I wish I could have taken Premier Dalton McGuinty with me on my trips to Fukushima and Chernobyl last year.
If he had walked through the ghost towns created by those nuclear disasters or spoken with some of the 150,000 Japanese and 350,000 Ukrainians forced to leave their homes, he might raise an eyebrow at the thought of evacuating the areas surrounding the Pickering and Darlington reactors.
Nuclear energy simply isn’t worth the risk to people’s lives, homes, food supply and drinking water.
As the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster approaches, the McGuinty government continues to wear blinders and protect its friends in Ontario’s powerful nuclear lobby.
To be frank, this scares me. After what I’ve seen, however, I think fear is a reasonable emotion.
Whether in Japan or Canada, nuclear safety regulators don’t operate independently from the industry. This is dangerous.
Reactor operators effectively regulate themselves, with no outside voice questioning their reactors’ safety. This relationship set the stage for Fukushima.
In February, Greenpeace published a review of the causes of history’s major nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. It found that those disasters were the result not of technical errors or freak acts of nature, but of the failure of institutions to acknowledge and address reactor risks.
The Japanese are experts in assessing the risk of tsunamis. Before the Fukushima disaster, Japan’s safety regulator and Fukushima’s operator both had studies in their possession showing that a 10-metre tsunami could hit the Daiichi station. They ignored their own studies.
Other countries have taken stock of what happened at Fukushima. Germany, Switzerland and Belgium are replacing their nuclear reactors with safe green energy, while Italy voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to stay nuclear-free.
We’re told such a horrible life-changing accident can’t happen here. We’re reassured that Canadian reactor technology is safer, while an earthquake, tsunami or any other event is unimaginable. Such claims don’t stand up.
In the real world, a reactor meltdown happens somewhere every 10 years. Rather than spend tens of billions of dollars to build new reactors in the GTA, we need to accelerate our investment in green energy.
The Fukushima disaster was a wake-up call. It showed us that human error plays a part in nuclear disasters. Are we willing to subject ourselves to a life of testing our children’s food for radiation?
Shawn-Patrick Stensil is a nuclear analyst at Greenpeace Canada.
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