Caleb Behn, a young, Indigenous law student from northeast BC and the subject of the forthcoming documentary film Fractured Land, will be at the Vancouver Public Library this Thursday evening, February 28, to give a talk sponsored by Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada.
Behn, who recently completed his legal studies at UVic with a concentration in environmental law and sustainability, derives from Treaty 8 country in northeast BC – one of the most heavily industrialized regions in the world. On side of his family is Dunne Za and Cree from West Moberly First Nations in the Peace River Valley, the other being Eh-Cho Dene from Fort Nelson. Both territories have been heavily affected by natural gas “fracking” operations, among other industrial activities – including logging, mining and large hydroelectric dams.
Behn’s presentation, which starts at 7 pm in the Alice McKay Room at the Vancouver Public Library’s downtown branch (350 W. Georgia), is titled “Indigenous Law as a Solution to Resource Conflict in Treaty 8”.
Event host Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada describes it as follows:
Unconventional energy development made possible by hydraulic fracturing (“Fracking”), has massively increased energy development in Treaty 8, which contains the second largest hydrocarbon deposit on earth. This has led to litigation, blockades and other forms of conflict with indigenous communities. Caleb Behn examines the potential of indigenous laws and legal traditions to ensure preservation of the environment as a condition of energy development and to effect reconciliation.
Behn’s profile has increased of late, partly due to his involvement in the documentary film Fractured Land, co-directed by The Common Sense Canadian’s Damien Gillis. The soon-to-be-lawyer recently completed a speaking tour through the Yukon, discussing proposed fracking operations there, and another with The Council of Canadians’ Maude Barlow, dealing with proposed oil and gas pipelines and tankers in BC.
Thursday’s night’s event is free of charge, but seating is limited.
In assessing Premier Christy Clark’s political sins, add one other: irresponsibility…big time.
In the Sun of February 26, on the business page, is an excellent article by Scott Simpson on natural gas prices and their uncertainty. In it you will see that exports of natural gas, in liquefied form (LNG), to Asian markets are scarcely a slam dunk proposition. Gas prices in most Asian markets are controlled by governments and the private sector in a number of cartels, with the idea of maintaining high prices. But, to say the least, the matter is in a state of flux.
Getting ordinary facts on this situation is a crap shoot. Christy Clark tells us that China will be our next big customer. On the other hand, we hear that China has discovered its own massive shale gas reserves – while yet other sources warn this gas will be a challenge to access. Russia sits on the world’s most plentiful conventional gas reserves and is developing a plan to venture into shale gas. The US is awash in the stuff.
Ms. Clark has based her economic position on gas revenues increasing 20 fold in the next 20 years, predicated on the assumption that LNG prices will be 2½ times higher than our domestic price in 20 years.
She has also promised a “Prosperity” fund, starting in two years, which will have us rolling in dough. To tie that all up, she has signed a long-term deal with a consortium of First Nations for gobs of cash to come when a gas pipeline is built through their territory.
This raises, of course, a critical question – if the market we want to serve is awash in natural gas, why in the years to come would it need the stuff from BC?
It rather reminds one of President Hoover, as the Great Depression started rolling, in the election year of 1932, promising a “chicken in every pot” and that “prosperity is just around the corner.”
In The Globe and Mail of February 26, an interview by Justine Hunter of Premier Clark has a little gem in it. The Premier, with her Prosperity Fund “just around the corner”, admits those LNG exports are “four or five years away”.
To top it all off, the International Energy Agency has recently stated, “it is questionable whether freely available LNG will be available from Canada as the main partners in developing other terminals — PetroChina, KOGAS (from Korea), and (Japan’s) Mitsubishi — have dedicated markets for sales in Asia.”
There is also the obvious point that in BC pipelines must cross two huge mountain ranges.
I am no expert in these matters, God knows. However, I have attained a pretty good tummy and an ability to spot horse buns when I see them.
The plain fact is that with the rapid discoveries of shale gas taking place around the world, but especially in the US, Australia, Poland, Russia and China, it doesn’t make sense to promise that any LNG will available from BC to Asia…ever.
Moreover – and please, dear readers pay attention to this – if Australia is any example, LNG plants will only be built with huge incentives (read money) from the public. That’s us folks.
If I am accused of not knowing what the hell I’m talking about, well, neither do Premier Clark and her government.
And I’m not running for a fourth term to lead this province.
Real forests are wild. The forests of human contrivance are tree farms, plantations, monocultures, timber supply areas. Such clusters of trees may superficially appear to be real forests, but they are less complex, less organic, less living and therefore less enduring. And they were handicapped by their beginning. Instead of originating and developing by the creative randomness of biological chance, their growth was guided by a defined purpose. They are not real forests because they are not wild.
Even real forests can lose their wild quality if they are disturbed by human influence. The enchantment provided by the wild is rare and delicate, sometimes violated by a word or a breath. Maybe this is why real forests invite the same quiet reverence as cathedrals, temples, or those sacred and holy places which countenance nothing less than silent awe.
A person in a real forest is in the presence of the wild, of something so profoundly important and so deeply primal that it only speaks to our bones — because, as Robert Bringhurst writes in The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, “it is what-is” (Counterpoint, 2008).
In Bringhurst’s thinking, the wild is the essence of “what-is”, a conviction — better still, an insight, an awareness, a knowing — he explores in the chapter, “Wild Language”. As a linguist and typographer, Bringhurst is looking for the wild in language and typography, the same wild that is in real forests.
Not surprisingly, he admits failure. “Wild typography isn’t something I’ve achieved; its something I’m always trying to reach. It is typography in which each form is as well made and as well placed as the wildflowers blooming in an alpine meadow in the spring, deerprints in a rain-soft stretch of game trail, the feathers in a varied thrush’s wing, or the miniature forest of moss and lichen spreading over a stump.” In other words, the wild is a spontaneous rightness that happens of itself, an unfolding perfection and a continuing completeness that is powered from within.
The wild cannot be made by us. “People accustomed to orchards, farms and gardens,” writes Bringhurst, “very often think of the wild in opposition to the domesticated or tame. The garden, they say, has greater order than the wild. But it’s the other way around. The order of the garden may be easier to see, but it is fragile and superficial. It is artificial and unnatural in a very convincing sense: it cannot take care of itself. The order of the wild is self-sustaining, flexible and deep.”
This brings us closer to the meaning of wild in a real forest. In Bringhurst’s words, such forests are “a living, ever-changing shrine to timelessness”. The wild contains a level of ordering that transcends human influence and control. “The wild is by definition unmanaged and unmanageable, and in some sense unconfined by those who would manage it.”
This begins to explain why real forests — wild forests — are so special. They provide something far greater than human planning and intention, something even more complex and permanent than the civilizations we think are so sophisticated and durable. Indeed, as Bringhurst rightly observes, “Forests are also highly developed civilizations.” But they do not “need or want our managerial interference.”
In reality, they contain a crucial wisdom that we would do well to learn, replicate and internalize. In Bringhurst’s words, “human civilizations actually start to resemble” a wild forest when they begin “to sense and respond to” the same “supple and reinforcing order” that guides its growth. So, “the wild isn’t something to conquer or subdue; it’s something to try to live up to: a standard better than gold.”
If this were all Bringhurst had to say about the wild in forests it would be more than enough. But he has more. “As soon as you think your way out of the wild — as soon as depression or arrogance or some other form of exaggerated self-concern leads you to see yourself as distinct from it — the wild looks like a thing. You might imagine you can carve it up and sell it. You might even think you can redesign it or manage it and do a better job than the wild itself. But of course you can’t. Your only hope, when you are really cut off from the wild, is to rejoin it. The wild is the biosphere: this tiny hollow ball which is the only place in the universe where you and I are free to be what we are.”
So the wild is a teacher, a constant reminder that we can be who we are. We can be ourselves just as the forest is itself. The same spontaneity that grows a wild forest grows the fullness of our own character. Just as each wild forest is unique, so too are we each unique, the organic consequence of a complex unfolding that happens of itself. We each become who we are just as a wild forest becomes what it is. The miracle of our own individual being is mirrored in the wild forest.
This comes close to the meaning of wild. And it comes close to the essential reason for protecting wild forests. They are ourselves as we ought to become and as we ought to be. We find ourselves in them. We can feel peaceful and whole in them because the freedom that makes them what they are is the same freedom that makes us who we are. Entering a wild forest is like entering our deepest selves, like coming home to who we really are. The elusive feeling that pervades a wild forest is the creative power of nature fulfilling itself.
Without the wild we become lost in a contrived world of impositions and manipulations, captives in a construction of conventions and expectations. We lose our character, our integrity, our soul, our essence. We need wild forests as a reminder to both ourselves and to our civilizations that what we seek is not a thing to be but a way to be.
Last weekend’s rally in Washington, D.C. is being called the largest climate change rally in history. At least 35,000-40,000 people from all over North America came out on what was an unseasonably cold and windy winter day to demand that U.S. President Barack Obama deny approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and make good on his stated intentions to take serious action to address the climate crisis.
The rally included speeches by Bill McKibben of 350.org, who told the assembled crowd, “For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work…We shouldn’t have to be here – science should have decided our course long ago. But it takes a movement to stand up to all that money.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, who was arrested a week earlier protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House, said, “President Obama holds in his hand a pen and the power to deliver on his promise of hope for our children. Today, we are asking him to use that pen to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and ensure that this dirty, dangerous, export pipeline will never be built.”
Canada was well represented by a number of indigenous leaders, including Chief Jacqueline Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation. “The Yinka Dene Alliance of British Columbia is seeing the harm from climate change to our peoples and our waters,” said Thomas, Yinka Dene Alliance co-founder. “We see the threat of taking tar sands out of the Earth and bringing it through our territories and over our rivers. The harm being done to people in the tar sands region can no longer be Canada’s dirty secret.”
Will any of this make a difference? Even while the demonstration was underway, self-proclaimed environmentalists such as New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin was criticizing the demonstrators, writing that “a tight focus on Obama’s decision over the pipeline could be counterproductive if the hope is to build policies that might someday reduce the need for oil, whether the source is Alberta oil sands, the floor of the Gulf of Mexico or the Niger River delta.”
Many climate activists did not take kindly to Revkin’s comments, with journalist-turned-activist Wen Stephenson tweeting, “50,000 people come out to fight for our kids’ future, and you dump on it. You are what we’re fighting.”
Grist columnist David Roberts noted:
We can sit around and fill our blogs with reasons why this or that solution is the wrong one, inferior to some better one that we’d already have, goldarnit, if those meddling pushers-of-other-solutions weren’t ‘distracting’ from ours. We can fall in love with the ineffable intellectual tangle, as Revkin has, and accept that anything specific enough to build an activist campaign around will be meaningless in the context of global energy demand and emissions…But some people want to fight! Some people actually haul themselves out from behind their keyboards, call a bunch of friends, put on warm clothes, and go stomp around in public yelling about it.
Tensions are running high, as is often the case when so much is at stake. But is Revkin right? Is fighting Keystone the best strategic move or should we be directing our energies elsewhere? I was at the protest in D.C. and had the opportunity to speak with a number of climate activists about what lies ahead for the movement. From what I garnered from my discussions, I think Roberts has captured a sentiment that most of us have yet to fully realize, even those of us engaged in this struggle.
Yes, Keystone is a symbolic fight and stopping the pipeline will not fix our climate problem, not by a long shot. But for many people (and the numbers are rising), climate change represents one of humanity’s defining challenges, on par with the abolition of slavery, universal human rights and defeating fascism during the Second World War. It is the sine qua non issue of the 21st Century – no matter what else we might do, if we don’t get this one right, we’re in for an extremely rough ride.
This sentiment is becoming widespread in climate activist circles witnessed by, among other things, the Sierra Club’s recent decision to advocate and engage in civil disobedience for the first time in the organization’s 120-year history. The route of international negotiations and treaties has led us no closer to arresting climate change so many are now rightfully asking: If not now, when? If this is not the issue to get us out of our chairs and into the streets to fight, then what is? New pipelines represent a tangible symbol of our continuing addition to fossil fuels, locking us in to many more years of oil consumption at a time when even the International Energy Agency is telling the world that most of the world’s fossil fuels need to remain just where they are: in the ground.
Canada’s federal government is notorious for its intransigence and lack of interest in the climate change file. In the wake of the ongoing Idle No More movement and massive opposition to the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, one wonders what climate activists in this country might be planning next. After all, Stephen Harper’s government appears hell bent on getting tar sands crude out of Alberta to international markets. If not Keystone, if not Gateway, Harper is determined to find some other way and other plans are surely in the works.
Following the protest, I had some time to visit the National Museum of African American History at the Smithsonian Institute where I came upon a quotation by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Whatever you may think of the campaign to stop Keystone XL, it would appear that climate change activists around the world are beginning to wake up to the cold reality of Douglass’ words. We may well look back upon last weekend’s protest as only the beginning of a long, bitter and increasingly hostile battle.
Proposed LNG plant in Kitimat – artist’s rendering
The famous bordello keeper of the 20s, Texas Guinan, used to greet her “guests” with, “Hello suckers!”
Texas Guinan has her presence today in the form of BC’s Finance Minister Mike de Jong.
First we must understand some underlying facts about BC finances.
A balanced budget – your style and mine – has us forecasting revenues and expenses accurately, including everything, not something to be pushed at a banker after a three martini lunch. If you don’t include everything you’ll have to borrow money when the car breaks down.
You and I know that if we don’t include everything, we’re just fooling ourselves. Well, folks, there’s no gentle way to put it. We have been played for fools and I’m only going to deal with three headings and leave the deep analysis to economists.
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
We are selling off some $800 million of Crown assets. This is like you and me selling our homes and using the revenue to balance our current budget. Using money from capital assets, you and I would say, doesn’t belong in our family’s budget because it simply isn’t proper revenue any more than selling off the family jewels is proper revenue.
Governments make up their own rules, of course, and some things that ought not to be are in the annual budget, while other things that ought to be there are missing.
Private Power Rip-off
Take BC Hydro – in fact, take it before General Electric takes it if the Liberal government is, God forbid, re-elected.
Under this government, BC Hydro, which used to pay us taxpayers hundreds of millions per year from its operating profits, is now essentially bankrupt, though not yet formalized. It will be sold with a Liberal victory in May.
No government would do such a thing?
Can you say BC Ferries? Can you say BC Rail?
Since the Liberals embarked on their deliberate plan to bankrupt BC Hydro, our crown jewel has seen its debt and contractual obligations rise to about $80 BILLION.
How has this happened?
Much of it comes from the sweetheart contracts BC Hydro is forced to give Independent Power Producers (IPPs). These contracts cost the public as high as five times the market rate for power and have pushed Hydro into an annual deficit position.
The trouble in dealing with this is it’s difficult if not impossible to believe.
Well believe it. Mair’s Axiom #1 prevails: “You make a serious mistake assuming that people in charge know what the hell they are doing.”
Now, if your family business started to lose big bucks and you decided to pump money from your family’s other sources of income into it, you would certainly show that in your budget. The Liberal government hasn’t told you about that.
LNG Pipe Dream
Finally, let’s take a look at projected income, particularly from Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), which is to be our fiscal saviour. Indeed, according to Premier Clark, we’ll be rolling in dough with this money!
Mr. de Jong perhaps hasn’t noticed that suddenly – and it has been sudden – the world is awash in natural gas. In the time I’ve been talking about it, our obvious major client, China, has discovered massive shale gas reserves of its own.
Believe it or not, it gets worse.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has made it clear that unless the BC government and the federal government agree to give 30% capital cost allowances – meaning they want a 30% subsidy on the money spent building facilities, like what happens in Australia – then thanks but no thanks to this LNG scheme.
A glance at the Australia experience shows that at the end of the day, the taxpayer ends up footing a big portion of the construction costs to serve a world that doesn’t want their product.
Here’s what one BC political blog had to say on the matter, comparing the LNG issue to our experience with private power:
…LNG exporters are just like our IPP run of river companies, who did nothing, built nothing, acted only on their own behalf, and laid out no money to build 1 kilowatt of power without 30 and 40 year guaranteed contracts, contracts that Gordon the thief Campbell was more than willing to sign. IPPs did not take one single risk, we, the taxpayers, the BC Hydro ratepayers were ripped off…
There are no LNG facilities built as yet, nor will there be unless government pays their capital costs and even then I predict we’ll never see a single plant, let alone the 5 or more proposed.
Christy Clark’s vaunted “Prosperity Fund” will never receive one penny.
The Speech from the Throne and the Prosperity Fund – and the Budget – are barnyard droppings and Premier Clark is trusting that a disreputable, ongoing lie will fool the public.
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency is seeking public input on whether or not to hold a federal environmental assessment process for a proposed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) mega-project on BC’s north coast. The plant, dubbed Pacific Northwest LNG, is designed to turn natural gas from northeast BC into super-cooled liquid so it can be shipped to new markets in Asia, currently paying a higher price for the commodity.
Citizens have until March 11 to let the government know whether the proposal for Prince Rupert – one of half a dozen slated for that community and nearby Kitimat – should undergo a thorough environmental assessment.
Project proponent Progress Energy became a wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned energy giant Petronas in December, when Stephen Harper approved the controversial buyout. The decision followed lengthy deliberations, during which time Harper was pressured directly by the Malaysian Prime Minister.
Just prior to that, the two companies announced their intention to proceed with the $9-11 Billion project, regardless of the fate of the buyout, but indicated the project’s size would vary accordingly.
A Financial Post story at the time noted, “If the takeover bid is a go, the LNG plant, named Pacific Northwest LNG, will export two billion cubic feet a day of liquefied natural gas. If the bid is not approved, the two companies will continue as separate entities and work on a plant with the capacity to export 1.2 billion cubic feet a day. Either way, the project will proceed at an ‘aggressive’ pace.”
Petronas’ mega-project is far from the only LNG plant proposed for BC’s coast. There are at least five major projects proposed by a host of North American, Asian and European natural gas players – some of which have already received some level of approval. These include Kitimat LNG, of which Chevron just purchased a majority stake, and Kitimat-based, Shell-led LNG Canada, a consortium which includes Japanese, Chinese and Korean partners.
These plants are a key piece of a promised natural gas boom that is a central plank in the BC Liberals’ economic and election platform. They also bring with them considerable environmental and economic concerns – from the shaky financial foundation of the nascent industry to the water and air contamination caused by fracking – a controversial, new technique used for harnessing much of the gas that would feed these LNG plants.
The plants themselves would create local air pollution and carbon emissions, as they plan to burn some of their own product to to meet the enormous energy demands of processing gas into liquid.
Progress/Petronas’ project description is available to download here. Comments can be emailed to GNLPacificNorthwestLNG@ceaa-acee.gc.ca – or see mailing and fax info here.
The Common Sense Canadian’s Damien Gillis and Vancouver Co-op Radio’s Imtiaz Popat discuss a range of topics relating to water and energy in advance of BC’s provincial election, scheduled for May 14. From the economic and environmental consequences of the Liberals’ private river power scheme to new plans to turn “fracked” natural gas into liquid to access new markets in Asia, Gillis raises questions that need to be addressed by both parties in the upcoming campaign.
The BC Liberal Government’s speech from the throne on February 12 – which hinged on promises of a $100 Billion windfall from BC’s heretofore nonexistent Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) industry – was an appalling attempt to divert attention away from reality with pie in a distant sky.
This government must be thrown out and one can say with certainty that any replacement would be an improvement.
Billions in a few years hence, perhaps trillions after that. We’ll become the LNG capital in the world! There are one or two dark spots on this sunny painting we should look at carefully.
The LNG will come largely from fracking, which is taking the world by storm. It involves drilling deep underground into shale beds where gas is trapped, then drilling horizontally through them, and ultimately pushing huge amounts of chemical-laced water through to crack open the shale and force the gas to the surface. Under Christy Clark’s grand LNG scheme, this gas would then be transported by pipeline to Kitimat or Prince Rupert, where it would be converted into LNG for export, mostly to Asia.
The first questions – the conditions precedent to this operation – are to do with the environment. In a radio interview with the CBC’s Rick Cluff Wednesday, Premier Christy Clark repeatedly referred to this gas as “clean”. Really?
Where does this water come from? The requirements are immense, so a large supply must be found.
Where does the chemically loaded water go? Into the water table, thence to the water supply of local residents?
What is the impact of the extraction of this gas on the stability of the area? Will there be earthquakes as a result of fracking, as a recent report from the Oil and Gas Commission suggests?
What is the impact of huge water extractions on the general ecology of the the supply area? Are there fish losses? What happens to the fauna and flora after the water is extracted? What impact is there on people, especially First Nations? What will be the impact of the water lost to this process on BC Hydro and its ratepayers – like the billions of litres coming from the Williston Reservoir?
There is this question Premier Clark won’t deal with because she doesn’t give a damn – what about the impact of pipelines (all four of them proposed to cut across BC), especially on wildlife?
The fact is that these concerns are being dealt with in several regions with a moratoriumon the enterprise until the answers to these and other questions are answered.
What we do know is that these sorts of concerns do not bother the Chinese in the least, which leads into the major economic concern. Asian prices are high now – 5 or 6 times higher than in North America, which is the basis for this whole scheme. This is a direct reflection of the current lack of cheap, local supply.
One doesn’t have to be an economic genius or Nostradamus to predict that our proposed customer, China, will find plenty of shale and be awash with natural gas.
Even if China does not develop its own supply, who says BC can compete with other countries, such as Australia, which is into this big time?
Another nasty question: how does Premier Clark know how much tax room there will for BC in this development? Are we to suppose that the feds will see huge money without wanting to get into the taxing game themselves, big time?
It should be noted that at present there is no LNG plant in BC.
This is the bunch that wants to be re-elected on May 14. This is their blueprint. Not only have they done nothing to relieve our financial woes they have taken us for fools by feeding us a load of unattainable and inedible pie in the sky.
Wow! The Vancouver Sun has been a-burst with environmental issues, two on the front page February 6.
Let’s first back up to Vaughn Palmer’s ill thought out column of February 4. It’s nice to see Palmer has finally sacrificed his virginity and tackled the Independent Power Producers’ (IPP) obscene contracts foisted by the government on BC Hydro. Before we rejoice at Palmer’s brain transplant we must recognize what tripe this column was.
Palmer defends gross overpayments to IPPs on the grounds that the contracts were granted at a time when electricity prices were much higher, which ignores the standard practice of tying contracts to prices at the time of sale. Certainly that would make matters riskier but that’s the name of the game in business.
Then Palmer attacks us skeptics by making the case that we will welcome these IPPs when we are short of energy, which Palmer sees in the immediate future. This is not so as Economist Erik Andersen has demonstrated. (You would see more of Andersen’s work if the Fraser Institute’s house organ, The Sun, would publish his work).
Mr. Andersen recently wrote in a letter intended for The Sun, but unpublished thus far, “When one sees value in a deliberately created surplus of anything costly, it can only be from ignorance of need. For decades, BC Hydro has an unbroken record of estimating provincial demand well in excess of recorded demand. The BCUC (BC Utilities Commission) recognized this several times in the last century but BC Hydro keeps coming back.”
Palmer also ignores the huge debt to IPPs by reason of these shameful overpriced contracts, which stand at over $50 BILLION and rising. It doesn’t seem to bother “Poodle Palmer” that if in the private sector BC Hydro would be in bankruptcy protection at best and that as of now BC residents owe about $16,000 per man, woman and child because of Hydro’s massive $70 BILLION in debt and contractual obligations.
Naturally, Palmer ignores the huge environmental cost of these projects; moreover, he neglects to mention that the IPPs are mostly out-of-province and out of Canada companies who – and these dots connect – take all the profits straight out of the pockets of ratepayers who will be dinged with ever-increasing rates to cover the costs of these government-cosseted corporate leeches.
The lead headline in The Sun of February 6 leads into a report that the federal government is ill-prepared for a tanker spill and talks about such a thing as “unlikely” – even though the Department of the Environment, scarcely made up of tree-huggers, assert that spills are a certainty.
That’s two certainties – a spill is certain and there is no way it can be cleaned up.
In Ancient times, Cato the Elder ended every speech to the Roman Senate, whatever the subject, with “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed”.) Eventually the Senate got the idea and Carthage was destroyed.
We must imitate Cato and wherever appropriate pronounce the essential truth about oil spills from pipelines or tankers: NOT IF BUT WHEN!
Twenty-five years ago, after consensus on the reality and impacts of manmade climate change led to the formation of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, western governments had two choices. They could either stop subsidising fossil fuel industries and invest the savings in promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy (e.g. putting solar panels on all public buildings to bring the price down for homeowners) or they could make long, lingering love to Fido.
They chose the latter and now, a quarter of a century later, we are being told by these same governments that our best hope of averting the worst consequences of climate change is to embrace nuclear power.
“Look,” they say, “no carbon dioxide emissions! Isn’t that great?” Well, no, it isn’t. It’s a bit like being told your only two choices are being beaten to a pulp tomorrow or being beaten to a pulp in ten years.
Assume for a moment that it is possible to guarantee there will never be another Chernobyl or Fukushima (and that’s a very large and problematic assumption), you can never produce nuclear energy without producing nuclear waste. This waste – leftover plutonium and uranium, as well as various isotopes – can remain lethally radioactive for an unimaginably long time.
The speed with which radioactivity decreases is measured by its half-life (the time it takes for half the radioactivity to decay). Picking just a few of the isotopes in nuclear waste, the half-life of Strontium-90 is 28 years and the half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,000 years, while the half-life for Caesium-135 is 2.3 million years and for Iondine-129 is 15.7 million years.
Half a century after realizing quite how dangerous nuclear waste is, there is still no safe way to dispose of it – nor is there ever likely to be.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some ill-conceived suggestions, including dumping it in the oceans and blasting it into space. (In the aftermath of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, my father-in-law – a renowned nuclear physicist – commented that the tragedy should at least serve as a warning against the latter proposal. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Apparently it might be a good idea to put nuclear waste in orbit around Venus– in case we ever want to retrieve it. I kid you not.)
The waste problem is very bad news for the nuclear energy industry and, like many other industries in the past, it has decided the best thing to do with bad news is to bury it.
As Anna Tilman reports in the current issue of Watershed Sentinel, proponents of nuclear power (both industry and government) have decided that Deep Geological Repositories (DGRs) are the “final solution” to the problem of nuclear waste.
The theory behind DGRs is that nuclear waste can be safely stored “forever” deep underground in geologically stable areas.
The reality, as Tilman points out, is that “nothing is immutable, not even rocks. Containers will eventually corrode. Cracks and fissures will develop. Groundwater will seep in. Water and gas contaminated with radionuclides will penetrate the barriers. Chemical and microbial processes and interactions will occur, with unpredictable results. Climate change, glaciations and earthquakes could severely destabilise the repository.”
Ignoring Geology 101, governments (including Canada’s) have been pushing hard for many years to establish DGRs. So far, none have succeeded, although one is currently under construction in Finland. (A documentary about this project, Into Eternity, eloquently makes the case for why this is a bad idea. It should be required viewing for all government leaders.)
Finding an “informed and willing host community” is, not surprisingly, a challenge for Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (a federal agency established in 2002 and run by the nuclear industry), despite the fundamentally flawed consultation process Tilman describes in her article.
We’ve created this disaster and, of course, we have to deal with it. (Personally, I would establish secure, monitored, above ground storage facilities paid for by and located in the backyards of every nuclear power industry executive and government supporter.)
What we absolutely, positively do not have to do is add to the problem.
Every year, each of the more than 400 nuclear reactors currently operating in 31 countries adds an average of 30 tonnes to the total volume of nuclear waste.
This is the sign the IAEA thinks will protect thousands of future generations from the dangers of nuclear waste:
This is the sign I think will best protect them:
Read Anna Tilman’s article “Nuclear Fuel Waste in Canada” here.
