics. Every time uranium is fissioned inside a nuclear reactor, the deadly element plutonium is created. Aptly named after the Greek god of the underworld, only a plum-sized sphere weighing eight kilograms is needed to make an efficient atomic bomb.

India used plutonium created in a donated Canadian reactor to make its first bomb in 1974. Pakistan followed suit in 1998, and is now using a Candu knock-off to make plutonium and hydrogen bomb materials.

But the danger is not confined to rogue states. A “dirty” plutonium weapon might require 20 kilograms, but can be delivered by a single-engine Cessna, suicide SUV or backpack bomber on a bicycle.

Moreover, with a half-life of 24,000 years, plutonium is effectively immortal. It is also virtually indestructible.

Laudably, Canada has pledged $1 billion to help secure Cold War plutonium stockpiles. But last year, Saskatchewan uranium exports totalled 7.3 million kilograms. When fissioned in any reactor of any make, model or purpose, this will transmute into some 19,000 kilograms of plutonium, or enough for 2,300 warheads annually. This exported uranium also contains 52,000 kilograms of the bomb ingredient uranium-235, or enough to make 2,600 warheads annually.

During the next decade, if Canadian uranium exports continue at the same pace, enough plutonium and uranium-235 will be dispersed across the planet to potentially make 50,000 atomic bombs — almost double the existing warheads many world leaders and citizens now desperately seek to abolish.

This is a fact of physics. No Canadian prime minister, no premier of Saskatchewan, no scientist, no citizen can alter this deadly dynamic: Fissioned uranium turns into plutonium. If this happens inside a Candu reactor, the plutonium production rate is about 2.5 grams per kilogram of uranium — among the highest of all commercial reactor models. The Candu’s unique online fuelling system also makes plutonium diversion harder to detect, and can be covertly manipulated to produce higher purity plutonium.

Nuclear power currently provides just 5 per cent of world energy demand. Doubling that portion to only 10 per cent would require the construction of some 450 new nuclear reactors. The combined 900 reactors would consume some 120 million kilograms of uranium annually, and produce enough plutonium to make 14,000 warheads each year. For decades.

No one not blinded by self-interest would knowingly court this calamity, or prescribe nuclear reactors as the alternative to our carbon-imperilled Earth. While reactors do not emit carbon, they produce a different, equally ominous security threat in plutonium and uranium-235, as well as intensely radioactive, latently lethal wastes that will remain a threat to the biosphere for hundreds of centuries.

Despite belated, growing alarm about growing world stockpiles of fissile fuels, Ottawa continues to sell uranium as a commodity no less benign than wheat, wood or potash, and pitch reactors that are also plutonium production machines. Yet as leaders in North Korea and Iran well know, uranium and plutonium are as innately conjoined as fire and smoke, or the twisted double helix of DNA. And, like India and Pakistan, they have used the guise of the peaceful atom to achieve their military ends.

By promoting a nuclear export policy that gives primacy to closing current sales while assuming future world security is irrelevant, Ottawa is promoting a form of commerce without conscience.

Paul McKay is an investigative reporter and author of the recently published book: Atomic Accomplice: How Canada Deals in Deadly Deceit.