One of the biggest nuclear power facilities in the region recently brought another idled reactor back online. The Pickering Nuclear station is just east of Toronto on Lake Ontario and has a total of eight reactors. Some say the cost of operating these reactors isn’t worth the power they generate. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:
Transcript
One of the biggest nuclear power facilities in the region recently brought another idled reactor back online. The Pickering Nuclear station is just east of Toronto on Lake Ontario and has a total of eight reactors. Some say the cost of operating these reactors isn’t worth the power they generate. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:
The Pickering facility is Canada’s oldest nuclear plant: two stations with for reactors each. The newer B station has been operational since it was built in the 1980’s. One reactor at the older A station was restarted last year and a second one, this fall, at a cost of a billion dollars.
Shawn Patrick Stensil of Greenpeace says they’re not worth it.
“We know that the other four reactors at the Pickering B station… they’ll be reaching the end of their operational life around 2009. What we should do is prepare for that, and start building other energy sources to replace the energy that we need as those reactors come offline.”
The Ontario government is looking to develop other sources of energy, but the nuclear industry says the province won’t find it easy to give up nuclear energy. They say it’s clean, emission-free, and despite the problems at the plants, it has still proven to be affordable and reliable.
For the GLRC, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.