4 - Wednesday, March 24, 1993 — North Shore News

PVE STILL got my home
in British Columbia, thank ,
God, which is being rented
oul at the moment, and
which is heated by natural
pas.

It’s an old house, pathetically
insulated, with lots of huge West
Coast-style single pane windows
that are thermal disaster zones,

The house our family is occupy-

ing in Torento is half the s

It's heated by natural gas, toa.
It's newer, insulated like a
bunker, with tiny, double-paned
windows. And, granted, the
climate is the pits.

But comparing hydro bills trom
the two houses tells my everything
I need to know about why On-
tario Hydro chairman Maurice
Strong lowered the byom fast
week, axing 6,000 jobs and refus-
ing to pour any more money! into
patching up a wonky old nuclear
generating station out on the
Bruce Peninsula on the edge of
Lake Huron.

My hydro bills in Ontario are
double what they are in B.C.

They've gon? up in the frozen
East nearly 30% in the last three
years. In B.C., they haven’y

, Changed in seven years, as far as |
can tell,

What’s going on? Well, nuclear
power is what's going on, And
going wrong.

Tt turns out that all the rosy
projections by the empire-builders
at Ontario Hydro over the years

e gia

were so vrassiy out of whack that
in any other institutions except a

Crown corporation, the planners

and accountants would have been
fired en masse a long time ago.

Atthe very least they should be
rounded up and forced to shovel
snow until the greenhouse effect
kicks in.

Every anti-nuke activist in the
province is burping up a steady
stream of {-told-you-so’s.

It may have seemed for years —
nay, decades — that the anti-
nukers were jabbering about
airy-fairy stuff like ecotogy and
health and safety while the ‘‘real-
ists’? with the iron rings were
dealing with the nuts-and-bolts
stulf: cash flows, peak periods,
pressure tubes and Triple-A credit
ratings.

Lo and behold! [It turns out the
reason the gargantuan utility,
which has become Canada’s larg-
est contruction company, is mired
in a swamp of brokerage alligators
is precisely because of the hippy-
dip stuff — ecology, health and
safety.

Why are costs out of control at
Ontaric Hydro? Simple! The
vaunted Candu reactors don't
work anywhere near as efficiently
over the long haul as the cocky
engineers claimed they would.

Like utility critic Ton) Adains
says, “You can play make-believe
for a while, pretend the costs
aren't going to be there, but in-
evitably the costs come to get
you.””

The 15-year-old Bruce “A"
generating station is the prime,
horrendous example. It was sup-
posed to provide inexpensive and
reliable power for at least 40
years,

In the carly years, it posted the
best operations records in the
world, La-di-da,

Nawadays, (he power praduc-
tion of the station's four reactors
has sunk to hardly more than half
their capacity, due to Caging’*
that wasn't supposed to happen
until well into the next century,

Last week, engineers admitted
they've had to crank the reactors
down to 60% of capacity because
if there was an accident they
won't be able to shut them off in
time. :

That's pretty scary stuff. The

Retirement living as it should be.

For informution please call 922-7616

HOLLYBURN
HOUSE

2095 Marine Dr, Wese Vancouver

bright picture painted by the
scientists, cnginyers and bureau.
crats of the future of “the peace-
ful atom" has proven to be a ra-
digactive portrait af Dorian Gray.

To their credit, the honchos at
Ontario Hydro have not had a
runaway nuke yet, although it was
touch-und-go once at the Picker-
ing station, just seven miles from
where [I'm living at (he moment.

And the reason is that safety
regulations are indeed stringent.
Moreover, the standards keep be-
ing modified to cope with all
those nasty little surprises the
complex nukes keep springing.

The effort to maintain safety
standards at ever-wonkier basket-
ease nukes has soared. To replace
a widget installed a dozen yeurs
ago costs astronomically more to-
day than it did then.

The die-hards at Ontario Hydro
still insist that a $3-billion rebuild
would be enough to result in the
Bruce station's technological

promise being fulfilled.

But, with their track record, its
no surprise that Mr. Strong opted
not to add to his crippled utility's
$34 billion debt load this time
around, thanks,

Believe it: it's the cost of adver-
ting a disaster that lies at the root
of Ontario's disastrous Hydro rate
inereases.

And the real fiscal nightmare
lies ahead.

Lam referring to the day when
Ontario Hydro’s customers will
have to start to pay for the
decommissioning of the plants and
the disposal — somehow — of the
15,000 tonnes of spent uranium
fuel that has already accumulated
in waste piles, and which is being
added to at the rate of 2,000 ton-
nes every year,

Hydro estimates (and this from
the brainy guys who calculated the
$i4.6-und-rising-billion Darl-
ington station would cost a mere
$3.9 billion to build) that decom-

missioning and disposal will cost
$12 billion.

Wanna bet? U say $50 billion —
at least. And that's probably op-
timistic, given that the means of
disposal hasn't even been figured
out yet.

Ah well, the waste from On-
tario Hydro’s nuclear plants won't
be a problem after 10,000 years,
or, as the Canadian Nuclear
Association so soothingly puts it,
“mast of the highly penetrating
radiation will be gone in 500
years.”’

That's the good news.

It’s the only good news, Unless,
of course, you get pleasure out of
saying t-told-you-so. And as
somebody who was warning as far
back us the late 1960s that the
Candu reactor was vastly over-
rated, well, ahem. { told you so.
Smile. Be glad you're not in On-
tario,

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