1999 April 26
To the Editor, The Toronto Star:
Re: "Nuclear waste is plentiful" (letter, April 15), Irene Kock warns that
nuclear waste is much more voluminous than I describe in my March 24 letter,
once you account for historical uranium mine tailings. The intent of my
letter was to put the volume of nuclear waste into perspective, by
comparing it to the waste from fossil power which has been displaced over
the last 37 years. To that end, Ms. Kock is advised to include the mining
wastes from fossil power in her comparisons, and include the fact that
nuclear power generates, pound for pound, thousands of times more
electricity than fossil power.
Even overlooking, as Ms. Kock does, the issue of fossil mine wastes, I
wonder how many hockey rinks would be filled by a billion tonnes of CO2
gas, or a hundred million tonnes of air pollution? How many thousands of
Canadians have died from our combustion of fossil fuels, and how many have
died from nuclear power? How many millions of additional lives have been
saved around the world, thanks to nuclear medicine? These are the
essential questions to ask when disputing the environmental and health
legacy of nuclear power in Canada.
Ms. Kock also misinforms about the danger of spent nuclear fuel disposal.
Canadian scientists have developed a technology that maintains radiation
levels above a disposal site at negligible levels forever, even with a
breach of the disposal containers after 500 years. Ms. Kock focuses on
this assumption of leakage and ignores the rest of the science. This is
fear-mongering.
Finally, the issue of wind and solar power is raised. Again Ms. Kock
neglects to compare apples and apples, since she does not provide an
estimate of how many hockey rinks would be filled by the raw materials,
and/or their extraction tailings, needed to build a wind or solar plant
comparable in output to a nuclear station. For example, to equal the
performance of Pickering, which supplies a city the size of Toronto, we
would need about 40,000 wind generators covering an area roughly four
times the size of PEI. That's a lot of material and maintenance, which
cannot be ignored when comparing the impacts of energy technologies.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Whitlock
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