Gulf Spill Raises Questions About Imported Seafood

  • Right now, Congress is considering a bill that would give the FDA a lot more authority over imported seafood. (Photo courtesy of the NOAA)

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is looming over the seafood industry. Prices for things like shrimp and crab are going up. It might mean we’ll see even more imported seafood in the coming months. But as Tanya Ott reports, some people are questioning the safety of imported seafood:

Transcript

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is looming over the seafood industry. Prices for things like shrimp and crab are going up. It might mean we’ll see even more imported seafood in the coming months. But as Tanya Ott reports, some people are questioning the safety of imported seafood:

Tom Robey runs around like a mad man. Or maybe a mad scientist. His laboratory is the kitchen.

“This is the beginning of New Orleans barbecue sauce for our shrimp dish. So it’s brown garlic and black pepper and rosemary and beer.”

Robey is executive chef at Veranda on Highland in Birmingham, Alabama. His specialty is regional seafood: Louisiana crawfish, Florida crab, Alabama shrimp.

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded last month spewing oil into the Gulf, Robey shelled out nearly 3-thousand dollars to stockpile 600 pounds of shrimp.

And it’s a good thing, because officials closed some of the fishing grounds. It’s not clear how extensive and long-term the damage to Gulf seafood will be. Early tests don’t show substantial chemical contamination, but monitoring might have to continue for decades. Meanwhile, industry officials expect a shortage of domestic seafood. And other countries are ready to fill the gap.

We already import about 80% of our seafood. But the oil spill is expected to drive that number higher.

Tom Robey says he’ll take seafood off the menu before he serves imports.

“I’m nervous about, like, how that seafood was handled, how it was fed, if it was farmed raised. I mean every day there’s some kind of recall one or another coming from China.”

He may have reason to be nervous.

“I think it’s really a buyer beware issue.”

Caroline Smith DeWaal is director of food safety for the Washington DC-based Center for Science in the Public Interest. She says when state regulators tested imported shrimp they found it was contaminated with antibiotics and other chemical residues that are illegal in the US. Dewaal says there’s evidence some imported shrimp are grown in contaminated ponds.

Supporters of the industry say – while some tests have caught problems – that doesn’t mean all imported seafood is bad.

Norbert Sporns say there’s no need to worry. He’s CEO of a Seattle-based company called HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries. They farm tilapia – mostly in China. Sporns says the US has an international certification process that is rigorous and will catch potential problems.

“Prior to export we are subject to a series of tests. Once a product lands in the United States there are other tests that can be administered by the FDA on a spot check basis, so there are multiple levels of security in place.”

But the FDA only inspects about 2 percent of imports.

Ken Albala is a food historian at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. He teaches about food policy and environmental issues. He says the cattle industry has been tightly regulated, but:

“Fishing hasn’t been.. And when you’re talking about a several thousand pound cow versus a bass – let alone a shrimp. I don’t see how they could ever begin to inspect consistently what’s coming in from abroad. Definitely not.”

Right now, Congress is considering a bill that would give the FDA a lot more authority over imported seafood. So far, the bill has passed the house and is waiting to be picked up in the Senate.

So – consumers who want to eat shrimp – and boy do we love our shrimp! – are faced with two choices:

Trust that random spot checks find any problems with seafood imports…

Or pay more for domestic, wild harvested shrimp …

And that price could go even higher if the oil spill in the gulf contaminates a good part of the domestic supply.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

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Oil Prices on the Rise

  • Stephen Schork says the rising prices are based more on investor momentum than anything else, and that there’s plenty of oil on the market.(Photo courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration)

Oil and gasoline prices are going up this summer. Lester Graham reports, it appears the higher prices are not caused by lower supplies.

Transcript

The Energy Information Administration’s new short-term energy outlook says gasoline prices will average about $2.92 this summer– hitting $3.00 or more in some regions. That’s about 50-cents a gallon higher than last summer.

The outlook also predicts oil prices to average $82 a barrel this summer. But, oil already hit $86 a barrel this week.

Stephen Schork with The Schork Report says… the government projections were put together about a week ago… and didn’t really anticipate the investors driving prices up this week.

“So this rally that we are seeing and this upward buy is based more on investor momentum than it is on underlying fundamentals. There’s plenty of oil on the market right now.”

The government says prices should remain relatively stable but rising… although is notes uncertainty over crude oil price forecasts remains high.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Nuclear Careers to Heat Up?

  • Until recently, there hasn’t been an order for a new nuclear plant in 30 years. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Some Senate Republicans want the climate
change bill to focus on building new nuclear
power plants. They’re calling for as many as
100 new plants in 20 years. But the industry
has been in decline for so many years now,
there’s concern there might not be enough
nuclear engineers to do the job. Julie Grant
reports:

Transcript

Some Senate Republicans want the climate
change bill to focus on building new nuclear
power plants. They’re calling for as many as
100 new plants in 20 years. But the industry
has been in decline for so many years now,
there’s concern there might not be enough
nuclear engineers to do the job. Julie Grant
reports:

There’s a lot of new interest in nuclear energy and technology these days. But there’s a problem.

The American Nuclear Society estimates they need 700 new nuclear engineers per year to keep up with growing the demand. It’s enough to give long-time nuclear supporters whip-lash. Until recently, things looked gloomy for the nuclear industry.

William Martin is chair of the nuclear engineering department at the University of Michigan. Ten years ago, he says no new plants were being designed or built. And he was having a tough time finding students.

“A student entering the field, what you could tell them was, ‘well, there’s a big focus on waste.’ That’s not hardly something that excites young students to enter the field.”

Martin remembers standing on the stage at graduation in the mid 1990s to call the names of his graduates. Other engineering departments had so many students, it took an hour to call them all. But Martin only had a few names to call.

“Our students trip across in about ten seconds.”

Lots of nuclear engineering programs didn’t make it through the down times. There are less than half the university programs today than there were 30 years ago.

Nuclear got a bad name starting in 1979 – with the meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. That was followed by the deadly nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine in the ‘80s.
By the early 1990s, President Clinton announced he would eliminate funding for nuclear power research and development.

Until recently, there hasn’t been an order for a new nuclear plant in 30 years.

Vaughn Gilbert is spokesman for Westinghouse Electric Company, which focuses on nuclear energy.


He says Westinghouse laid off a lot its engineers in the down years. A decade ago, those who were left were heading toward retirement. So, Gilbert says, the company started working with universities to train engineering students to run its aging nuclear plants.

“Simply because we knew we would need to attract new people to maintain the existing fleet and then also to work with our customers to decommission the plants as they came offline.”

Westinghouse and other nuclear companies started giving lots of money to maintain university programs.

And then, everyone started worrying about climate change – and looking for ways to make energy that wouldn’t create more greenhouse gases. Nuclear power has started making a comeback.

Gilbert says new plants are in the works again – and Westinghouse needs engineers. The company’s designs will be used in six new U.S. plants.

The timing is pretty good for 25 year old Nick Touran. He’s a PhD student in nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan. He knows there’s a negative stigma to nuclear power – because he’s asked people about it.

“I just say, ‘so what do you think about nuclear power?’ Just to passersby on the street. And one person said, ‘I only think one thing – no, no, no, no, no.’”

But Touran says the negative stuff mostly comes from older people. When Three Mile Island melted-down, Touran wasn’t even born yet. He says most people his age are much more accepting of nuclear power.

“It’s the people who remember Three Mile Island and remember Chernobyl and remember World War II, who have all these very negative associations with nuclear weapons and Soviet reactors that were built incredibly wrong. And stuff like that.”

Touran says much of his generation just sees a power source that doesn’t create greenhouse gases.

Of course, there are greenhouse gases created in the process of manufacturing nuclear fuel rods. And then there’s that pesky problem of that spent nuclear waste. There’s still no permanent place to dump it.

Touran says he started studying nuclear power because he was amazed by it. But as the number of students in his department grows, he says more are choosing nuclear because it’s a smart career choice.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Fighting Over Oil and Water

  • The richest oil shale deposits lie in the Piceance Basin, which runs northwest of the town of Rifle, Colorado. The bands of dark grey along the edge of this snow- capped ridge are oil shale. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

In the future, keeping your gas tank full could make disputes over water in the American
West a lot worse. It’s because energy companies hope to develop the oil shale industry.
Getting oil from shale requires lots of water, and the richest oil shale deposits happen to be
in the dry state of Colorado. Shawn Allee headed there to see why a fight over water and
oil could be in the works:

Transcript

In the future, keeping your gas tank full could make disputes over water in the American
West a lot worse. It’s because energy companies hope to develop the oil shale industry.
Getting oil from shale requires lots of water, and the richest oil shale deposits happen to be
in the dry state of Colorado. Shawn Allee headed there to see why a fight over water and
oil could be in the works:

Oil companies have their eyes on vast oil shale deposits in western Colorado, Utah and
Wyoming.

The federal government says companies could pull 800 billion barrels of oil out of that shale.

That’s about three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Oil shale’s an impressive resource but it depends on water and there’s not much available
there.

How much would an oil shale industry need?

Shell Oil PR guy Tracy Boyd says the simple answer is that it will likely take his company
three barrels of water to extract one barrel of oil.

It’s because oil shale doesn’t really have oil in it – it’s got something called kerogen.

“You can heat this kerogen up. If you do it really slow, which we do for about 3.5 –
4 years, by putting heaters down in the rock formation, (you) produce a crude-oil
like material but with a little processing this is the first product we get out of it
which basically transportation fuels.”

Heating the ground require loads of electricity from new power plants and generators, and
they’d be cooled by water.

Oil companies are just experimenting with shale right now, but they’re securing rights to
water just in case.

Shell’s latest water claim is on Colorado’s Yampa River.

When Shell filed its court papers – some town governments warned they might fight the
claim.

One of these towns was Parker – a Denver suburb hundreds of miles east of the oil shale
region.

Frank Jaeger runs Parker’s water district.

Jaeger says, like other Colorado cities, Parker plans to expand.

“We know approximately what our numbers are and it will be somewhere in the
neighborhood of 150,000 people. In order to assure 150,000 people for another
150 years from now, I have to be proactive, I have to be at the front of the line for
the next drop of water available in the State of Colorado.”

Oil shale developers and cities across Colorado are set to fight over the water they might
need for the future, but some feel oil companies already have an edge.

“They’re actually one step ahead of the game.”

David Ableson is with Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group.

Ableson says energy companies tried developing oil shale several times in the last century.

They failed, but each time, they bought more water rights – just in case.

Now, they’ve got loads of water rights – and if the industry takes off, they’ll use them.

That could stop cities like Denver and its suburbs from getting water they hoped to have for
new homes and businesses.

Ableson says this isn’t just a Colorado fight, though.

He says some congressmen sell the idea of oil shale as an energy source the whole country
can depend on – even though its future could get tied up in Colorado water courts.

“And so, folks who are looking at this issue who do not live in CO, UT, or WY, need
to understand that when an elected official says, “this can solve our energy woes,”
that it’s actually a far more complicated situation than that and if there are severe
water impacts, that makes it much less likely that you could develop that
resource.”

The energy industry claims the concern over water is overblown – they say they just might
not need all that much water.

Ableson says that’s only true if oil shale fails. But if it succeeds, and we fill up on oil shale
gasoline – he predicts some towns or industries in the West will be left dry.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Getting Water to the Dry, Dry West

  • Colorado Springs pumps water through the Rocky Mountains into town (Photo courtesy of the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau)

Out West, a lot of cities figure many more people will be moving in over the next few decades. Water engineers wish those people would bring along all the water they’ll need, but of course they won’t. Shawn Allee reports these cities want to pipe more water from far away, and some people think that’s a bad idea:

Transcript

Out West, a lot of cities figure many more people will be moving in over the next few
decades. Water engineers wish those people would bring along all the water they’ll
need, but of course they won’t. Shawn Allee reports these cities want to pipe more
water from far away, and some people think that’s a bad idea:

The air in Colorado Springs is usually so dry it quickly chaps your lips.

What gives? Colorado Springs sounds wet enough.

“There’re really no springs in Colorado Springs, so when you start talking
about water, it’s a divergence between our name and reality. Sounds like we
had a lot, and in reality we didn’t.”

This is Matt Mayberry, Colorado Spring’s historian.

I’ve heard about this massive water pipeline project the town’s cooking up, and I was
curious just how long the city’s worked to quench its thirst.

Mayberry’s got an exhaustive book on that with an exhaustive title.

“Blah, blah, blah … the emergence and appropriation of rights in Colorado
Springs.”

The crib notes version?

Early on, buffalo manure poisoned Colorado Spring’s creek, so people dug wells.

Then, the wells got infested with grasshoppers.

And the town grew, and grew, and grew again.

“Very soon you had to bring water from further away, and ultimately to the
Western Slope which is a couple hours drive of here.”

Today, Colorado Springs pipes water through the Rocky Mountain range.

Doing the extraordinary for water is kinda ordinary for Colorado Springs.

Its latest pipeline project is called the Southern Delivery System, and it’ll pump nearly
80 million gallons into town each year – and it’ll pump that water forty five miles –
completely uphill.

Impressive, but some people are asking tough questions about it.

“Our concern with this project is the greenhouse gas emissions that it would
contribute to.”

Stacy Tellinghuisen is with Western Resource Advocates, a Colorado environmental
group.

She says there’s a connection between pumping water uphill and a large carbon
footprint.

“Water is heavy. Pumping it over a great distance takes a lot of energy, and
in the process it would require something along the lines of 60 MW of power,
which is about a tenth of a power plant.”

And, for the most part, the utility burns natural gas and coal to generate power. Both
emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Tellinghuisen says Western cities are considering at least five other water pipeline
projects, some with even larger carbon footprints.

She wants Colorado Springs to set an example by using dedicated low-carbon sources
like wind power for its water pumps.

I ask the Colorado Springs Utilities about that.

Keith Riley helped plan the Southern Delivery System.

“We think there are some ways we can minimize the carbon footprint by
looking at some new technologies.”

Riley says there were lots of environmental regulations to wade through before the
Southern Delivery System got approved.

But a large carbon footprint doesn’t disqualify utility projects.

Riley says, even if carbon were considered, the project might have gone forward
anyway because the city’s expected to grow over the next few decades.

“Water is the essential element for all of us, so when it comes to that level of
sustaining our own lives, then you get to some trade-offs on what we’re
willing to do to keep ourselves alive where we we live, where our cities are.
No matter what happens, we’ve got to move water to Colorado Springs, and
we’re uphill from the river, so we’ve got to get the water uphill one way or
another.”

Riley says Colorado Springs Utilities is considering low-carbon renewable power for its
new pipeline.

But it’ll be expensive, and no one’s stepped forward with all the money.

Other Western cities are engineering clever ways of moving loads of water around,
too. And it’ll be a political and financial challenge for them to pay for the carbon
footprint.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Learning to Live With Less Water

  • Ellen Peterson has lived in Florida for many years and this is the first year her well went dry. (Photo by Arthur Cooper)

Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:

Transcript

Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:

(sound of birds)

Even in swampy, muggy Florida, people have been running out of water.

“This is the first time the well has ever gone dry.”

Ellen Peterson remembers water gushing out of her artesian well when she’d hook up the hose. These days she’s stuck with rusty water from her shallow well.

(sound of faucet turning on)

“Now if I let that sit it would settle out orange.”

We visited Peterson at the tail end of this year’s dry season. In the weeks since then, Florida’s been pummeled by major thunderstorms. But Florida water managers say it’s too early to know how much the rain will help.

This was the driest dry season Florida’s felt in more than 75 years. And it’s the third year in a row of serious drought. That’s meant some changes for people who live here.

Many cities put rules in place that limit watering lawns to one or two days a week. One woman actually ended up with a warrant out for her arrest after she watered her lawn on the wrong day and didn’t pay the fine.

Some cities in Florida are talking about adding a drought surcharge to bills for people using the most water.

Ellen Peterson says local water managers have even been capping wells in her area. Peterson may be 85 years old, but that didn’t stop her from telling her local official to back off.

“They told me they were going to cap my well and I threatened the guy with his life if he ever came back. (laughs) It hasn’t happened yet.”

So it’s not such an easy sell to get people to cut back on water.

(sound at a lake)

But that’s Gary Ritter’s job. He’s a water manager in the Lake Okeechobee area. It’s a giant lake – 35 miles wide – and it’s nicknamed the liquid heart of the Everglades. The lake level is 2.5 feet below average.

“For water to get to the Everglades it has to come from Lake Okeechobee. Now we have a juggling act as to how we manage this water in the system you know for multiple users for the water supply and for the ecosystem.”

The lake’s the center of a huge tug of war. Farmers and cities need the water, and the lake’s also a big tourist draw. And the Everglades are in major trouble – mostly because the water flow to this fragile area has been cut off by people.

Some experts say these kinds of conflicts are just going to get worse.

Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute. It’s a nonpartisan group that studies water issues.

“Places we didn’t think were vulnerable to water shortages in the past are now increasingly vulnerable. As our population continues to grow and our water supply doesn’t. As more and more people try to share that fixed resource there’s going to be growing competition for water and more natural and manmade drought.”

And he says we just don’t know what’s in store for us as the climate changes because of global warming. We could get a one-two punch.

First, from weird new weather patterns. And second, from more and more people moving into dry areas.

People have expected these kinds of problems for cities in the desert Southwest. But nobody really saw this coming in the Southeast.

Peter Gleick says even if you live in a place surrounded by water now, you shouldn’t expect to always have plenty of it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Chicago Looks to Beijing for Green Olympics Lessons

  • This is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest fleet running on compressed natural gas. (Photo by Violet Law)

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

Transcript

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

(sound of a bus pulling up and announcing the stop)

As more Chinese are getting richer they are driving more. But most still catch the bus to
the Olympic venues, because there’s no parking for spectators. Officials have added
special bus routes to take people to the games – for free.

(sound of a bus pulling away)

But this is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest
fleet running on compressed natural gas. That means less pollution and CO2 emissions.

Doug Arnot is in Beijing. He oversees the planning of operations and sports venues for
Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. He says Chicago can do even better if it gets to
host the games.

“We believe that by 2016 all of our buses and all of our vehicles in the Olympic fleet will
be alternative energy or hybrid vehicles. That will have a huge impact on the
environmental imprint if you will of the Olympic Games.”

(sound of an English-language announcement of an Olympic venue stop on Beijing
subway and the noise of the train speeding through the tunnel)

Beijing has had to tackle a host of environmental problems. Most people know about the
city’s massive efforts to clean the air. But it also opened five new subway lines just in
time for the Olympics. Its added wind power generators.

But hosting the Olympics might have made one problem worse.

(sound of water fountain)

Beijing already has a water shortage. For the Olympics, workers planted trees and
flowers and added thirsty landscaping all over the city. New parkland and an urban forest
form the bulk of the Olympic Green.

‘Friends of Nature’ is the country’s oldest grassroots environmental group. Zhang Boju is
the head of research. He’s torn over seeing all this greenery.

“We think this grassland and man-made forest is a very, very important part of greener
Beijing, but it also has some problems. Is this fit for Beijing, a city which has limited
water resource?”

Hosting the Olympics has spurred the government to open up new facilities to recycle
water.

Achim Steiner heads the United Nations Environmental Programme. Steiner says he’s
pleased to see that China has seized the opportunity. His agency will issue a report
assessing the environmental impact of the Beijing games by the end of this year.

“What the Olympic Games provided was an opportunity to showcase and create a
platform to demonstrate what is possible if you’re determined to address these issues. A
great deal has been done and shown in the last seven years. What we are looking for here
is what kind of long lasting improvement the Games have brought.”

Beijing will take advantage of all these improvements. All of the newly built venues will
stay. Some, including the iconic Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, will be converted into
commercial use. The wind power generators will produce enough energy for 100,000
families.

There are also small things that show how hosting the Olympics has made Beijing a
greener city. Doug Arnot of the Chicago bid committee is taking notice.

“Every event you go to sometimes it’s not the big idea that you see, but the smaller idea
that you see. One of the things I’ve noticed is the staff and volunteers and the way they
have addressed green issues. They’re very conscious of where the recycling waste
baskets are. That may seem to be a small issue. But when you have tens of thousands of
people at your venues on a daily basis, it is very important.”

And Chicago is hoping both the small things and the big changes in its environmental
approach will win it a chance to host a green Olympics in 2016.

For The Environment Report, this is Violet Law.

Related Links

Food Prices to Stay High

  • Corn production in Colorado. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Food prices are expected to keep rising in the
coming year. That’s at least partly because farmers plan
to plant less corn. Dustin Dwyer reports:

Transcript

Food prices are expected to keep rising in the
coming year. That’s at least partly because farmers plan
to plant less corn. Dustin Dwyer reports:

Jim Hilker is an agricultural economist at Michigan State University. He says the
demand for corn is high right now.

“Ethanol’s probably the biggest driver of it, but there’s also been very strong corn
exports.”

Hilker says those exports are going to countries where the wheat crop has
come in lower than expected.

But with all the demand for corn, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says
farmers across the country are planning to plant about 8% less
corn this year, compared to last year. Last year farmers did plant more corn
than they had in more than 50 years. This year, corn production should still
be high, but it might not keep pace with demand.

Hilker says that could mean higher prices for food.

But he says there are a lot of other factors to consider when it comes to
food prices. He says gas is a big one, since food has to be transported.

For The Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

Report: U.S. Not Ready for Bioterror Attack

  • Some see national struggles with the availability of the flu vaccine as a measure of our readiness for an act of bioterrorism. (Photo by Pamela Roth, courtesy of creatingonline.com)

A new study finds the nation is still not prepared for a biological terrorist attack… mainly because it could take us years to respond to it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jenny Lawton has this report:

Transcript

A new study finds the nation is still not prepared for a biological terrorist attack –
mainly because it could take us years to respond to it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Jenny Lawton reports:


The study found that viruses specially manufactured by terrorists – or even a rare, natural
virus – could be devastating to the country. That’s because as it stands now, it takes
nearly a decade to develop vaccines against them. Mark Lister is one of the authors of the
report, published by the Sarnoff Corporation and the Center for Biosecurity of the University
of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He says the recent scramble over the shortage of flu vaccines
just proves the point…


“If we are fairly ill-prepared for an annual flu vaccination process, how prepared are we
going to be if a bioterrorist event occurs on a large scale?”


Lister says the government needs to coordinate its efforts more closely with drug and
biotech companies. That, he says, could help new drugs of all kinds hit the market faster.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jenny Lawton.

Related Links

Canada to Restart Nuke Program?

The debate over nuclear energy in the Great Lakes Region will likely heat up again in the coming months. In Canada, three reactors are coming back online after they were closed for years, and as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports, a new nuclear power plant might be built:

Transcript

The debate over nuclear energy in the Great Lakes Region will likely heat up again in the coming
months. Ontario is about to bring three reactors back on line after they were closed for years.
And as Dan Karpenchuk reports, the province is also considering building a new nuclear power
plant:


Ontario is facing an energy crunch. Demand during the summer months, last year, had tested the
province’s reserves to the limit, and an especially cold winter has placed even more demands on
the system.


Now Ontario premier, Ernie Eves, says he’s considering new ways of dealing with the energy
shortage and nothing will be left out.


“That includes everything from wind power to large nuclear projects.”


Bruce Power owns two nuclear plants on the shores of Lake Huron. Recently its President,
Duncan Hawthorne, met with Ontario officials and made it clear his company wants to be
involved in any new nuclear projects.


“We’ve got a strong capable workforce, we’ve got every favorable community around us, we’ve
got a formula that we can build on.”


But environmental groups and opposition politicians were quick to denounce the plan, saying the
industry does not have a good record.


They say Ontario has some of the oldest reactors in North America. And history has shown that
every time a nuclear plant has been built in the province, the cost overruns have been enormous,
with taxpayers ending up with the bill.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.