THUNDER BAY — Canada has better options than nuclear power in the country’s quest to reduce carbon emissions, says a professor in York University’s faculty of environmental and urban change.
“I think we’ve got lots of options in terms of what sort of pathways to decarbonization we take – within which an expansion of nuclear, I would argue, is an option of absolute last resort,” Mark Winfield said in an interview before speaking to an Environment North meeting in Thunder Bay.
His remarks came just hours before the launch of an online and in-person vote in Ignace on whether the Northwestern Ontario township should “continue participating in the process” of site selection for an underground nuclear waste repository.
The vote, open to Ignace residents and property owners aged 16 and over, will continue until Tuesday night.
Nuclear power plants’ low carbon emissions has long been a talking point for the industry.
At the Northwest Nuclear Exploration Event earlier this month in Ignace, University of Calgary physicist Jason Donev told Dougall Media he’s “passionate about” the proposed waste repository “because I’m very worried about climate change.”
“I am very worried that we are making a lot of CO2 (carbon dioxide) and putting it into the atmosphere,” Donev said.
“And nuclear power is one of the really, really important technologies that reduces the amount of CO2 we emit,” he added.
Donev said he teaches about solar and other renewable power technologies, “but the technology that we’re not using nearly as much as we could is nuclear.”
Winfield, on the other hand, said Thursday there are “lower-risk, lower-cost, more flexible options” that should be pursued “before we double down on nuclear.”
“There’s a whole series of challenges, of which the waste question is one, to which we don’t have an answer,” he said.
Winfield said nuclear power is creating “an unmanageable waste stream” at all phases from uranium mining to the spent fuel after power plants’ use.
“You can’t solve the climate problem by creating other problems that you pass on to future generations, in the case of nuclear waste,” he said.
“We’re in the midst of a series of converging technological revolutions around energy storage, smart grids and renewables which are simply overtaking this technology, which is an old technology,” Winfield said.
In his Environment North presentation, he said nuclear power’s “upsides” include low greenhouse gas emissions and the “low geopolitical risk” that comes with Canada having a domestic fuel source.
The negatives he listed include the environmental impacts of mine tailings, high capital costs and the risk of “significant extreme events” like the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant and thousands died.
The industry-funded Nuclear Waste Management Organization is proposing to build a deep geological repository similar to one recently completed in Finland.
A location south of Highway 17 between Ignace and Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation is one of two finalists for siting the repository, which would be constructed hundreds of metres below ground by about 2034.
The other site finalist is in the South Bruce area of southwestern Ontario, on Saugeen Ojibway Nation’s traditional territory.
The nuclear organization has said it will finalize site selection by year-end.
