John Rustad, the climate skeptic leader of the increasingly popular Conservative Party of B.C., would consider building nuclear reactors if he wins next month’s provincial election.
The veteran politician made the comment in a recent podcast interview with controversial right-wing and ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, criticizing what they call B.C.'s "socialist trainwreck." Nuclear power, Rustad claimed, is the pinnacle of energy production because it uses less raw material to generate energy than wood or fossil fuels.
It would be a huge shift for the province, which has a long history of anti-nuclear activism.
For decades, B.C. has been home to a strong anti-nuclear movement – Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver to protest nuclear testing – and in 2010, the former B.C. Liberal government banned nuclear power. Last year Premier David Eby reaffirmed that the NDP government will not build nuclear power plants in the province, citing the province's "massive clean energy resources" like solar, wind, geothermal potential and existing hydro infrastructure.
Rustad, who was a parliamentary secretary in the B.C. Liberal cabinet when his party imposed the ban, said on Peterson's podcast the move was made "because of politics." His former colleagues were trying to chase votes instead of "standing on the principles … that are needed to be able to create a good society and quality of life," he claimed.
Climate-minded proponents of nuclear power say it is a reliable source of fossil fuel-free electricity that can help back up renewable power sources like solar and wind. A 2015 study found that if countries invested in nuclear power at the same rate as Sweden and France did between 1960s to the 1990s, the coal- and gas-fired power plants that existed at the time could be replaced within a few decades.
However, many experts say nuclear power is actually more expensive than renewables like wind and solar.
"It would be a great way to throw money down a black hole," said Thomas Green, senior climate policy advisor for the David Suzuki Foundation. Building nuclear power plants is a "money sink" and the construction tends to get delayed. Solar or wind farms are cheaper and faster to build, and a more efficient way to generate electricity.
B.C. is uniquely well placed to take advantage of renewables because it already has an extensive network of hydroelectric dams, which can be used to meet demand for electricity when it is dark outside or there is no wind blowing. Developing so-called "smart grids" that distribute demand for power more evenly through the day so it gets used more efficiently can also eliminate the need for increased power generation, he said.
A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Victoria and the David Suzuki Foundation found that renewables could meet all of Canada's projected electricity needs by 2035. Achieving this will require building more solar and wind power facilities, and creating better links between the provinces so they can share electricity more efficiently.
Meanwhile, researchers have found that the high cost and limited availability of nuclear reactors mean they aren't helpful in the transition the world away from using fossil fuels. Some have even gone so far as to say that "investments in new nuclear plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times."
M.V. Ramana, a professor at the University of British Columbia's school of public policy, concurs. Nuclear energy is the most expensive form of energy, costing more to build and maintain than renewables. It is also slow. Even if Rustad is elected next month and decides to pursue nuclear power, a B.C. nuclear facility wouldn't come online before the 2040s at the earliest between the time it would take to obtain permits and actually build the facility, he said
Most importantly, nuclear power generates significant amounts of highly toxic, radioactive waste. Canada is already struggling to dispose of the waste generated by existing facilities, and both Green and Ramana noted that the problem would only be exacerbated if a facility were built in B.C.
"You cannot describe nuclear [power] as a clean source of power," Ramana said. "It has its own pollutants, as a coal plant does."
Still, there are those who think building nuclear power facilities in B.C. could be a good idea. Margareta Doval, managing director of Resource Works, a Vancouver-based organization focused on natural resource use, credited Rustad for raising the possibility.
"It is long overdue in the B.C. political space to be talking about [nuclear] as an option," she said. Building a nuclear power plant is technically feasible, she said; what B.C. is missing is the "social license" to use nuclear power.
Echoing Rustad, she said nuclear energy is a "pragmatic option" that can help provide a foundational energy source if B.C.'s hydro reservoirs can't provide enough power to supplement renewables like wind and solar. She also estimated that as long as B.C.'s population was large enough, nuclear facilities could be built without significantly increasing costs to consumers and government coffers.
Nuclear power could help provide low-carbon power to fuel the projected growth of B.C. LNG projects, she added. The private sector's choice to pursue these projects shows there "is a variety of demand pathways for the product" and it can help Asian countries reduce their reliance on coal.
However, experts question if there is enough demand for B.C. LNG to make the projects, which have received over $5.3 billion in government subsidies, economically feasible. Refraining from developing these projects, which are projected to use eight times the amount of electricity generated by the Site C dam, would make more renewables available to B.C. residents.
Beyond the cost and practical challenges to building nuclear reactors, Ramana emphasized it is unlikely Rustad could find a community that would be willing to host the facility. While accidents at nuclear plants are rare, high-profile disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl elevate the sense of risk, and few people are willing to accept the risk of being forced to evacuate their home forever on short notice – or suffer even worse consequences.
"There is always resistance for justifiable, rational, reasons because there's a source of risk," he said. "I don't see why in B.C. it is going to be any easier."
Comments
Wind and solar along with battery storage have already won the race. Nuclear is the worst of the green choices, is too expensive, will take too long and they haven’t solved the problem of waste storage. The lobbyists and proponents need it in order to reprocess the waste for plutonium required for nuclear weapons.
The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy, Barnard M, CleanTechnia 2023: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modu…
More information:
https://nuclearwastewatch.weebly.com/
https://www.protectourwaterways.org/
Absolutely. We fought nuclear power in Alberta years ago and won. It's another make money scam from the Big Boys...all we have to do to shut them down is tell them there will be no public money........and the water they'll need for the constant cooling will be expensive if not non existent.
Amazing though how failed technologies keep popping up on the challenged right wing. They can't let sustainable technologies take over....for the simple reason that there isn't the big money in it for them........if distributed wind and solar and geothermal are given the support they deserve.
Physicist M.V. Ramana on the problem with nuclear power: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/04/mv-ramana-w…
Rustad needs an educational stroll through NRCAN's Seismology Laboratories in Sidney.
Earthquake risk in southwestern BC is very real as is tsunami risk on the west coast. And we all know what happened in Fukushima.
Pie in the sky when we die.....is about as good an offer as is the promise that nuclear power will save us from greenhouse gas emissions rise. It's a delay tactic from the fossil fools....madly funding the madness we're seeing lately from the growing right wing lunatic fringe.
Hang on, hang on . . . I was against this, but the LNG connection has made me reconsider. How about this: No LNG projects can go ahead until the nuclear plants intended to power them are finished!
. . . By the time that even gets close, nobody will want LNG any more.
Sorry, but storage is not yet cheap enough to get the prairies through a "dunkelflaute"; Alberta has had two multi-day periods with 5% sun and 10% wind in the last 3 years.
I grew up on SF and boosted nuclear for 50 years, since my teens. I don't see a future for it now, though - if we can't make storage cheap enough, I think that geothermal will bring in the "clean firm" we need.
That said, there's no need at all for us to R&D nuclear any more, because the Chinese have taken over. They're doing 20 projects, most of them different designs, some never tried. There's a persistent belief in nuclear boosters that we were sabotaged by the bomb-makers, that if civilian-only nuclear power had been pursued, we'd have cheap and safe designs. If any of that is true, the Chinese have huge incentives to find it.
BC, of course, is the single stupidest place to try nuclear - and that's a booster, a fan, saying that. We have massive, massive hydro, which can balance at least an equal amount of intermittent, holding water back when intermittent is going.
OUR strategy is to build a ton of wind and solar, modify our 7x24 dams to hold water back and spend it all at night and have loads (heh) of leftover power to sell Alberta...during those dunkelflautes.