Peace River Nuclear Plant Debate

[karrie]

PEACE RIVER, Alta. — Dan and Huguette Ropchan stand on the grainy edge of ice-crusted Lac Cardinal in northwest Alberta and worry that in a decade they’ll have to raise their wheat and canola in the shadow of monster nuclear cooling towers. In Peace River, a 15-minute drive down the road, contractors for Bruce Power put the finishing touches on a storefront office.
The walk-in shop, says Bruce Power president Duncan Hawthorne, will give residents the straight goods on the nuclear plant proposal and balance what he calls the misleading data of the intractable “ideological opposition.”
Across town, Brenda Brochu of the Peace River Environmental Society distributes statistics that show going nuclear is the surest way to contaminate soil and food, and raises the odds a child will contract blood cancer.
South of Lac Cardinal, area reeve Veronica Bliska fights to keep control of a council that has flipped, flopped and flipped again on an issue that is spawning grassroots protest groups, sparking feuds on editorial pages and turning longtime friends against each other.
Drive the highway through the Peace Country — halfway between Edmonton and the Northwest Territories — and it’s evident the land here is linked to livelihood. There are farms, logging trucks, pumpjacks, horse trailers.

Full article

 

[Tonington]

I am against is using it for generating electricity. I think a nuclear power plant is an atomic bomb under control. You lose control of it, you have an atomic bomb

That's just scare mongering. He'd be a fool to think that nuclear safety issues haven't been dealt with and learned from. Look at the crap storm over Chalk River. That was a third level of redundancy.

Chernobyl was a huge boner. The supervisor didn't know how a cascading reaction worked, disabled safety systems while trying to get the reaction rate faster, and ended up noticing the problem after it was beyond critical. Jamming brand new control rods back in only sped up the reaction, which was already in runaway. The result was not a nuclear explosion, but one of steam. The core was way too hot, 30 GW of thermal energy, an order of magnitude too hot. The reactor failed, and radiation spewed everywhere when the steam ruptured the weakened walls.

Failing to note the cascade, something a qualified supervisor, rather than political appointee, would have known about.

Today, we have the benefit of learning from costly and disastrous mistakes, which really should have never happened. The concern du jour, is one of storage of reactor material when it's used up, not a mushroom cloud.

 

[L Gilbert]

Yep. I agree with Tin. Sounded to me like the 1960's Hollywood version of what happens when matters nuclear get out of hand: glowing people, insects increasing size by the multiples of thousands, etc. lmao
All you people with your electric cars ( I want one, too) have to get electricity to refuel your energy cells from somewhere and hydro is more devastating to the environment. Besides that irradiated food lasts longer and has not been shown to make people grow third arms and the like. lol

 

[karrie]

One of the arguments about nuclear that really picks my butt is the cancer debate. Look at the rise in cancer that can be attributed to the burning of petroleum, and the research that correlates likelihood of childhood leukemia with proximity to gas stations, and then tell me that nuclear is the big concern when it comes to cancer.

Or look at the increase in, and deaths due to, asthma... and tell me that petroleum isn't worse than nuclear. Sure... they have yet to turn up truly solid proof or stats, because we're so damn inundated with chemicals, but, that's all the more reason, in my view, to go ahead with some nuclear power plants.

 

[MHz]

Whatever happened to one that was proposed to go up near White Court?

 

[Lester]

Whatever happened to one that was proposed to go up near White Court?

Apparently, they are still thinking about it so there might be two nukes here.

 

[karrie]

The more the merrier. We need to be in a position to sell off our petro when it gets stupid expensive.

 

[MHz]

So you are sure that if this goes ahead we will get the rods needed and not have some foreign country say no after we spend a lot of time and money building the structures?

 

[karrie]

So you are sure that if this goes ahead we will get the rods needed and not have some foreign country say no after we spend a lot of time and money building the structures?

No, I'm not sure. I haven't placed an order lately. ;-)

 

[Tonington]

Well we could always just use our own Uranium, and our own CANDU reactors.

 

[MikeyDB]

Besides....

It's great having a market for our depleted uranium.....

 

[MHz]

Well we could always just use our own Uranium, and our own CANDU reactors.

True, but it still has to be refined to a certain % before you can use it, that % needs to be a lot higher before it becomes weapons grade.

 

[MikeyDB]

I don't know about weapons grade nuclear garbage but it seems to me that if you had a sufficient quanity of radioactive material surrounding a core of high explosives and then detonated that package over a major city....or reservoir or farmland or ..etc. etc..

 

[bushbob]

We need the power and bad. My guess will be in the next 10 or 15 years, we will be heating our homes with electricity. Nuclear power is safe today. The new problem that may come up is the crackpot terrorists.

 

[MHz]

As soon as we got their street address we could then bomb them with our new secret weapons of self-destruction.