Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources
Issue 5 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Tuesday, February 29, 2000
The Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources met this day at 5:05 p.m. to examine issues relating to energy, the environment and natural resources generally in Canada (Nuclear reactor safety).
Senator Mira Spivak (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Welcome, Mr. Rubin. Please proceed with your presentation.
Mr. Norman Rubin, Director of Nuclear Research, Senior Policy Analyst, Energy Probe: Many people believe that the issue of nuclear safety is too complicated for ordinary people to grasp. My thesis is precisely the contrary -- that it is too simple for experts, who are immersed in it, to understand.
The key to the simplicity of the field is simply to keep your eyes on the risk. Follow the risk. Whenever anyone claims that a risk -- for example, a risk of nuclear power plants -- is small, negligible, trivial, or acceptable, find out whether the speaker is actually bearing the risk. Most of us humans find it extremely easy to accept risks that are borne by other people. We tend to find it much more difficult to accept risks that we ourselves must bear.
In the case of the environmental and public health risks of a catastrophic release of radioactive poisons from a CANDU reactor, which is the crux of the safety debate, the risk-makers -- AECL, Ontario Power Generation, which is the company formerly known as Ontario Hydro, and New Brunswick Power -- do not now bear that risk. These parties, and the federal government, have made it abundantly clear, by their words and by their deeds, that on no account will they accept the risk. They tell us the risk is small and perfectly acceptable, but they do not and will not accept it for themselves or for their organizations.
The federal government, as I have said, is one of those parties that maintains that the risk is low but has so far even protected itself from responsibility for bearing that risk. Therein lies the essential simplicity of the issue. The voices we hear telling us that we are safe are all coming from inside a bulletproof bunker. Asked to come outside and join us, they refuse.
Judged by their actions rather than their empty claims, the organizations that design, build, promote, supply and operate CANDU reactors agree completely on one crucial issue with antinuclear groups like Energy Probe and citizen groups who live near nuclear reactors. The issue on which we all agree is as follows: We will not accept the offsite risk of a catastrophic accident in a CANDU reactor. The only thing we disagree on is the definition of "we".
The organizations that design, build, promote, supply and operate CANDU reactors, and the federal government, are all protected by what I call the craziest law in Canada -- officially known as the Nuclear Liability Act. That law is the nuclear industry's ultimate special safety system. You have heard testimony about the other special safety system, shutdown system 1, shutdown system 2, and the emergency coolant injection system; but the ultimate special safety system is the Nuclear Liability Act.
This essential safety system stands poised waiting for a serious nuclear accident. If one happens, the act sets up a mechanism to distribute the reactor owners' insurance money, which is $75 million -- that is "million", with an "M", not "billion", with a "B" -- and the act absolutely exonerates the operator, the designer, the suppliers and everyone else from any responsibility to pay another cent. It does not matter who caused the accident, whether negligence was involved, whether they knew they were causing an accident, whether criminal activity is involved. The total payout under the act is limited to $75 million, unless Parliament expressly authorizes additional payments. If Parliament does, the extra money comes from the Canadian taxpayer and not from the responsible party or parties. In our opinion, the act should be entitled the "Nuclear Irresponsibility Act," because its main function is to ensure that the people and companies that caused the catastrophe are not held responsible for their actions.
Included in my written brief is a short history. I will not go through Energy Probe's history, along with the City of Toronto and Dr. Rosalee Bertell and others, in trying to get the law struck down. Relatively Herculean efforts were made by the federal government -- whose job it is to defend acts under attack, of course -- and by then Ontario Hydro and New Brunswick Power wherein they spent millions of dollars to ensure that the concrete bulletproof bunker stays exactly where it is today. They made it clear in their testimony and by their efforts that this is of extreme importance to them, despite the fact that the act has, one could say, no effect at all unless there is a catastrophic accident.
In our opinion, the act tells the potentially responsible parties in advance that they will not be held responsible. If there is something that you really want to avoid, and you think there are some people who are really in control of whether or not it might happen, why would you tell them in advance that they would be forgiven if it happens? What is the effect of doing so? That is precisely what this act does.
I would be remiss if I did not address the technical basis for the industry's rational fear of being held responsible for what their reactors might do on a bad day. I do not believe they are being irrational. I believe they are being quite intelligent and rational in avoiding this risk. The basis for fear is that CANDU reactors are inherently hazardous. The hazard is large and is inherent in the design. Once you design the reactor the way they are designed, the hazard is provided not by details here or there, but by the laws of nature, by the laws of physics.
The safety that is supposed to keep that hazard contained is in the form of tin cans surrounding the hazard, in the form of fire hoses aimed at the hazard, and in the form of computerized triggers designed to open the valve on the fire hoses. The protection is in the form of engineered safety systems that are designed to anticipate every way the hazard, which is inherent, might do what it wants to do, which is escape.
I point out on the bottom of the second page of my brief that Ontario Hydro, as it was formerly known, was once ill-advised and rash enough to claim in an advertisement that they made no compromise in the safety of their nuclear reactors. One of the easiest jobs I have ever participated in at Energy Probe was to successfully challenge that ad before the Advertising Standards Council. It is trivial to demonstrate that compromise is the essence of decision making in reactor safety.
I believe you have some of the flavour of that -- at least in the discussion when the Atomic Energy Control Board was here, when questions arose about how safe is safe and when is safe safe enough. One can always be a little more prudent or rash. There are great pressures on operators and designers to be more rash. Compromise is the basis of decision making.
The four basic technical realities that make the CANDU inherently hazardous and that make the job of Victor Snell and his colleagues at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and the job of people at AECB essentially impossible are the following: First, each reactor contains so much poison that it is beyond comprehension. In a short while I will disclose how much poison each reactor contains. If anyone here can grasp how much poison that actually is, I would like to know, because it is beyond my brain to comprehend it.
The second factor is that poisonous material, poisonous literally beyond description, is what produces energy for a living. It produces enough energy to spread itself around the environment and to overcome many engineered barriers to its release.
Third, the production of energy cannot be stopped. I know it sounds as though I am making that up, but I am not. The production of energy cannot be stopped. You have heard of shutdown systems. The expression "shutdown" is a term of art. "Shutdown", when it relates to a nuclear reactor, does not have the same meaning as the term found in the Webster's dictionary. It is a technical term that means something, but it does not mean what you and I mean when we say that something is shut down. A reactor cannot, in the normal sense of the word, be shut down.
Fourth, as if those three were not bad enough, CANDU has a special design feature that is fundamental to it, fundamental to no other reactor system in the world, except the Soviet RBMK that was used at Chernobyl. It is a function of large pressure tube reactors. That function has fancy technical words, but what it basically means is that, if the plumbing system springs a leak and the high-pressure water inside starts being lost during a loss-of-coolant accident, not only the ability of that cooling water to take the heat away from the reactor is lost, but also, because of the laws of physics, the power produced by the reactor rises exponentially. Just when one would expect the reactor to shut down, according to the laws of nature, the laws of nature are such that it takes off through the roof. In some cases, as in Chernobyl, literally, it does go through the roof.
Let me explain those four components in a little more detail.
I have done some math on the content of the core of a CANDU reactor. The question becomes: What units can you use to put into context the amount of poison that is inside the reactor? The standard method is called "the quantity of water needed to dilute the drinking water." In other words: How much water would be required before it would be legal to put it through a water supply plant? Obviously, I am not suggesting that that is the method by which we should deal with nuclear waste or any other toxin, but it is a way to deal with the same comparisons, apples and apples, on the same matrix.
I have applied that measure to the contents of one of the smallest CANDU reactors, the CANDU 6, which is identical in size to each of the eight reactors at Pickering -- four at Pickering A and four at Pickering B. I have allowed for 100 years of radioactive decay, during which the factor of drop in radioactivity is close to 100, compared to the end of the first year. The result -- the quantity of water needed to dilute one small reactor's contents to drinking water standards -- is roughly two times 10 to the eleventh power tonnes of water. In other words, roughly 200 billion tonnes of water, or more than six times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined, is needed to dilute the contents of one reactor to drinkable standards after it has cooled off for 100 years.
That amount of poison, as I have said, is beyond human comprehension. Is there a brain that can truly comprehend that? It is not the brain of this former Mensa member. I do not yield to many, but I cannot do it. If you can do it, I want to hear from you.
If 1 per cent of 1 per cent of that amount were distributed into the environment, I believe we would have a huge catastrophe. I believe that to be obvious from what I have said.
Can it get out? Of course, it can. The reactors produce energy. It takes energy to get it out.
At full power, that reactor would generate 600 megawatts, or 600 million watts, of electricity. It produces that power at roughly 30 per cent efficiency by producing about 2,000 megawatts, or 2,000 million watts, of heat. That is roughly the equivalent of 1.3 million of the largest commercially available domestic tea kettles, all plugged in and all looking for water to boil. These tea kettles are not ordinary, in that they are made of the nastiest, most toxic, and most carcinogenic material we know about.
Nuclear reactors are similar to tea kettles in other ways, in that they have safety systems that include various shutoffs; for example, a kettle has a thermostatic shutoff switch. When a tea kettle starts destroying itself, if the shutoff system does not work, the first parts that melt, vaporize and fail are the parts that produce the energy. At that point, the kettle stops producing energy. If it has not already set the house on fire, you are home free; you may just have to replace the kitchen counter. In a nuclear reactor, the part that plugs in and produces the heat is the nuclei of the atoms of the tea kettle. There is no way to unplug it.
What does the term "shutdown" mean? When a nuclear reactor that has been running at 100 per cent power for a length of time is shut down, its power output, 2,000 million watts, drops within a second or two from 100 per cent of its rated power to 7 per cent of that level. Nothing but time will drop its power output any further. Three Mile Island was an accident in which shutdown was achieved 8 seconds after the first sign of trouble. A day and a half before the population was evacuated, the reactor was successfully shut down. Continuing the analogy, evacuation is pointless a day and a half after a tea kettle is unplugged. There is not another piece of equipment in the world that is as hazardous in a state of "shutdown" as a nuclear reactor. The term "shut down" does not mean that it is unplugged or, in the case of a car, that the emergency brake is on; rather, it means that it is still generating more energy in one place, in the essence of an incredible quantity of poison, than almost anything else generates at full capacity.
The heat that is produced -- it is not that it just used to be hot; it is still hot because it used to be plugged in, like the tea kettle. New heat is produced constantly from radioactive decay and the immutable laws of physics. If that heat is not removed, the temperature goes up and up until it melts or is otherwise destroyed.
I want to direct your attention to one of several interesting design flaws or design characteristics that are challenges in the CANDU reactor. The technical name of this characteristic is "positive void coefficient of reactivity." That means that there is solid water being pumped over the fuel bundles at extremely high pressure, about 100 times the pressure of a pressure cooker. If it blasts away from the fuel, the laws of physics state that the chain reaction producing 100 per cent of the heat becomes uncontrollable and rapidly increases from that level to 200 per cent and beyond. That is the phenomenon that destroyed Chernobyl. These results are immutable unless the reactor is shut down extremely quickly and effectively.
There are other challenges. For example, the metal that comprises the core of the CANDU is one of the most difficult, intractable, easily embrittled metals in the world, but it is necessary to continue the reaction. The metal is zirconium, the geometry of which is so complicated that inspecting its surfaces to ensure they are intact is virtually impossible. That is one of the reasons CANDU reactors cannot be licensed in many of the advanced countries in the world. That is why the folks at AECL and Ontario Power Generation make the big bucks -- their job is to try to address these challenges, at which they are bound to fail.
Given those realities, I would maintain that Canada's nuclear industry is completely rational in their refusal to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions on a bad day. The public living and working near nuclear reactors are also completely rational in saying to these folks: "The risk may be acceptable to you but it is not to me. I believe the government, which is forcing the neighbours to accept some things that the industry itself will not accept, has violated the public trust.
Senator Kenny: I will begin by testing you a bit on your initial premise that AECL, Ontario Power Generation and New Brunswick Power were not accepting the risk. It is my impression that people live near these facilities and keep their families in these areas, as well as work in these facilities every day. I cannot think of how much money you would have to pay me if I thought that I would put my family at risk, or myself at risk, going to work at a nuclear facility on a regular basis. Would you not agree that these people are putting themselves at risk, if indeed there is a risk, as much if not more than others by virtue of their work at a facility?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. Certainly many individuals in the nuclear industry do bear personal risks by living near nuclear reactors. None of the groups of people is willing to bear risk for the total damages that the reactors may cause. There are certainly people in the industry who sincerely and religiously believe that the risks are vanishingly low. There is also, as heard in testimony from AECB about the healthy worker effect, a type of psychological safe worker effect. I used to suggest a comparison for this type of worker with cabdrivers who never wore seat belts; but I believe those times have changed. For many years, the only people in our society who would never buckle up were the people in our society who were at the greatest risk. That made perfect sense to me, not from a public safety point of view but from a psychological point of view. In choosing to perform work that presents a risk, people do not want reminders of those potential hazards.
I have distributed an ad that was distributed by the people at Three Mile Island before that accident. They said: "We want to tell you about the kind of plant that does not make the news -- a smooth running nuclear plant." I spent a minute in my office trying to find, and failing to find, a copy of the Soviet life article that appeared the February before the Chernobyl accident, which took place in April, in which they interviewed workers at Chernobyl who said they are safer at work than at home. They honestly believed it. I am sure that they were not lying.
Yes, there are people who individually accept the risks of being an individual casualty of a reactor accident, but their companies are too sophisticated to join them.
Senator Kenny: I will come to that in a second, but basically there are people there who are betting their families.
Mr. Rubin: That is fair to say, yes.
Senator Kenny: Therefore, it is probably fair to say that they think there is not the same level of risk that you think there is?
Mr. Rubin: That is probably true. There is definitely disagreement on what the risks are.
Senator Kenny: With respect to the Nuclear Liability Act goes, it is a well-established principle, with the government at least, that it self-insures. I am surprised that these people are spending any money on insurance policies. It seems to me that that is throwing money away.
I am comfortable with the principle that the federal government should bear the burden of it. Why should we pay an insurance agency a premium when the taxpayers clearly have the capacity to cover the damages if, as, and when they occur?
Mr. Rubin: I am not sure taxpayers are at risk. It is not exactly government agencies that own reactors for the most part. Crown corporations are increasingly acting like businesses. Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power and Hydro-Québec are the owners of the CANDU reactors in Canada. In fact, Ontario Power Generation is trying to get out of the legislated requirement under the act that they have insurance. If and when the act is revised, they may be excused from that requirement and be allowed to self-insure.
On the day after a catastrophic nuclear accident, it is reasonable to think that the Government of Canada will still have some money to pay for some changes; it is not necessarily reasonable to think that Ontario Power Generation will. Therefore, the question of self-insurance is not as trivial as it might appear.
The real issue is responsibility. You are right that the act does, perhaps arbitrarily, require that the trivial responsibility of the operator at the level of $75 million be backed by a commercial insurance policy. However, as far as I am concerned, that is not the major effect of the act. The major effect of the act is that, if there is $76 million worth of damage, there is $1 million looking for a funding source and Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Commission, or Hydro-Québec would be held completely blameless under the act, completely irresponsible for any damages over $75 million.
I did not mention this in my brief, but estimates for what the damages might be from a conceivable accident range from tens of billions to $1 trillion for the radiation health damage value alone.
Senator Kenny: Then your position would be that the act should be amended to delete the requirement for private insurance and simply establish a Crown risk; that if reactors are to continue to operate, the jurisdiction in which they are located should bear the responsibility in the event of an accident. Am I correct?
Mr. Rubin: I am a believer in the "polluter pay" principle. I think the people who are bringing the risk should be held responsible for bringing it. It is not enough for them to claim that the risk is low or for them to claim to be surprised the day after the accident; they should be responsible.
For me, that means that there should be no artificial limitation of the liability of all of the parties who might be found to have been responsible for an accident, should one happen. If General Electric made a part that was faulty, whether or not we find the memos or e-mails in which the staff discussed the possibility of the part causing an accident, we should go after General Electric until either they run out of money or everyone who has a claim is paid. Whoever is responsible should be held responsible.
I believe that doing so is a first guarantee of responsible behaviour. Holding people responsible starts with childhood and works up through adulthood. I believe that you can best ensure responsible behaviour by holding people responsible. Therefore, I do not believe the Crown should be held responsible in the first instance.
There is the second question of ensuring that victims receive full compensation. It is certainly possible that the responsible parties will be bankrupted before they are held fully responsible, and that should be addressed by legislation requiring minimum financial assurances.
Senator Kenny: With respect, Mr. Rubin, I have great difficulty with the analogies you are using. Do you think airline pilots fly planes safely to avoid crashes because of their insurance or because they do not want to be at the front end of an accident?
Mr. Rubin: You are dealing with more than just the individual pilots here. You are dealing with corporate decisions to do maintenance or not to do maintenance. You are dealing with safety culture. The word "culture" came up many times from the regulator. The regulator has figured out in the last few years that culture, the structure of thought in an organization, turns out to be the key to whether reactors are run relatively safely or relatively unsafely.
There is a culture at Ontario Power Generation, and formerly Ontario Hydro, of winning awards for record numbers of days of operation in a row. In the culture there, everyone knows that when a CANDU reactor shuts down after running at 100 per cent power it cannot be restarted for 36 hours. That is 36 hours of useful production and cash input lost. Those things are known and they affect behaviour.
Senator Kenny: I wish that were part of your testimony because that sort of information is much more useful to the committee. We can study forever how to clean up or who should take liability if something goes wrong; however, I am much more interested in figuring out ways to avoid accidents and hearing your recommendations to this committee on what should be done to ensure that we do not have the accidents.
If you want to talk to us about the problems with the culture that exists there, I am very interested in that, because I think that relates directly to whether we will have safe reactors. However, you lose me when you say that the amount of insurance determines whether a reactor will be safe.
Before I yield the floor, I would like to ask for a list of countries that will not take CANDUs.
Mr. Rubin: That will have to be an undertaking.
Senator Kenny: Yes, just send it to us.
Mr. Rubin: I am not sure that I have a complete list. I know of Germany. It is interesting that it has to do with prevention versus what they call fundamental safety. "Preventing accidents" means inspecting rather than building add-on fire hoses and engineered safety systems to react after the pipe breaks. They want to ensure that the pipe will never break. That is their philosophy.
I have discussed the Nuclear Liability Act with many people and in many public fora. With respect, I believe it is a minority view, and certainly not one I share, that holding parties responsible for their actions has to do with what happens after the accident. In my experience, most people agree that holding people responsible for their actions has to do with whether the event occurs or not. If we disagree on that, then we disagree. I have run into people before who do not make the connection between telling someone in advance that they will be held responsible if they do something bad and the likelihood of the event happening. I make that connection. I think it is fundamental.
Senator Kelleher: When the AECL officials appeared before us on February 22, they told us that the reason that no new nuclear reactors had been built in the last number of years in North America was because we were in an oversupply situation, not because of a lack of confidence in the reactors. What is your reaction to that comment?
Mr. Rubin: I am surprised that Dr. Torgerson can say that with a straight face.
There is a great deal of activity in North America and in Europe building generating capacity. There is a great deal of activity around Toronto building generating capacity. We just had an 800-megawatt co-generation facility announced within the past year. Willing investors are pursuing opportunities to make money generating electricity in the coming competitive environment; they are just not building his technology.
A number of times, Mr. Torgerson tried to skate around the issue by talking about "large scale," or using words like that. Of course, the scale of an individual generator is completely irrelevant to how much supply and demand we have. You could build several small ones or one big one. It is in the nature of the nuclear industry that they only build big ones. They occasionally like to use words very carefully to try to make everything disappear that is not as centralized as their capacity. However, an 800-megawatt co-generation facility is bigger than a CANDU 6 reactor; therefore, I do not know how we can ignore that. I think it is specious nonsense.
Senator Kelleher: Does it reflect, within the industry, a lack of confidence in nuclear plants in that no nuclear reactors have been built lately?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. Increasingly, electricity is being treated as if it is a commodity rather than some voodoo magic called infrastructure. It is being treated as something that customers buy and producers produce and transmitters transmit. The more it is treated that way the more it enters the realm of commercial activity. In that realm, most investors will not touch nuclear power with a barge pole. No one is considering building a nuclear reactor at their own risk, with their own money. Many people are investing their own money in generating capacity. But it is not nuclear; it is gas-fired co-generation, it is windmills in some places, small-scale hydro. It is several things. It is not, notably, a great deal of coal burning, I am pleased to see as an environmentalist, and I am also pleased to see that none of it is nuclear.
Senator Kelleher: One of the interests of the committee is dealing with international nuclear safety standards. In light of the fact that Canada is in the CANDU export business, I asked AECL what jurisdiction, if any, did they exercise with CANDU reactors, for example, that they have sold to Romania and/or Korea. The answer, rightly, as I assumed, was that they could not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction in those other countries but that they are certainly consulted and asked and they have people on the ground giving advice.
In your opinion, is this sufficient? If not, what would you recommend in this area in light of the fact that since we are selling the CANDU, and if they want it badly enough, we, perhaps, would have some leverage over them?
Mr. Rubin: That is an excellent question. I do not have a handy answer to it, partly because the activity you are trying to improve is one that I am trying to stop. I also believe that this activity is only going on because it is being artificially propped up by a number of heroic life-support measures that should be relatively easy to stop. If we could just stop putting $1.5 billion on a platter every time someone comes along desperate enough, or despotic enough, to think that they can foist a CANDU reactor on their own population, I think this thing would then go away and we would not need to worry about whether or not the Turkish or Chinese reactors will be safe.
Senator Kelleher: Assume that, in the short term, you have not been able to stop CANDU reactor sales.
Mr. Rubin: It pains me in my stomach lining to accept your premise, but I will. I am here at your convenience, so I will try to answer your question.
Senator Kelleher: Until you stop these CANDU sales, what do you think we can or should be doing to try and minimize these safety risks in other countries? I am sure you care about the people in other countries, too, that you do not just care about the people here in Canada.
Mr. Rubin: Absolutely. I care also about their environment and, in the long run, I am not sure that their environment or their safety would be better served by giving them the illusion that their reactors are safer than they would be otherwise. There are interesting trade-offs here; I have not completely wrapped my head around them, but I will try in a moment.
There is routine exchange between the Atomic Energy Control Board, our regulator, with whom I have many bones to pick, and the regulators in CANDU client countries.
Senator Kelleher: I accept that.
Mr. Rubin: Therefore, the nuclear regulatory agencies of Romania -- and perhaps China, although I am not familiar with the Chinese case -- and Korea do come to Canada and they get training from the Atomic Energy Control Board, as the operators get training from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and sometimes Ontario Hydro in the past.
It is not as if we are not sharing our expertise; we are doing that. There is a problem of extraterritoriality. We cannot force them, I do not believe, to adopt all of our standards or to be as competent as we are and, God willing, that is competent enough.
One branch of the subject of my presentation that is relevant here -- and I wish I knew the answer better -- is whether Canada, through Atomic Energy of Canada Limited as CANDU provider, is exposing the Canadian Crown to liability, should there be a catastrophic accident in one of our reactors abroad.
Senator Kelleher: Since this is one area that we, as a committee, are interested in, could you think about this? It is always hard when you do not have an answer. Perhaps you could sit down and think about it and let us know in writing, in light of the fact that CANDUs are being sold. I think we would be interested in hearing your suggestions, perhaps as to the types of conditions that CANDU might put on reactors it sells abroad. Could you let us know that, please?
Mr. Rubin: Yes, if I can come up with any wisdom on the subject.
One thought occurs to me now, namely, that there is one mechanism for this assessment that exists in law and which has been observed in the breach by the present government, and that is the environmental assessment of projects outside of Canada.
The Chairman: Right.
Mr. Rubin: That is now the subject of a lawsuit, for example. If the spirit of that law were followed, it does give a mechanism at least for the assessment of the design and the training, and a number of other things, to assess that impact and it could, at best, lead to a public discussion of those questions.
Senator Kelleher: We are just as concerned about the operating procedures.
Mr. Rubin: It would be good if it were possible for the committee to follow up on this question of extraterritorial liability. If the laws of China, for example, would not protect AECL, and you and me as taxpayers, in the event of a catastrophic accident, and should some citizens of China express the opinion that they have just lost a lot of money, on the face of it that sounds as if it creates an opportunity for extraterritorial action for us to protect ourselves.
Senator Kelleher: May I leave that with you?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. I am not sure how helpful I can be, however.
The Chairman: Before I call on Senator Wilson, I wish to tell you that what we might be interested in, apart from these strategic moves, one of which is under court review, is exactly what operating procedures would be optimum in that case and the extent to which we can find out about them.
Senator Wilson: My first question is with regard to the risk of earthquakes. We once thought that there was no risk in that area. However, more and more small earthquakes are being reported. Do you have a comment on that?
My other area of concern is the importation of MOX fuel, from the safety angle, not from the political angle and not because people might disagree with the whole philosophy of that. Is there any safety risk there?
Mr. Rubin: If you do not mind, I want to answer three questions, the first of which precedes your two.
The question of what operating rules we should set up for the operating of foreign reactors is precisely the kind of question that should not be answered by me and honourable senators. We are not in a position to write the operating manual or to specify any page of the operating manual of a nuclear reactor.
The people who are in the best position to do that are the owners and operators of the reactors, as long as we are sure that, from a structural and incentive point of view, they have safety as a higher priority than one more hour's output from the plant or setting a record for being better than the other guy at keeping it running. If that is not the priority, then the manual will be wrong.
I do not want the safety of the world's reactors to rest on my finding the bad sentences in the operating manuals. I do not even want the job of reading them. I do not think honourable senators do, either. That is not a job for a senator or for Energy Probe. It is a job for the people who are in the trenches writing the manuals. However, they must know that they will be severely punished if they get it wrong, and rewarded if they get it right. That is how our world tends to work.
The Chairman: That is an answer in and of itself.
Mr. Rubin: I will now address the two questions put to me by Senator Wilson. First, the issue of seismic risk for a nuclear generating station. When David Torgerson of the AECL said that, in case of an accident he would head for the CANDU, I wished someone would yell earthquake and shake his chair to see which way he would run. I would not be running toward the CANDU reactor.
The safety analysis of the CANDU reactor is overwhelmingly based on the reliability of individual components failing spontaneously. The entire defence in-depth philosophy that you heard so much about is only valid, even theoretically, if components fail spontaneously and independently.
Defence in-depth was arrived at because everyone knows that if you are designing a sensor, a valve, or any safety component, you will get several failures per thousand time intervals. It is hard to get past a 99.9 per cent confidence level, or reliability level, in any type of equipment, whether it is the starter in your car or the safety system in a reactor.
Is 99.9 per cent good enough as the protection from a reactor accident? The early designers and regulators, bless them, said no. They said: "We cannot have a 1 in 1,000 chance of failure of these systems. The math is too scary. The consequences are so high that that probability is unacceptable."
What is the answer? We cannot design things much better than that. The answer is that two in a row are lined up, and the assumption is made -- and the key word is "assumption" -- that nothing will come along to make them arbitrarily fail together.
To be fair to the designers, they have gone to great measures to try to make them different in design; as well, they have put them in different rooms and tried to make them independent. Therefore, there is a shutdown system that works with falling cadmium rods and another one that works by injecting caladium nitrate. Thus, if something keeps the candium rods from dropping, the caladium nitrate will still be injected and the reactor will be shut down. That is what defence in-depth is about. There are two systems, each one with a 1 in 1,000 chance of not being there when you need it. The thinking is that because they are completely independent there is only a 1 in a million chance that neither will be there, that both will fail.
The math of that calculation depends on the failure of the second system when the first one fails, being the same as the failure of the second one on a random day. It depends on the two events being independent.
Senator Wilson: Does this relate to earthquakes?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. There are certain classes of initiating events in reactors that are totally outside of that analysis because they can clearly make many "independent events" happen simultaneously. An earthquake is one of them. It is not the only one. Sabotage is another. Human malice, like an earthquake, could simultaneously cause the initial problem that means you need the special safety systems, and could make the safety systems not work.
The probability of having shut-down system number 2 not work at the same moment that shut-down system number 1 does not work and at the same moment that you need shut down is very low unless there is an external event that caused all three of them. Then it is not unthinkably remote at all. It is not 1 in 1,000 times 1 in 1,000 times 1 in 1,000. It is whatever the probability of that earthquake was, times 1, times 1.
The seismic risk near many of our nuclear reactors is much greater than thought. The historical record is not dependable to determine earthquake risk.
Let me drop this topic and move to MOX, if you would like.
Mr. Wilson: I have a comment about MOX. I do not want to hear about the political reasons for importing it. What is the safety factor you see, or is there a risk?
Mr. Rubin: First, the main safety concerns are not involved with the small tests that are going on now but would be involved with a large MOX fusion program that is contemplated by AECL and the federal government.
There would be additional safety concerns with the operating of the reactors. The control and dynamics of the reactors change a little bit for the worse. The toxic inventory of the reactors would increase. Whether or not that is important depends on whether you can comprehend the toxicity levels. Making it bigger is not a step in the right direction. There are also transportation issues; however, I do not consider myself expert in that area. I believe they are real, however, and they have been taken much more seriously by United States government agencies than they have by Canadian government agencies.
Senator Taylor: I noticed you quoted odds and so on. I am an engineer who is associated with hydrocarbons and I noticed when you mentioned the word "poisonous". There is nothing more poisonous than an oil refinery, given the variety of substances that are put through that system. The resulting product is still poisonous and its toxic effects are widespread.
Life is more or less a question of trade-offs. For example, you can decide not to eat beef because of the cholesterol and eat nothing but vegetables and then find out they are genetically modified and likely to send you to your Maker quicker than if you had eaten the beef. There are all sorts of trade-offs you have to make.
You seem to be a person who enjoys putting mathematical models together. Have you put through a model the unknown factor -- when you speak you almost make it sound like a known, but I still think it is an unknown -- in respect of how much is destroyed when a nuclear plant goes wrong, versus how much we are destroying with the use of hydrocarbons as an energy mode, as well as what we do to the air and the water? As you know, in California we put additives in the gasoline to make it easier to breathe and now we find those additives get into the water and start killing us that way rather than through the air. We also have CO2 and global warming and so on.
Have you put together a model that indicates that, whether we like it or not, atomic power is the best option over pollution caused by oil and gas? If you have atomic power on one side and fellows like me with oil and gas polluting everything in sight on the other side, what do you choose? In other words, would you rather get hung or electrocuted? You can choose, but you have to make the choice.
Mr. Rubin: Let me present an approach to the problem that I think may be different from yours. I do not think any of these decisions should be made Soviet style. I do not think this should be done by the Politburo deciding who should drive an electric car and who should drive a gasoline car or a natural gas powered car. Rather, we should make the polluter pay, internalize the cost of environmental externalities in the cost of doing business, and let people make their own choices. I do not want to subsidize the risks you are creating by driving a particular type of car and you do not want to subsidize the risks I am creating by driving a different kind of car. We should each bear our risks and industry should bear its risks and pass them on to consumers.
Senator Taylor: Can you do that with atomic or nuclear energy?
Mr. Rubin: Yes, of course. Hold the parties creating the risk responsible for creating the risk. Ensure, by legislation, that they have deep enough pockets to get the job done. That is a good start. In other words, do the exact opposite of what the Nuclear Liability Act does. That gets you close to responsibility. Then there are issues of low level radiation, as reactors are designed to emit and disperse radioactive waste and the design is based on 20-year-old science that is significantly out of date regarding the effects of that. The informed consent of those exposed is an important principle to me. I take the approach that people who are exposed to hazards and risks have rights and should have their consensus bought or achieved in some way. That is where I come from.
For carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, there has to be some style of Politburo centralization involved. We have to get together and decide what the negative value of those emissions is to be internalized, and it should be internalized through something like tradable emission rights or tradable emission permits or something of that kind. It is economically equivalent to carbon taxes. It ends up with the same kind of impact. The money ends up in a different place, which is why it is politically very different, but from an incentive point of view it means that those who want to buy a bigger car, burn more gas, and emit more additives have to pay a lot more for the privilege of doing so. Those who want to do less, pay less.
I found it interesting when the federal government came out with its Green Paper on the environment many years ago, a couple of governments ago. The discussion of internalizing externalities and economic mechanisms for putting in these incentives was discussed. The government said that it wanted to do this in order to get the signals right, up to the point of not changing the level of activity in the various sectors of our economy.
What is so elegant and radical about internalizing externalities is that it does change the level of activity in the different sectors of our economy. In some ways it seems a very conservative kind of motherhood thing to make people pay for their own damage, but in fact it is more radical than anything that most governments would consider doing because it will take some things completely off the shelf and put other things on the shelf, and the things that will be on the shelf will be better and cleaner and more benign than the things that are now on the shelf.
Senator Taylor: If you internalize the external cost, the danger, you put a good argument forward for nuclear energy. We do not do that with hydrocarbon energy. As a matter of fact, we are doing our best now to encourage Saddam Hussein to export hydrocarbons because the cost is far too high. We were putting restrictions on some people selling oil in the international market and now we are not. Outside of the Kyoto agreement, through which we are trying to cut down CO2 emissions -- and even there the hydrocarbon industry is complaining loudly -- we are not internalizing external dangers of hydrocarbons, so why should we internalize the external dangers of nuclear, or do you say we are wrong in both cases?
Mr. Rubin: Comparing apples with apples, the risks of a gas-fired generation station exploding are completely borne by the owner-operator of that facility.
Senator Taylor: I am talking about atmospheric pollution, which is the biggest danger from the use of hydrocarbon. It increases asthma and causes smog. It probably kills hundreds of thousands of people, and coal is even worse. I will admit that they do not blow up, although the odd refinery does. But all the danger hazard with nuclear is at the blow-up point, whereas the danger hazard with the alternative is spread across the world. That is why I wanted to ask you about your model. Is there not a high likelihood that many more people are killed with small doses of smog, sulphur, et cetera, here and there around the world than are with the odd nuclear plant blowing up?
Mr. Rubin: The evidence is clear that the emissions, especially from coal-fired generating stations, are certainly killing people, and those costs should definitely be internalized. The Government of Ontario, for example, just blew an opportunity to get very strict on not only electricity generating emitters of smog producing compounds but also on industrial producers who are getting an extra year or two. Energy Probe has been working hard to get those emissions capped and reduced. I do not think there is a double standard there. In fact, if we do both -- that is, if we make the producers of nuclear risk bear the nuclear risk and we make the producers of coal-fired electricity bear the coal risk -- we will have the best of both. They are not the best alternatives for each other, as we have learned by now.
The Chairman: We allow everyone a lot of leeway, but we are interested in the safety aspect and not whether or not we should be using nuclear power.
Senator Taylor: I only raised that issue because I thought there was an attitude creeping in here that nuclear-generated power was unsafe and all the rest were safe. I wanted to get the point across that we were walking down a hazardous road no matter which way we looked at it.
The Chairman: You are quite right about that.
Mr. Rubin: What is special about nuclear power is that we, through our government, artificially created the irresponsibility. In the case of our emissions going into the air, that is the way it has always been. We all exhale and we all do not pay for exhaling. Our plants and our cars do it, too. We must fix that. However, we will have to be clever, aggressive and active to fix it. To me, it is much more outrageous when we find that that is the normal state of affairs. If you build a generating station and it blows up and destroys the houses around it or makes people move out, they will send you a bill. We have changed that, and that is crazy.
The Chairman: We have that point, and we appreciate it.
Senator Buchanan: You would make a good politician because you have the ability to sit there and discuss all these things and convince us of things that, perhaps, we do not know much about. I wonder how much you know about it. That is the art of politicians.
On the first page of your brief you state that:
Many people believe that the nuclear safety issue is too complicated for non-experts to understand. Although there are many complicated details, the issue is actually too simple for most experts to understand. The key to its simplicity is simply to follow the risk. Whenever anybody claims that a risk is small, negligible, or acceptable, find out if the speaker is actually bearing the risk. It is far too easy for most humans (even nice ones) to "accept" other people's risks.
What do you mean by that?
First, let me ask you this. We do not have nuclear power in Nova Scotia. I listened to people years ago who said that we would all die, in particular, in Western Nova Scotia, because when the inevitable happened and Point Lepreau blew up, everything would come across the Bay of Fundy and kill us all. That has never happened.
The Chairman: Senator Buchanan, I must inform you that Point Lepreau is listed as inadequate by the Atomic Energy Control Board.
Senator Buchanan: No. It has been operational for 18 years and there have not been any great problems with it.
The people to whom I have spoken over the years about nuclear power plants say that they are very safe and the risk is negligible. You have also stated that the risk is too small and negligible. Those people are the ones who are actually bearing the risk; they are the people who work and live around Point Lepreau. Others are working in plants in the United States. I went through a lot of this down in Connecticut, when some governors wanted the reactor in New Hampshire licensed and others said no. Eventually, it was licensed and there have been no problems since then. The only problem is that the people who were opposed to it ended up costing the consumers of power a lot more money than would have been the case if it had gone into licensing long before it actually did. The people to whom I spoke and the people who were here a few weeks ago say, "This is why it is safe. We would not operate it or licence it if it were unsafe." They appear to have the qualifications to be telling us that. They are actually working at it. What are your qualifications?
The Chairman: You had a prior question to that. I think you asked Mr. Rubin what he meant by the statement he made in his brief, and then this is your second question.
Mr. Rubin: It is all tied in together.
Senator Buchanan: Yes, I have tied it all in together.
Mr. Rubin: I described myself as a half-baked physicist. I graduated from MIT many years ago. It is now over 21 years that I have been immersing myself in these matters. I certainly would not want to replace Victor Snell and his colleagues at AECL and start designing reactors or writing their safety reports, because I do not think we would necessarily do a better job than they do. I do not profess to have that level of expertise. At some level, I am here with a philosophy. I have always been what I sometimes call a structuralist.
Senator Buchanan: Philosophies are great, but what is behind the philosophy? I took science and engineering and law and I call myself a half-baked engineer and a half-baked lawyer because I have been a politician for 33 years. How do you back up your philosophy with knowledge and expertise?
Mr. Rubin: One of Energy Probe's main claims to credibility and one of my main claims to credibility is our record at being right.
Senator Buchanan: I was waiting for you to say that.
The Chairman: Senator Buchanan, let Mr. Rubin answer the question and I will give you enough time to rebut.
Senator Buchanan: The witness is right, but where in Canada and the United States have the explosions of nuclear power plants been? There has only been Chernobyl, which as everyone knows is not the one you can set as an example.
Mr. Rubin: No. Canada has not, thank God, had a serious nuclear accident.
Senator Buchanan: Where are you right, then?
Mr. Rubin: I did not say we would have a serious accident by now. Whenever I have estimated the risks of a serious accident, they have always been 1 in 10,000 reactor years. The kind of debate we have with the nuclear industry is whether we are talking about 1 in 5,000 reactor years or 1 in a million reactor years. Occasionally, we will find a loopy nuclear person who says it is lower than 1 in a million reactor years, but not very often. That is the range of discussion.
We are in a field where one is too many for the neighbourhood; one is too many for the country, I believe; one is too many for the industry to be responsible for. In other words, the same risk that I am telling you is unacceptable is not a sure thing.
One of the tricky things about this risk, and one of the reasons that we come up with the wrong answers so often, is that the probability of a catastrophic accident is low enough that any individual working in the field can have a reasonable level of confidence that he will be retired before something happens. It is not something that we think we will have to get up and face Monday morning. It is not that level of risk. Humans are reasonably good at dealing with that level of risk, for example taking umbrellas on rainy days and that sort of thing. The question concerns how to be prudent about something that may end life as you know it in your part of your province, if it happens. It can happen, and the probability may be 1 in 5,000 years per unit or it may be 1 in a million years per unit. That is a very tricky thing for humans to wrap their head around. That is why we need at least the normal rules of human responsibility to try to get people to stare at the bedroom ceiling at night and come up with the right level of fear and prudence.
Senator Buchanan: What you are saying is great logic, no question about that. Now, let me give you an example. I come from a province where I defended -- and still do defend, contrary to many here -- the burning of coal. I grew up in Cape Breton, where we mine and burn coal and have done for years. At the present time, we generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity from coal-burning plants -- some with scrubbers, some without, some with fluidized beds where the SO2 levels are now lower than you will find anywhere in the eastern seaboard of North America. Having said that, I realize that it is coming to an end. They will not open the new Donkin mine; they have closed down one, and the other will operate probably for another 10 years.
What is the alternative to burning coal? What is the alternative to nuclear power plants? I have been given the answer that you must change your method of generating electricity to the sun and to the wind. We have taken a look at that. As politicians, we must look at how much the consumer is paying. The consumer cost of generating electricity from the sun and from the wind is too high, so how will you generate electricity? In Nova Scotia we are fortunate because we now have a large amount of natural gas offshore. It could be that in a few years we will be generating power from natural gas because the pipeline will go to Cape Breton. Without that natural gas, how do we generate electricity and do it in such a way that we will not bankrupt the consumer?
Mr. Rubin: You do it in whatever way the producers want to take a chance. You do not protect them from their own responsibilities. However, if people want to invest in a wind farm, let them do that.
Senator Buchanan: They will not do it in a wind farm.
Mr. Rubin: I did not think they would do it in Toronto, senator, but they are. It may well happen. We may have the eggbeaters going around.
Senator Buchanan: I see the eggbeaters in California, and it works, but the cost to the consumer is much more than if they were generating from other fuels.
Mr. Rubin: The cost is being paid by the consumers.
Senator Buchanan: That is right.
Mr. Rubin: The cost is not being subsidized by taxpayers. If you find willing investors and willing consumers to produce and sell electricity made from gerbils running in cages, I have no problem with that. The balance of supply and demand will come from producers and suppliers.
In Nova Scotia, as you have said, it will be from more natural gas burning and, I believe, from more renewable resources. The natural gas burning will probably happen at roughly three times the efficiency of the burning of coal now, and roughly three times the efficiency of the fission process of uranium through co-generation. That is the most economical way to generate electricity. That is wonderful: economics sometimes works because it is the most efficient way and, therefore, the nicest way for the environment. You get the most useful product out the wires for the least inputs and the least nasty stuff out the stack.
That is a relatively green way to generate electricity -- not 100 per cent but roughly six times greener than coal burning. Renewable resources are even nicer. The consumer is given a choice. Some will pay extra for renewable resources rather than natural gas. I believe many will pay extra for gas co-generated electricity as opposed to coal and nuclear.
Senator Buchanan: I do not think so.
Mr. Rubin: Well, we will find out.
Senator Christensen: You talked about all of the possibilities of failure in nuclear power generation and also the question of who assumes the risk. Quite frankly, I do not care who assumes the risk if I am near it and it blows up, or anywhere for that matter, because it will affect not only the immediate area but the globe as well. In your opinion, with today's technology, do you think that it is possible to have safe nuclear power generation?
Mr. Rubin: With today's human cleverness -- not exactly today's nuclear technology -- it is certainly possible to do much better than we are doing. It may be possible within the foreseeable future, that is, if an effort were expended, to build inherently safe, reasonably sized reactors. There are some inherently safe reactors.
Senator Christensen: Would you feel comfortable in recommending those "inherently safe reactors"?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. I have been quoted widely saying nice things about the SLOWPOKE reactor, for example, at the University of Toronto, which was just shut down. I was invited to the wake just before they shut it down. I have said that it is an inherently safely designed reactor because it is. I have no problem saying that.
One could look at that design of reactor and ask what would happen if the water ran out of the tank. What if someone maliciously took the control rod out and took it home? We could play what-if games until we were blue in the face. Unless you brought your own energy source, like dynamite or something, there basically is no way for the power of that reactor to distribute the poison inside that little can in the core of the reactor.
The designer of that reactor, John Hillborn of AECL, had a much easier job than the designers of the CANDU because it is a trivially small reactor and its peak output is something in the order of 20 kilowatts. It is a tiny reactor and at full capacity it does not generate much power. However, the principles that went into its design and similar thought processes could be applied by clever human beings who want the job of designing nuclear reactors to build inherent safety into larger reactors.
As far as I am concerned, one of the biggest blunders that AECL ever made -- otherwise intelligent people, I hasten to add -- is that when this same clever fellow, John Hillborn, scaled up the reactor, he indicated that they should put it under parking lots in shopping malls to run the lights and heat the shopping mall. He also recommended the reactors be put in the basements of apartment buildings to heat the apartment buildings. He made it big enough to produce energy. He scaled it up and he lost the inherent safety. He just came out on the wrong side of the line. Suddenly the thing does have the energy, on a bad day, if the water is lost, to distribute its poisons throughout the apartment building. He just did not stop to think. He did not realize how important his inadvertent accomplishment in the first design had been, so that he did not make it the number one priority in designing the bigger one. Partly as a result of that, no one bought the big one; it shut down, the project is dead, it is gone, he has retired, game over.
However, it is conceivable. There are a number of half-hearted design efforts around the world -- half hearted because no one in the developed world wants to invest in nuclear plants, because they are too smart. I actually brought a document on inherently safe or inherently safer reactors. There are a number of projects that could be promising. If I really wanted there to be more nuclear reactors in the world, that is where I would be looking -- namely, to try to design reactors, in effect, from the ground up, as if the neighbours' opinions mattered, as if we lived in a democracy, as if we were responsible for our actions. How good a job could we do? I believe we could get into the hundreds of megawatts range. There are scaling factors. With any given design, if you make it too big, you will lose that inherent safety. However, I believe we could get into hundreds of megawatts and still have inherent safety.
Senator Christensen: If you were going in that direction and if you could make them safe, as you say is possible, then why would you not feel comfortable in looking at nuclear generation for power?
Mr. Rubin: I am not religiously opposed to nuclear power. I am not sure that 100 years or even 50 years from now humans will not have come around to solving some of those problems. There are problems with reactor waste and the mines. It is not just about reactor safety. However, the reactor safety problem is, theoretically, soluble up to a point. It is not soluble if you tell the designers and operators you do not need to worry. No problem is soluble if you tell somebody not to solve that problem. That is just stupid.
However, if you went around trying to solve it as if it were important to solve it, I believe that that one is soluble. The problem is that it will not make the reactors that much cheaper. They are so far out of the marketplace it is a non-starter. It is a no-brainer now. They are losers all the way. You would need to be dealing with China to find a customer.
Senator Wilson: We have wandered all over the map tonight, which is interesting. I want to recall for the committee that your central point was that the creators, the owners and the promotion program of the nuclear reactors have not accepted the risk that they have created. My question is why not? It is important that the committee remember that.
The Chairman: Could you please shorten your answers? We do not have much time and other people wish to ask questions.
Mr. Rubin: Many of the things that we have discussed to make the world better are precisely things that owners, operators and designers might work harder on if they had an incentive to do so. We have artificially taken away that incentive.
Senator Buchanan: I am glad to hear you say that you are not ultimately opposed to nuclear power and that you would not oppose it if your safety concerns were looked after and you were satisfied; is that correct?
Mr. Rubin: There are other concerns, but the safety concern is solvable.
Senator Buchanan: You are saying, then, that AECL people, who are the ones involved in licensing nuclear reactors...
Mr. Rubin: AECB licences; AECL designs and sells them.
Senator Buchanan: Yes. They are saying that they would not licence nor have a nuclear power plant operated in Canada unless they were convinced it was safe.
Mr. Rubin: Yes, adequately safe, all things considered.
Senator Buchanan: Are you faulting what they are saying, then?
Mr. Rubin: Yes. They draw their own compromises and trade-offs, where they think the line should be drawn.
Senator Buchanan: They are experts in the field though.
Mr. Rubin: Yes, but this is not fundamentally a technical question. The question of safety is not ultimately technical. The means of delivering safety are technical. I make this distinction, for example, in radiation safety and radiation protection all the time.
We have a distant academic group of unaccountable people, in Geneva or Vienna or somewhere, called the International Commission on Radiological Protection. They decide what the scientific consensus is on how much radiation causes how much cancer. Fine. They also then decide what is an acceptable dose of radiation for me to receive. Not fine. That is not a technical question. The first part is something like distilling all the best science from all the best studies around the world. You can determine the best estimate for how effective radiation is at causing cancer. From that, you can calculate what my risk is from the emissions from the Pickering nuclear generating station, but you cannot tell me whether or not that risk is acceptable because that is not a technical question. It is a political question; it is a human question.
Senator Buchanan: There is radiation in this room right now.
Mr. Rubin: Exactly. God has given us radiation, and if we could rail against that and change it a lot, some of us would. But some of us consider that a bargain in return for living on this wonderful planet. I take that view. I wish it were not here. I think we would have a lower cancer rate if it were not here, as does the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
Senator Buchanan: However, it has always been here.
Mr. Rubin: That is right. It probably caused mutations that helped us evolve to where we are now. I am glad it is not causing me to mutate that fast.
Anyway, there is a technical question on how to do it once you decide it has to be done. The other question is deciding what to do.
Senator Buchanan: I am not opposed to people like Mr. Rubin taking the positions they take. I am not opposed to that because we must have people like Mr. Rubin in society to counter people like me who are not believers in what you are saying. It does not have to be proven to me.
Senator Finnerty: I have one question going back to Senator Wilson's question about earthquakes. I understand Pickering is built on a fault. How large an earthquake and from what distance from the rafter would be sufficient to cause a breach in the containment? Have you done a study on that?
Mr. Rubin: I have not done my own studies. I am not a seismologist. I am not the person who should do the study, but several studies have been done. One of the best studies on the earthquake risk -- that is, the risk of serious ground motion -- was done in response to our lawsuit over the Nuclear Liability Act, because we were pushing seismic risk. As a result Canada and the nuclear establishment in Canada went farther in quantifying the risk near Pickering and Darlington than they had before, so we advanced the science. Partly as a result of that, the Atomic Energy Control Board required Ontario Hydro, now OPG, to do a seismic margin assessment.
There have been a number of studies. Several of them have shown that the pressure relief duct, the kind of vacuum cleaner hose that connects the eight reactors to the vacuum building, is probably the most vulnerable part of the structure. Some of them have shown it failing at ground accelerations that seem easily achievable by the kinds of earthquakes that seem conceivable. The seismic margin assessment I think has come up with some design changes, but mostly reassuring results. I have not really gotten into them, nor am I necessarily the best person to review them. You choose an earthquake; how big a shake do you want to look at? That is the first thing that is done. The one that Ontario Hydro chose is lower than several geologists who are concerned about the faulting in the area thought they should have chosen.
Again, I do not see an answer to the responsibility as substitute. First, hold them responsible, and then let them say they feel comfortable. Perhaps they will then choose to protect themselves against the proper threat. As long as they are inside the bunker, I do not want them to tell me that they made the right choices in what to analyze.
The Chairman: Mr. Rubin, I do have one or two questions. Since our focus is on nuclear safety and not all the aspects of that could be explored today, would you mind if we sent you some of the questions that our researcher has prepared? You could answer them for us by computer or by paper, whichever you wish. Would that be too great a burden to impose on you?
Mr. Rubin: I will try. If it is, I will probably fail to carry it out. I will do my best.
Senator Buchanan: We were in California a few years ago. I was astounded by the small number of oil burning plants, and there were no coal burning plants at all. They generate most of their electricity through nuclear and some gas and they get a minuscule amount of power from the windmills that we saw. They do not appear to have many problems with nuclear power plants, yet I am told that California is probably the area in North America most prone to earthquakes.
Mr. Rubin: Yes, and they have their version of the Nuclear Liability Act. I am not shocked that the nuclear industry's in-house regulator approves nuclear generating stations on fault lines in California.
If you look at the generating capacity that is on the ground, whether in Canada or in California, you come up with one picture. If you look at what has been built in the last five or 10 years, or what is to be built in the next five or 10 years, you come up with a totally different picture. We are in a transition phase away from coal and nuclear and toward renewables and co-generation, but we have not yet arrived there.
Senator Buchanan: You will be surprised to know that for over 15 years I absolutely opposed even the suggestion of building a nuclear plant on the south shore of Nova Scotia. I would still oppose it because there is no need for it. It is not because I am that frightened of it; it is that I knew all along that the gas was there.
Mr. Rubin: Point Lepreau had a market and it has driven New Brunswick Power to what would be called bankruptcy, except for the Crown. New Brunswick Power is now worth less than nothing on its own books, and it is all because of Point Lepreau.
If you look at the testimony you received from AECL and AECB, you will find at several points in that testimony discussion of risks and benefits and trade-offs between them. If you look at documents from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Commission on Radiological Protection, you will see that they do not want to lose the benefits. None of those agencies has ever examined the benefits, nor do they have a shred of expertise. I maintain that the benefits have so far been negative, without counting the accident risk and without counting the Nuclear Liability Act. We have destroyed wealth in Canada by generating power in this particular way rather than in other ways.
The Chairman: In the testimony from AECL we heard that it would cost $1,850 per kilowatt to build a CANDU reactor in Canada, which is three or four times as much as the new gas turbine would cost. Do you agree with that estimate?
Mr. Rubin: It sound optimistic to me.
The Chairman: In that same testimony they said that in the 20 years that reactors have been built in the United States the factor was much greater, that it was $3,000 to $4,000 a kilowatt.
Senator Taylor: The cost of building a natural gas generator per kilowatt is much cheaper than nuclear, but the fuel for a natural gas generator will cost much more.
Mr. Rubin: I will say two things about that. First, the nuclear industry is what I call a promising industry. It has always promised. We had probably the most expensive environmental assessment hearing in the history of the world in Ontario around 1990, the Demand/Supply Plan hearing, to give Ontario Hydro approval to build 10 more nuclear reactors. It did not go to completion, but it did end up spending over $100 million, I believe, several millions of which went to AECL to subsidize their wonderful performance at the hearing.
During that time, the power from the Darlington nuclear generating station became Canada's most expensive power. It was hard to build a solar photovoltaic generator to generate electricity more expensively than Darlington did in its first year.
Toward the end of that hearing, the super brains at Ontario Hydro, who had told us in advance that Darlington was going to be cheap, come out with a study that said that Darlington B, the next one, would be pretty cheap, and they revised downward their estimate of the cost of the next theoretical nuclear generating station. Reality was going through the roof -- no one could afford it -- and theory was getting better. Building a cheap nuclear generating station in your mind is not that hard; building it on the ground turns out to be much more difficult.
The second thing is that getting reliable output from it for a few decades in order to pay off the capital cost turns out to be nearly impossible. David Torgerson kept telling you that the problem with windmills is what you do when the wind is not blowing and that the problem with solar is what you do when the sun is not shining. You do exactly the same as you do with Pickering A and Bruce A: you get your power somewhere else; you just do not take as big a bath as you do if you have built a nuclear station.
Senator Buchanan: I should like you to be a spokesman for Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the federal government moving ahead with tidal power with which you can generate 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts of power, with no fuel cost whatsoever, whenever the tides are ebbing and flowing. We have a plant in Annapolis Royal that generates electricity from the tides.
The Chairman: I am glad to see that there is a meeting of minds here. However, perhaps you could speak privately after the meeting.
I want to explore the Pickering situation, although not in great depth because we do not have much time left. I understand that there are still a lot of concerns from the community and we did not get a very clear picture from AECB of why a comprehensive study, in which they would have had to explore alternatives, was not done rather than screening. What are your thoughts on that? It was not clear to me why AECB has not allowed that to happen. Apparently the situation is not finished, but we get the strong impression that they will not have that kind of an environmental assessment.
Mr. Rubin: AECB has decided that a screening will be adequate. They can change their mind, but that has been their decision. It has not historically been the role of the Atomic Energy Control Board to trigger environmental assessments where they did not have to. One can read through year after year of Atomic Energy Control Board minutes before the passage of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and see that the hot key was pressed on the computer to spill in the boilerplate prose that said that the board decided that the environmental impacts and public concerns were not such as to warrant a public hearing. They just kept saying the same thing to ensure that whatever decision they were making did not trigger an environmental assessment.
There have been one or two occasions on which they said that something did warrant an environmental assessment. The decommissioning of uranium mines was notable. However, I think they were more or less true to form in this case. They were within their rights, as far as I can see, to do what they did. I do not support what they did, but they were within their rights.
The carriage of the assessment to date has been very disappointing for those of us who were involved. For example, the draft terms of reference of the review were circulated for an extremely short period of time and the staff of the control board gave themselves something on the order of a week to receive everyone's comments and then come out with the final terms of reference. Well, what is the probability that they will take your comments seriously if the stuff is already at the printer by the time your comments arrive? It does not inspire confidence in the process.
The Chairman: Since you have had some experience with this process, do you have any thoughts as to how it could be made better? The whole environmental assessment process in Canada has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. I do not even think the legislation has been tested as to its proper functioning in major projects like this. Do you have any thoughts on that? You may not want to share them with us at this moment, but we would like to hear them. I think you would agree that that is one element in the whole consideration of safety. In fact, it may even be a key element in order to get the public process and the proper kinds of perspective on the whole safety situation.
Mr. Rubin: The principle of community involvement and the principle of gaining consent from the risk takers, namely, the neighbours, is a beautiful principle, especially in a democracy. There are times when that has worked, and environmental assessment has often been helpful in that regard, but it has not been the process.
For example, there are a number of cases in Ontario where private waste dump operators have responded to the community around the waste dump in ways that I would consider very advanced and sensitive by not only hearing but also listening. They have done so not in an environmental assessment hearing but in order to avoid an environmental assessment hearing. Where that leads, ironically, is to a situation where you have kind of the iron hand and the velvet glove. It is almost as if you want an onerous process, but as long as everyone is happy you do not have to go there. Especially if you have profit maximizing, cost minimizing, bottom-line sensitive proponents, they will realize that the shortest way from A to B is to make the neighbours happy and to listen to what they really care about and to address precisely those concerns. That has happened, but not in the nuclear facility.
The Chairman: No, not in any truly major project. That does not happen in my experience. At any rate, I would be interested in hearing what other comments you might have about how that process, particularly in the case of Pickering, relates to our whole quest here to look at nuclear safety.
There is one other thing I should like to ask you. You say in your document that you can claim that a risk is unacceptable just by pointing to all the highly informed people who refuse to accept it. Can you give us a list of those highly informed people who refuse to accept it?
Mr. Rubin: That includes the entire nuclear industry in Canada that refuses to accept the financial risks for the off site consequences of a CANDU catastrophic accident. All of them except Hydro-Québec showed up in court to prove it. Threatening to take away the Nuclear Liability Act and striking it down in court would have made them responsible for the consequences of their actions. It would have forced them to accept the risk of their activities. They refused to accept it. They showed up in force and spent millions of dollars to ensure that they were not forced to accept the risks.
The Chairman: I see what you are saying.
Mr. Rubin: The people who understand this technology the best built it, designed, operate it and analyze it. I defer to them in their knowledge.
The Chairman: Thank you for coming here this evening. It was most interesting. I hope that you will answer the questions that we will send to you; many of them were not raised this evening and we would be most interested in hearing from you on that matter. We may even ask you to return at some time. Thank you, again.
The committee adjourned.