The time is approaching when the provincial government will have to decide whether to proceed with the renovation of Quebec’s lone nuclear-power generating station or take the thing down.
Appearances have been that the Charest government, spurred on by Hydro-Québec, was leaning toward refurbishment. But the vacillating over committing one way or the other has prevailed for going on four years. In light of mounting cost projections and more recent turns in thinking about nuclear-power generation, dismantlement is starting to look like the preferable option.
The facility is Gentilly 2, situated at Bécancour on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River across from Trois-Rivières. It produces only three per cent of the province’s electrical output, but owner-operator Hydro maintains it contributes vital diversity to the province’s energy supply that is derived for the most part from hydraulic generating stations.
Brought onstream in 1983, the station has surpassed the quarter-century productive cycle that is standard for nuclear power plants, at the end of which they must be refitted. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has decreed that the plant must shut down by the end of this year, either for refurbishment or dismantling.
Environmental activists have railed against the plant as a major safety risk from the time it was conceived and have stepped up their attacks as the deadline for deciding its future nears. The disabling of the Fukushima nuclear power facility in Japan by last year’s killer tsunami has lent their warnings added heft and urgency.
But if safety were the paramount consideration in this case, the refurbishment should proceed. Despite decades of dire warnings that catastrophe is imminent, the plant has operated safely. There have been malfunctions, but these have been routinely detected and safely dealt with. No one has been killed by Gentilly 2 and no maladies in the surrounding population have been reliably traced to it.
It is true that it is located on a seismic fault line in an area susceptible to earthquakes. But this was taken into consideration in the facility’s design, and seismological authorities persuasively attest that neither an earthquake on the scale that hit Japan could happen here, nor even less a tsunami, which is what caused the direct damage at Fukushima.
What should give the government pause is the seemingly escalating enormity of the potential cost of refurbishment. Four years ago it was estimated at $1.5 billion, but a recent media report now pegs it at $3 billion.
The new figure was neither confirmed nor denied by Hydro-Québec, but it is noteworthy that the decision on Gentilly 2 has been delayed because the government wanted to see how the refit of New Brunswick’s nuclear plant at Point Lepreau would work out. That project is now three years overdue and its projected cost has also ballooned far over the original estimate.
If indeed the government is taking its cue from the New Brunswick project, it should consider the tremendous saving it could achieve by opting for dismantlement. For this the cost would be $1.6 billion, just over half the new projection for refurbishment.
The saving could be invested over the years in promoting new economic activity in the area to compensate for the 750 jobs that would be lost with the plant’s closure, as well as the development of alternative energy production, including renewables, in conjunction with the government’s Plan Nord.
Governments in various parts of the world have been pulling back from nuclear-power production in the wake of Fukushima, and not only because of the environmental risk. The cost of building nuclear plants is astronomical and so is that of the refits that they inevitably need.
The so-called nuclear renaissance touted by many in the past decade has lagged as the dangers and costs of nuclear plants seem more clearly to outweigh any benefit from the fact that they emit insignificant amounts of greenhouse gas.
The authoritative business journal The Economist recently compiled a special report on the state of the global nuclear-power industry. Its conclusion was summarized in its title: “The dream that failed.” It found that while nuclear generation will persist, it is mainly attractive to countries without other indigenous energy resources.
This is certainly not the case in Quebec, with its vast hydro potential that is being developed ever further. In light of the cost involved in refurbishment, and the availability of cheaper and assuredly safer alternatives, keeping Gentilly 2 in operation is likely not worth the candle.