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Rustad Wants Nuclear Power for BC. We Don’t Need It

The BC Conservatives’ energy policies are based on some wrong assumptions.

Crawford Kilian 12 Oct 2024The Tyee

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

The Conservative Party of BC has published its election platform, and it gives the game away with its use of “common sense” as a slogan. Common Sense was also the title of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary 18-century pamphlet, but now it generally means “misinformation that makes me comfortable.”

This is especially true of the party’s energy policies, posted on Oct. 1 by Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad himself. Much of it sounds sensible, but the policies’ premises are that our energy demand will increase indefinitely, so our energy production must grow to match the demand. That’s a very widespread and very misguided belief, and it’s precisely what has brought us heat domes and atmospheric rivers, droughts and wildfires, floods and landslides.

“Eby’s government,” Rustad writes, “is imposing radical, top-down restrictions on the types of technology that people need to power their daily lives. At the same time, they are failing to invest in the new generating capacity required to meet their own goals.”

Terms like “radical, top-down restrictions” echo the anti-vaccination rhetoric of the early pandemic, and we’ll hear more echoes later in this piece.

Rustad is framing energy policy as dependent on “types of technology,” particularly the kinds “that people need to power their daily lives.”

And that policy should deliver “clean, affordable, and homegrown power,” as tasty as apple pie from Mom’s own orchard.

Well, the BC NDP government’s document “Powering Our Future: BC’s Clean Energy Strategy” does estimate that demand for electricity could double by 2050. It expects BC Hydro to prepare for that demand by spending $35 billion in the next 10 years to build out the electricity grid, reduce emissions and connect new customers.

The government also plans to become more efficient in using electricity, “decarbonized” natural gas and hydrogen.

Efficiency, it argues, also involves exporting and importing energy to keep costs low; “homegrown” energy can be expensive, or simply wasted.

The nuclear option

Rustad doesn’t deny or reject anything in the government’s report, and in his policy he promises to “accelerate” BC Hydro’s 10-year plan. And he raises one option unmentioned by the BC NDP: nuclear power, particularly small modular reactors.

It was the BC Liberals, including John Rustad, who in 2010 passed the “radical, top-down restrictions” in the Clean Energy Act that prohibited nuclear power.

Victoria journalist Shannon Waters provides useful background on this issue. She points out that small modular reactors are still an unproven technology and seem likely to cost far more than solar and wind — assuming such reactors ever go online at all.

In his policy statement, Rustad hedges his bets: review “seismic hazards” so reactors aren’t built on unstable ground, join the Small Modular Reaction Action Plan and “commit to having a small modular reactor operating by 2035 — if and only if the business case makes sense, seismic safety is addressed, and the idea has the confidence of the public.”

Burning more cash than uranium

The business case for small modular reactors has already been disproven, as the Utah SMR NuScale Power project demonstrated when it shut down in November 2023. Originally estimated to cost US$3 billion and to be running in 2023, the project ran into trouble.

UBC professor M.V. Ramana describes it this way:

“The estimated costs of the project rose to $4.2 billion in 2018, then $6.1 billion in 2020, and finally $9.3 billion in 2023, after it was scaled down to 462 MW in 2021,” wrote Ramana, the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at UBC. “In the end, the costs were clearly too high for [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] members to bear.”

Small modular reactors, in other words, would be much like the TMX pipeline expansion and Site C dam — energy techno-fixes whose costs would price them out of any rational market.

Both Rustad’s policy and the BC NDP government’s “Powering Our Future” report agree on the “common sense” basics: demand for energy is growing, it must be clean energy and we are on our way to meeting most of that demand. But they both ignore the climate change that will make energy far more expensive than it is now.

B.C. is already in a serious drought that could affect power production from hydro, fracking and oil and gas production, as well as from hypothetical nuclear reactors. Drought can also force the shutdown of functioning power grids when conditions are ripe for wildfires.

And drought or not, we still get occasional catastrophic storms and floods. The atmospheric river of November 2021 here in B.C., and the impact of Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S. are just two examples of disasters that can rip power grids to shreds.

Floodproofing a small modular reactor would only add to its cost, just as quakeproofing it would. Even if we managed all that, we’d still have radioactive waste that would require safe storage for tens of thousands of years.

A literal power struggle

Let’s also bear in mind that our future energy demand won’t just be to charge our electric vehicles and smartphones. Bitcoin mining is currently estimated to consume two per cent of yearly U.S. electricity production.

Data centres used about two per cent of global electricity consumption in 2022, but the International Energy Agency predicts a doubling of demand by 2026. By then, data centres could be consuming as much electricity as Germany.

B.C., with all its clean, renewable energy, will be under pressure to provide a substantial share of it to run such data centres and bitcoin mines.

If Microsoft is ready to bring the Three Mile Island reactor back online to power its data centres, we might find that to get the best out of our AI-enhanced phones, we will have to dam the Fraser River — assuming that future winter snowpacks are heavy enough to keep the Fraser flowing at all.

It could well be that we will compete with ourselves for electricity during climate disasters.

In July 2023, drought-stricken B.C. produced little electricity despite intense demand for it. In a future hot summer, data centres could keep cool while people are sweltering, scrambling to access air conditioning.

We will also find that much of our energy must be dedicated to climate-proofing communities and their infrastructure, as well as repairing the damage caused by climate disasters. Restoring power to, say, a wildfire-scourged Prince George might require rolling blackouts in Vancouver or Kelowna.

The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Surprisingly, the Canadian Centre for Energy Information reports that “Residential energy use [in Canada] increased three per cent since 2000 but would have increased by 35 per cent without energy efficiency improvements.”

It also notes that “Per capita energy consumption was 12 per cent lower in 2020 than in 2000.”

Avoiding the Jevons paradox

So efficiencies could help us live better while consuming less electricity. We might find that fracking and liquid natural gas production demand more energy, and emit more carbon dioxide, than they are worth. (Exported LNG has recently been found to cause worse CO2 emissions than coal.)

But we’d also have to avoid the Jevons paradox, which predicts that efficiency in using a finite resource only increases the demand for it.

An ever-rising standard of living under the Rustad Conservatives means ever-rising demand for electricity — and for fossil fuels too, since Rustad wants to continue with natural-gas heating and “non-electric vehicles.” Never mind the fossil-fuel air pollution that kills eight million people a year, or the excess mortality and poverty caused by climate disasters.

In a line that sounds eerily similar to how anti-vaxxers justify their choices, Rustad says “people should get to choose what technology works best for them.”

It’s understandable that many people don’t want to face the implications of global heating, even when disasters like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton deliver a one-two punch.

All our lives we’ve been taught to get as rich as possible, “rich” being defined as “having personal access to ever more energy.”

We’ve accepted that idea as common sense and judged our own personal worth and success by it.

But common sense is bringing the sky down on our heads. We will need some very uncommon sense to give our grandchildren a fighting chance to survive on a burning planet.


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