Harper's ISO-dope

... may lead him In Search Of - India:
http://www.oci-aic.org/index.asp?pid=5&spid=view&linkid=58

Is he thinking of outsourcing Raitt's 'sexy' medical files; flushing more taxpayer investments to follow the gun registry ?

Shhhh!

The nuclear sell-off started under the Liberal government. Do some research and take a look at some of the senior people who were appointed, running the company under the previous government.

If you send an email to Jeremy Whitlock from his Canadian Nuclear website .... they all get sent to AECL, even though is site claims it is 'an unofficial and privately-maintained list..." He must work for AECL!

Regan's view is also pre-determined....

Especially if he has the presumption that the industry should continue.

"the Liberals are "open" to various possibilities, so long as they enhance and promote the industry in Canada."

Why should it continue? Why should we continue to fund the industry when it will add to a waste legacy already at $500 Million per year?

Why should we taxpayers fund an industry which is by definition regional? There's need for nuclear energy in BC, Manitoba or Quebec.

If the liberals are so open, why are the un-open to abandoning nuclear?

Yes, the Liberals began the selloffs........

.....because they are more "Red Tories" than they are Libs.

And both parties are stocked full of hypocrites - the Libs because they are closet privatizationers, and the Cons because they are the ones who are adamantly against deficit spending but jumped on that bandwagon right quick.

AECL

AECL has been sucking tax dollars since day one. CANDU reactors were only marginally successful, in both sales and development. The "national" crown corporation has sunk money entirely into Ontario and New Brunswick, just WHAT is "national" about that bottomless financial pit?
YES, we need ongoing research and development of nuclear power generation, mostly because it has far more potential for success than the airy, fairy enviros proposals of windmills and solar panels. Nuke generation IS proven and practical. But, flitting about the globe flogging reactors? How about letting private carpetbaggers do that?

If I'm not mistaken

The last time there was a serious effort to sell reactor technology in the 60's, the customers(India, Pakistan, and a few others decided to take the technology and then reneged on paying for it leaving the Canadian taxpayers to pay the bill. We gave them the technology and lent them the money to pay for it and then our government forgave the loans. Are we going to help other countries build nuclear weapons, yikes?

Reactors 4 sale by Fed Gov

Is everything 4 sale in Canada. Disgusting bunch of politicians at all levels of Gov in Canada. Come on baby boomers run for fed gov and rule all Canada.
Get rid of these incompetent people who can't run a job creation program let alone an across canada government.

Just callin it like it is. Comments.

No Nukes Neocons

AECL problem's stem from Harpo - 100% owned by Big Oil. Big Oil knows AECL could with mass produced nuclear power, put them out of business easily in ten years and have Harper on task using the time tested Neocon tactics to destroy government institutions. Read Thomas Franks - The Wrecking Crew for details. Harpo sure has. The technique used here is to target the Crown Corporation with budget cuts then when fuckups happen trot out the usual privatization government bad/inefficient hooey.

One Neocon excuse will be the Maple reactor - works just fine. The problem is that with a tiny positive temperature coefficient (predicted as possible right from the earliest design), a meltdown is slightly more probable than two giant asteroids striking Ottawa on Christmas day two hours apart. For that reason the reactor has multiple redundant safety systems - more than a normal reactor. The NRC reactor - things break we try to fix them with no money. They break again - What's new. This crap is just politics.

Another Neocon talking point will be the current overbudget delayed refurb idea. A nice theory that like the Canada line was harder to do in practice - like trying to replace bad capacitors on a computer motherboard instead of replacing the motherboard. Cheaper to put in a new reactor core but a still a hell of a lot cheaper than coal or renewables.

The last 10 or so new Candu 6 builds all overseas were on time on budget.(pre Harpo and the Neocons). That gives AECL the modern record in nuclear construction for all worldwide nuclear manufacturers.

The cost of power from those old Candu's is a lot less than the cost of generating power with coal or gas. People in Ontario see that enormous saving every time you pay your power bill – a reverse subsidy.

Tens thousands of Ontario Quebec and New York Ohio and Michigan residents are alive now who would have been dead from coal fumes if it hadn't been for the Candu. Which family member or friend would you critics of Ontario's nuclear past put in a coffin to make your point. How about Alberta and Saskatchewan - the tens of thousand of them sick, dying and dead because they chose the cheap then, expensive now and always dirty coal option.

You Greenies love to kill people - from millions in Iraq since Green leader Nader elected Bush to hundreds of millions of people sickened dead and dying worldwide since you managed to shut down nuclear 30 years ago and replace it with coal. Your support for utterly ineffective and extremely costly renewables and outright ignorance on nuclear will kill billions when you force us over the as little as TEN years down the road climate/peak oil precipice.

A worldwide build of 10000 reactors would be paid for by and would end fossil fuel use. A $150 billion investment in mass produced AECL nukes paid for by and would end Canada's $100 billion annual fossil use creating an incredible market opportunity for our nuclear power industry.

What logic Seth!

Wonderful logic, Peak oil and Acid rain are the fault of Greenies for failing to litter the planet with reactors.

As for a WW build of 10,000 reactors, are you sure enough fuel exists? Exactly how much fuel is that, and where does it come from? Maybe we can get it enriched in the 3rd world for pennies on the dollar. Or maybe a centrifuge cascade in your backyard?

It starts with YOU

Not to contradict the sentiment, but we here in BC actually produced parts for the CANDU projects.
It called for extremely close tolerances and just maybe we had the machinery and skilled people to do that?

The best way to save the environment is to use less and stop wasting! But that seem too much to ask!

Does that seem to much to ask?

Useless and stop wasting???

Money makes the world go round. Is that why the credit crunch hurt so much? All bite and no bark. But taking it to the limits that has got to hurt.

Make-less and stop spending beyond your means.

What do economist say is going to bring the world economy out of the recession?

Its spending and massive credit and making useless nicknack's to sell and over priced homes for people to buy and renovate. As 15 thousand dollar shower heads are installed as little fixer uppers. Or flat-screen TVs that use 6 to 10 times the energy to operate and a must have in every home. But its going to take more than televisions that use less energy to make a real difference it is going to take a whole new programming of societies for a start.

Seth

may be exaggerating the details for effect's sake, but he is essentially correct in his basic assumptions. Nuclear is the only solution to the world's problems, all of which arise from mankind's quest for power. Solar and wind can be temporary stopgaps, replacing fossil fuel initially but giving way to nuclear ultimately.

Unfortunately, he's absolutely right about using less and stopping waste - it is too much to ask. We are simian in nature, i.e., dirty slobs, and we like it that way too much to ever change.

AECL has to go

As an engineer who has made a career addressing the shortcomings of the CANDU reactor I can attest to what an unreliable and overly complexpiece of sh*t it is and why AECL has to go.

One might think that a Federal crown corporation might see its role as helping to foster the development of private interests in the Canadian nuclear industry. Not so. AECL uses its dominant position in the industry to ruthlessly suppress competition and actively poach talent from competing organizations. Rather than embrace a culture of continuous improvement of the design, they vigorously resist acknowledgement of design shortcomings for fear that this will open them up to warranty claims in the future. They have had to perform a lot of maintenance on warranty for their overseas customers that domestic utilities have had to pay for. They gouge their customers on price. While there is genuine integrity and a desire to please customers at the working level, they are constrained by the commercial side of the business, who see it as their role to ensure that the highest possible price is exacted for any "service" provided. I have been present at meetings where AECL engineering staff have suggested suppression of reports that cast doubt on the long term serviceability of certain materials and components, and subsequently accept a multi-million dollar contract from a customer to develop tooling to perform maintenance on the same component, knowing full well that they had no technical case for saying that the tool wouldn't damage the component if used. I have known them to threaten suppliers with loss of contracts if they bid on certain offshore projects.

AECL's latest product, the Advanced CANDU Reactor, or ACR, is an abomination that has cost taxpayers upwards of $1B so far to design. Most of us think it will never work, and if it does, it will require at least as much ongoing technical support as the current generation. Even AECL's management is starting to realize that the ACR has been a mistake and are starting to push the "enhanced CANDU 6" as their primary offering. Better the devil we know. Better yet, a PWR.

AECL has a culture of believing their own propaganda. It is a rotten organization selling a second-rate product, running up liabilities for the taxpayer at the rate of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and it gets in the way of other organizations that could do the job faster, better and cheaper.

Get rid of it. The sooner the better. The talent will be snapped up and utilized more effectively than it is now. The rest can go and join the heavy water plants. The CANDU design will likely survive with a small share of the international market, but the point is, the market will decide.

Sourcing Energy Throughout the Home

... as fission fizzles out, the solutions for the 21st century are already here:

http://www.netzeroenergyhome.ca/Files/files/NZEH_PR_June8%20p2.pdf

Seth

Don't give up, Seth. The very last thing the neocons and the so-called Greenies want to see is trustable information replacing the ideological and emotional hype which is used to somehow justify the lack of transparency.

It is interesting that the anti-nukers carefully ignore the clear thrust of the article, which is that decisions are being made for purely political reasons with the lack of transparency hiding those reasons.

Usual anti nuke claptrap

Nuclear waste and fuel issues are propaganda from Big Oil/Coal and astroturf organizations like Suzuki and Greenpeace.

Nuclear waste will be reused as reprocessed fuel in Candu's,or as fuel in generation four nukes. With modern efficient generation 3.5 reactors able to use reprocessed and thorium fuels, a huge eighty year current supply of natural uranium, thorium fuel five times as abundant as uranium. and orders of magnitude more efficient fast breeder reactors like Sandia and Toshiba new designs there is sufficient nuclear fission fuel to last hundreds of years.

India has already committed to 450 gigawatts and China to 120 of nukes. The US Senate GOP is holding out for a miniscule 100 gigawatts in the climate bill, but its a start.

If you think I'm exaggerating something Des let me know what. I can back it up.

We often hear from anti nuke types like Z-Man who claim to be engineers with all kinds of inside info they can never back up. Most of his complaints sound exactly like disgruntled employees in any large industrial organization.

Some of his statements are outright ludicrous. There is no competition for AECL in Canada, its main competitors are Toshiba GE and Areva. The AECL ACR-1000 product has many advantages over the competition and there is a huge market opening up.

The cost of nuclear power in Ontario is 3 cents a kwh less than coal or natural gas production. That includes all of Ontario's nuke costs including the 10 billion dollar Darlington fiasco which was 100% interest charges caused by the Ontario government delays

But you know what - like a lot of things in Canada it might fuck up and we can carry on selling off our resources to the much smarter Americans.

Some great selloff examples might be Gordo's purchase of $55B in run of the river power worth close to nothing, or our $2B utterly wasted by Harpo on CO2 sequestration. Better that than the "billion" in development on the ACR-1000 which potentially could give us a thousand times return or not - why take the risk. Arvo Arrow, Nortel, now AECL better to sell Oil, water, and wheat.

We can just buy the American reactor product and hope maybe they'll be nice enough to buy some cars from us in return.

"What if they held a war and nobody came?"

"What if they held a war and nobody came?" Ever see that bumper sticker?

Regarding Canada's vaunted CANDU technology, as someone who worked in the industry, I would rephrase the above statement to, "what if you had this great technology, but nobody wanted to buy it?"

This has been the dilemma for the sitting governments of Canada, regardless of political party: what to do with CANDU? Energy Probe in Toronto released the figure of $80 billion of cumulative investment since 1952. Based on numbers I saw from other sources, years ago, $80 Billion sounds right. And of course, as time marches on, the investment is even bigger. Do you want to be the party and the PM who killed CANDU? Diefenbaker will always be remembered for scrapping the Avro Arrow, that much-mythologized aircraft. But how much good money do you throw after bad money?

I’ll post more on this series when I have time to really read it and respond. I admit that I am not familiar with the 'recent' sales to China. Several of the projects I worked on, Lepreau and Wolsung, are now undergoing the extremely expensive re-tubing to extend the reactor’s life.

seth

On nuclear fuel reprocessing: French experience shows that for every cubic meter of high-level waste you reprocess, you create 1,000 cubic meters of low to medium-level radioactive waste. What is the cost and feasibility of dealing with that? After all, people are lining up to have nuclear waste repositories built in their neighbourhoods, are they not?

A few years back, I talked to a fellow who worked in planning at Ontario Hydro. He told me they used a levelized cost of $0.12 a KiloWatt-hour for nuclear-generated electricity for internal planning purposes. At the time, rates had been frozen at $0.046 in the wake of Ontario's electricity privatization debacle. Where do you get your figures of nuclear’s cost being lower than coal?

You're way off the mark to tout the ACR (Advanced CANDU Reactor). They've yet to build one and gain real-world operating experience. This is no different from the Glenn Clark-era NDP's fast ferry project.
1) get a bunch of eggheads and policy wonks in an airtight room. Suffering from anoxia, they convince themselves they can establish an industry selling fast ferries.
2) license someone’s design and modify it.
3) proclaim you have this great technology and industry and you are going to sell it to the world. This will create (union) jobs.
4) staff a sales office to sell globally, even though you have no experience in building or operating one. Since you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not offering financing for customers, either.
5) build three ferries and face horrendous cost overruns and delays.
6) finally operate the things and find out they are duds, expensive duds.
7) taxpayer gets stuck with bill. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

Don’t forget the Canadian Nuclear Liability Act, whereby the Government of Canada steps in after the small amount of insurance the private insurance industry offers runs out. This is a blatant subsidy. There is similar legislation in the USA and other countries.

Privatization Myth

Dave and Zee with their Neocon ideology forget that the private sector is now largely run by teams of ole boy's club attorneys specializing in making quarterly returns look large and bonuses huge. Political connections, campaign donations, and unstated but very real promises of post political board of director and consulting contracts keeps unaudited government business flowing and the regulators away. The engineers and entrepreneurs that used to run businesses are now back in the shop and are treated as a sometimes necessary expense. If an investment payback is more than a year - forget it. Nortel, GM, Chrysler. Lehman Bros. Goldman Sachs the list is endless.

The private sector can't compete with national governments when multibillion dollar investments are required in things like the space programs, Manhattan projects or the massive program required to save our asses from Big Oil and the climate crisis.

Energy Probe numbers generally are biased in the extreme where everything is included even the cost of an imagined nuclear war. Their figures are nonsense.

The fast ferries are a tiny burp compared to Pirate Power. $55 billion in signed contracts producing one and half old Candu's worth of baseload power, but so intermittent that is is practically worthless. Hundreds of sq miles of ruined forest and river, and could have been built by BC Hydro for half the cost instead of builds by companies of BCLiberal Party hacks in the legal business. The AECL experience building nukes in China would have produced 25 times the power of the Pirate operation for the same cost.

There are numerous Zee's in every big company - BCHydro, GM, Ford, Bell Canada could trot out a hundred Zee's with the same story. I'm sure that AECL could improve in many ways but unfortunately Harper with only Big Oil's interest at heart is really on a mission to destroy not improve it. Engineers like Zee assuming he's not just another Neocon ideologue with that discredited George Bush/Milton Freidman/Harpo free market scam would be important part of a management with big goals and money to invest.

AECL and the the rest of the world over the last 30 years suffered from the mindless political manipulations of the Greenie nitwits at organizations like Energy Probe who were so successful at replacing nuclear with Coal killing millions in the process. The current peak Oil/ Climate crisis is an unprecedented opportunity for nuclear power with 10000 new nuclear reactors required to save civilization and AECL despite its relatively minor problems is ideally positioned to take advantage.

We can dump AECL and go back to chopping down trees for a living passing the opportunity on to France, China, India, or the US or we can take advantage of our investment and take a shot at building AECL into the biggest industry Canada has ever seen.

wake up Z_man

What is clear to you, is what exists in your imagination. Do you even have a clue about energy issues? Are you even aware of Ontario's energy plan?

There is certainly a lot of controversy about the ACANDU design, for & against. There are actual Nuclear Engineers who believe the ACANDU is a good, competitive GenIII design, that can be produced for $1,500 per kw, vs your alternative intermittent, unreliable wind that requires mostly NG as complementary power, at $12,000 per kw. And there is a whole lot more criticism about the latest Areva design - the EPR, which is not going so well in its 1st build in Finland. It is drastically over-engineered to appease anti-nuclear paid-by-coal pseudo-environmentalists.

Ontario's new Energy subsidy program will cost a minimum of $80k per avg delivered kw for their Solar Power scam. You can buy the latest - most highest tech machine ever built - the Virginia Class Nuclear submarine - for $2B with a 50 MW nuclear reactor with 33 yrs refuel cycle. 5 yr build time - start to finish. That's $40k per kw, 1/2 the price for Ontario's Solar power program, and delivers reliable power 24/7 rain or shine.

There are lot of people here, who think this Oil fueled paradise we have lived in for the past 100 yrs, with typical raw energy costs of ½ cent per kwh, will just continue into the future, by wishing and hoping, and not doing anything except investing in Wind at 13 cents per kwh for intermittent, unreliable power, or Solar at >40 cents per kwh. Fools, you have NO IDEA what is coming down the pipe. Latest, and most reliable news coming down the pipe is World Oil production Peaked at 74.7 MBD on July 8. And it’s going down fast, while non-OECD demand continues to rise, dramatically in spite of the recession. See:

http://www.theoildrum.com/files/ccst20091119.png

While both the EIA and IEA have been caught trying to falsify data to make the coming Oil Crash catastrophe less imminent, to avoid causing a panic speculative price explosion in Oil. We need to move, and we need to move fast on the only alternative to fossil fuels, that is Nuclear.

And that means build all promising designs, with an all-out crash program, at least one commercial reactor of each type, prove out which is most cost effective, and which can be built with the fasted speed. This is Urgent – OR MILLIONS WILL DIE!

Personally, I think Canada should develop the LIFTR, and we have a great Nuclear Engineer proponent, David Leblanc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So

"And that means build all

"And that means build all promising designs, with an all-out crash program, at least one commercial reactor of each type, prove out which is most cost effective, and which can be built with the fasted speed. This is Urgent – OR MILLIONS WILL DIE!"

Wow, a quasi-religious argument to shift from an oil-fueled paradise to a nuclear fueled paradise.

Seth's and your argument that the prodigous and conspicuous consumption should continue is simple bunk.

Reduction and Conservation and is the only solution. And the coming catastrophe will ensure it happens, since the choice is one we won't make ourselves.

Another Punish the Bad Western Consumer Greenie

"...Wow, a quasi-religious argument to shift from an oil-fueled paradise to a nuclear fueled paradise..."

Quasi-Religious?!? So that's how France swapped out Oil and Coal for Nuclear in 20 yrs, with a modest build, using a run-of-the-mill US design, modified it and standardized it. Electrify their transportation sector, build a few more Nuclear plants, maybe add some Nuclear CHP and some small Hyperion type reactors and JOB DONE! Duh.

It is you who ain't just religious, you sound like a fire-and-brimstone, hell-and-damnation religious Nutjob. Punish those nasty over-consuming Western Middle Class - Make them Suffer - ".. ensure it happens.."

Reduction and Conservation? By Far most of the new Energy Growth will be in Developing Nations. Many people have no schools, transportation infrastructure, refrigerators, food to eat. Now how are they going to manage to reduce? Get Real, dude.

YCSTS

Ya just shot yourself in the foot. The "many people" who don't have anything, will continue not to have anything with energy growth anyway. They are a non-factor.

RickW - you need to think before beaking off!

Then how is there energy consumption growing rapidly?

See The Oil Drum, Oil consumption in OECD countries (like Europe, USA, Canada) has now peaked. Rising sharply in China, India, Other Asia, Middle East, Latin America etc.

http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/5990#more

Seth - your comments

Anyone who knows me would laugh at your labeling me a neo-con. I think we need a variety of solutions, whereas Government and industry and the business community like to find singular solutions. If someone had offered a safe and reasonably-priced electric commuter car, I would have bought it years ago. No such car exists, although some are finally coming to market as we speak.

As for CANDU, I think it is:
>mythologized (no objectivity)
>over-rated
>expensive
>overly-complicated
>low temperature (not suitable for significant industrial process heat like cracking tar sands)

Don't forget the years of Parliamentary Special Appropriations for nuclear waste disposal research to AECL in the 1980s to the tune of more than $200 million per year. AECL treated this money as INCOME in their books, leading to the bizarre fact that Statistics Canada considered AECL one of the top ten private R & D performers in Canada. They did not earn that money from sales of products, it was a gift from Canada, and their dishonest accounting treated it as income.

I've yet to hear of any detailed plan for a waste storage facility coming out of this several biullion dollars worth of research. What gives???

The other part of the CANDU equation that no one has addressed here is Eldorado Nuclear, who produces and stores heavy water. All through the 1980s, Eldorado got Parliamentary Special Appropriations on the order of $275 million per year just to store surplus heavy water that was produced for the expected boom on CANDU sales that never happened. There is more to nuclear energy in Canada than AECL.

YCSTS

First you say that the poor in the developing world contribute nothing to GHG emissions because they are poor and cannot make use of the energy extant.
Then you say it is the poor who are benefitting from the massive increases in developing nations' energy sources. So what has happened to the local economies that has made the poor not so poor? Or are you advocating COMMUNISM, where the energy increases are GIVEN to the poor?

Talk about "beaking off". You should climb out from under those stats you so love to wield, and look at what's happening on the ground. The poor in the developing nations are still poor -- and are growing poorer. They are in fact becoming LESS relevant (if you all ready think they are irrelevant to the emissions of GHG).

And what makes you think that taking our proverbial eggs from the basket that is the oil industry, and placing them in the basket that is nuclear, will bring nirvanna to the world at large?

No, "my friend", regardless of the solution to energy requirements and consumption, what is needed is diversification, not merely switching one millstone for another. In other words, all of the above, which you so seem to despise and that have been brought forward by other posters is what is really needed.