Author: CREDNB

CRED-NB is a member of the SMR Information Task force that publishes regular bulletins send to federal and provincial legislators. This month the topic is radioactive small modular reactors.

Every nuclear reactor, large or small, runs on neutrons. The core of the reactor is swarming with these subatomic projectiles. Each time a neutron splits a uranium atom, energy is released and radioactive waste is created.

Indeed, the broken fragments of uranium atoms are fiercely radioactive materials called “fission products”, and they accumulate in the fuel. Used nuclear fuel is millions of times more radioactive than unused fuel because of the fission products. This “high-level radioactive waste” must be isolated from the environment for many millennia.

But some neutrons penetrate into the structural materials of the reactor, making them radioactive too. When a stray neutron is absorbed by a non-radioactive atom, that atom is often “activated” –it becomes radioactive.

When a nuclear plant is dismantled, much of the rubble is too radioactive to be reused for other purposes. Such radioactive “decommissioning waste” must be kept out of the food chain and the water for tens of thousands of years.

Read the full bulletin HERE.

In its recent Energy Plan, the New Brunswick government proposed that the NB Power Belledune power plant should switch from burning coal to burning wood pellets. The federal government has mandated that all coal-fired electricity plants stop burning coal by 2030.

However generating electricity from forest-based biomass is a false climate solution. Burning wood for heat is one thing but burning it to generate electricity is incredibly inefficient.

Research has shown that burning wood pellets generates more carbon emissions at the smokestack than coal. It also creates many toxic particles harmful for the health of surrounding communities.

Two years ago, more than 500 scientists sent an open letter to world leaders calling on them to not burn forests to make energy.

How can governments get away with claiming that biomass-generated electricity is renewable and carbon neutral? It’s a scam.

International carbon accounting rules state that carbon losses from forest harvesting have to be reported in the land sector section of the carbon audit for the country where the trees were cut.

Every time a hectare of forest is cut, that counts as a reduction of forest carbon uptake. The harvested forest wood, if it’s burned, can’t be reported as a CO2 emission, because that would be counting it twice.

So the country or province that burns trees reports that as zero carbon emissions. That means that producers can treat biomass as being equivalent to zero emissions technologies, like wind and solar. Scam!

Scientists and environmental activists everywhere are lobbying hard for constraints to be put on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel.

In November, CRED-NB signed a letter to federal Energy and Natural Resources minister Wilkinson, with 26 other climate groups across Canada, calling on the federal government to take immediate action on biomass. These are some of our demands:

• Work with other levels of government to ensure forests are off-limits to wood pellet production for export.

• End all subsidies to the utility-scale wood pellet industry

• Redirect funding to Indigenous land use, stewardship or restoration projects and real climate solutions such as wind and solar power.

• Support value-added jobs that provide more substantial and stable economic opportunities
locally.

• Encourage utilities to take a public stance against burning forest biomass as an energy replacement for burning coal.

• Advocate on the international stage for an update to carbon accounting mechanisms that closes loopholes which falsely represent industrial logging and utility-scale exported biomass as carbon neutral.

The year 2023 saw many developments for nuclear waste policy and governance. For an update on last year and discussion of what we can expect in the year ahead, join this webinar on Thursday, February 29 at 8pm Atlantic. Speakers include Susan O’Donnell from CRED-NB who will talk about policy related to reprocessing radioactive fuel waste in Canada. Other speakers are:

• Theresa McClenaghan, Canadian Environmental Law Association, speaking about Canada’s Radioactive Waste Policy
• Ole Hendrikson, Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area and Sierra Club Canada Foundation, speaking about an Integrated Strategy on Radioactive Waste

The event registration is HERE.

This event is part of a series on nuclear waste organized by Northwatch and Nuclear Waste Watch.

New Brunswick this week released a “5-year roadmap” for hydrogen development, predicting that the strategy will make the province a clean-energy powerhouse.

Hydrogen will be an element in a future energy system that emits fewer GHGs. However the government’s plan misses the mark.  Here’s CRED-NB’s initial analysis:

• Electricity and heat pumps are a far cheaper solution to heating buildings than hydrogen.
• It is far better & cheaper for transportation to be muscle or battery powered. Green hydrogen is too expensive except for flight and long-distance shipping.
• Hydrogen is hard to contain so exporting it will be difficult. That’s why most hydrogen is produced close to where it is used.
• Green hydrogen (produced by renewable energy) can be a clean back-stop to wind and solar electricity generation but the priority should be using more efficient storage.
• Green hydrogen must be made with wind power to keep the cost down. There will be no market, local or export, for hydrogen made with nuclear power as it will be far too expensive.

CRED-NB spokesperson Tom McLean got a few words in about this during a CTV clip about the government’s plan the day it was launched. Watch it HERE.

SMR Information Task Force bulletin #6

The federal government recently endorsed two similar nuclear fantasies.

This month, Natural Resources Canada published a statement endorsing a plan to work with other countries to “advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050.”

The global nuclear declaration attracted endorsements from only 22 countries. In contrast, the official COP28 pledge to triple renewable energy by 2030 was signed by 123 countries and adopted by consensus as the official COP declaration.

Earlier, in 2023, the Canadian energy regulator projected a tripling of Canadian nuclear generation capacity by 2050.

Why is Canada engaged in a nuclear fantasy?

Click HERE to read the rest of the bulletin.

CRED-NB is a member of the SMRs Information Task force, a national coalition of groups that issues regular bulletins about so-called small modular nuclear reactors. These bulletins are sent to all MPs in Ottawa and provincial representatives in several provinces, including New Brunswick.

SMR Information Task Force bulletin #5

Plutonium is the stuff from which nuclear bombs are made. It is created as a byproduct of nuclear fission. Plutonium resides in the fiercely radioactive used fuel assemblies discharged from nuclear reactors. Any method for extracting plutonium from used fuel is called reprocessing.

Moltex Energy, a U.K. start-up, plans to extract plutonium from used fuel produced by the Point Lepreau reactor on the Bay of Fundy. Moltex needs plutonium to fuel its proposed reactor. It hopes to export the technology.

Another company in New Brunswick, ARC Clean Energy, wants to reprocess the used fuel from its proposed reactor, designed to “breed” plutonium.

Ottawa has given the two companies almost $60 million, and New Brunswick more than $30 million, to develop their technology.

Click HERE to read the rest of the bulletin.

CRED-NB is a member of the SMRs Information Task force, a national coalition of groups that issues regular bulletins about so-called small modular nuclear reactors. These bulletins are sent to all MPs in Ottawa and provincial representatives in several provinces, including New Brunswick.

NB government’s energy plan is ignoring reality.

Rothesay, New Brunswick, December 13, 2023 – The Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB) is astounded that the NB government would produce an energy plan that ignores the reality of where energy systems and the global energy economy are headed.

Tom McLean, of CRED-NB, said “Today, at the conclusion of the UN climate change conference, COP28, the global community committed to triple the use of renewables and transition away from fossil fuels. It makes no sense for New Brunswick to plan to frack fossil gas when the world is deploying wind turbines and solar panels.”

The government’s plan is also based on a nuclear technology that may never exist. In the presentation in February by CRED-NB to the NB Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship, we quoted the authoritative U.S. National Academies’ of Sciences 2023 report. It states that the advanced reactors planned for New Brunswick, ­ molten salt and sodium-cooled, ­ will have difficulty achieving commercial operations even by 2050.

“Premier Higgs’ energy plan is not sensible, sustainable or just,” said Ann McAllister, Chair of CRED-NB. “Fracking for fossil gas has no social license in NB due to its health and pollution risks. Hydrogen production is so expensive and inefficient that it makes more economic sense to use the electricity directly.

The SMRs proposed for New Brunswick will come too late to reduce carbon emissions now, when we need them. To export them would provide client countries who don’t yet have nuclear weapons with the plutonium to produce them. This is not the plan we need in these times of climate change and escalating global conflict.”

Meanwhile, the planet is burning, and the clock is ticking. While we’re waiting for these nuclear SMR experiments to fail, the government is wasting time that we must spend urgently on genuine climate action.

The WNISR annual report is a must-have reference for anyone interested in the nuclear industry. The 2023 report, launched today, includes in-depth analysis of the industry and a section on SMR development written by University of British Columbia professor M.V. Ramana. The chapter Nuclear Power vs. Renewable Energy Deployment provides an overview of the increasing gap between the development patterns of the two electricity generating technologies. As in previous reports, the 2023 WNISR traces the trajectory of a dying industry, despite efforts in Canada and other countries to keep it alive. Read or download the report (free) HERE.

CRED is a member of the SMRs Information Task Force. Here’s our latest bulletin:

Promoters and vendors of new nuclear reactors appear ready to move ahead with the generation of new varieties of long-lived radioactive wastes without having the science or social license to safely manage those wastes for hundreds of thousands of years.

The current $26 billion plan for the long-term management of Canada’s highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste is based solely on the used fuel from CANDU reactors owned by Ontario Power Generation, Hydro Quebec and New Brunswick Power. The plan, 45 years in the making but still at the concept stage, is facing strong and growing opposition by potentially affected Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

The current designs for a deep geological repository would not accommodate the radioactive wastes from SMRs given their very different dimensions, heat generation, burn-up rates, chemistry, and levels of radioactivity compared to the CANDU wastes the industry has spent decades studying. For SMR wastes, the transportation systems, the spacing of the wastes for storage, and the safety case – including the risks of unanticipated chemical reactions and nuclear criticality – will all be fundamentally different.

Read the full bulletin, in both official languages, HERE.