Collaborative Proposal Creation
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Proposal text
Be it resolved that the Green Party of Canada long conflicted between the horror of nuclear weapons and the need to support reliable and clean nuclear power,
• will adopt a view of nuclear power that is consistent with the best scientific knowledge and practices, and
• will advocate for the continued development of nuclear power technologies, extraction technologies, nuclear waste disposal, and alternative nuclear fuels.
Type of Proposal
Public policy that the party would represent
Objective / Benefit
The GPC has a longstanding public position of preferring renewable power generation instead of nuclear power generation. Yet not one policy currently addresses the beneficial effects of nuclear power. All policy references to nuclear are to the prevention and control of nuclear weapons.
The objective of this policy is to establish a new policy that addresses the benefits of the use of nuclear power generation in a changing environment that urgently needs reliable power generation.
- Whereas the policies of the Green Party of Canada are to be based on scientific principles, and
- Whereas we now know how to build nuclear power plants that are far safer than our current operational designs, and
- Whereas nuclear power generation can be demonstrated,
- to be the least polluting of all electricity generation technologies, in terms of CO2 production per MW of capacity,
- to have the smallest footprint in terms of station size, acres per MW of installed capacity,
- to have the lowest volume of waste production in terms of tons per MW,
- to require the least input of scarce resources in terms of tons per MW,
- to have the best safety record of all generation facilities in terms of loss of human life per MW of installed capacity, and
- Whereas we do know what to do with spent nuclear fuel to ensure safety.
This policy will complement and expand the policies of the Green Party of Canada, making them more appropriate in an intellectually honest way.
If your proposal replaces an existing policy or policies, which one does it replace?
This is new policy. All existing policy addresses various aspects of the undesirability of nuclear weapons. It does not in any way reduce the relevance of those policies.
List any supporting evidence for your proposal
1. Jack Devanney, The Two Lies that killed nuclear:
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear
2. Jack Devanney, Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop:
3. Cleo Abram, The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
4. Burning Nuclear waste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u44skO-nMo
5. IEA on Nuclear Power:
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power
6. Our World in Data, Death Toll from Chernobyl and Fukushima:
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
7. Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, LNT:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/health/linear-non-threshold-model/index.cfm
8. Original text of this proposal: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/j5bvh4dagagllrhus59h9/GPC-Nuclear.docx?rlkey=8ozj24vcajsvofrtgtpy9pt85&st=uvmsga8g&dl=0
Does this proposal affect any particular group and what efforts have been made to consult with the group or groups?
There are many in the party and outside, who consider Nuclear Power to be so dangerous as to be categorically denied as a solution to our future power needs. This policy reverses that perception of Nuclear Power. It is likely to alienate such people in their support of the party.
There is also likely to be an adverse reaction from the Global Greens, which would need to be carefully managed, though it is to be hoped that this motion will start a greens-wide reassessment of their positions on nuclear power.
Jurisdiction: Is this proposal under federal jurisdiction?
Yes
Please indicate the language the proposal is being submitted in.
English
This proposal is being evaluated
Posted on the Continuous Motion Development Vote tab for member review prior to the all-member vote.
Amendments (3)
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Created at
24/05/2024 -
- 0
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Created at
05/07/2024 -
- 0
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Created at
10/07/2024 -
- 2
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Conversation with Derek Doda
Part 2 of 5
You’ve probably heard someone say something along the lines of “it’s waste that sits around radioactive for thousands of years”.
That is a correct statement, and also misleading. It paints a picture that spent fuel is this super dangerous substance that you can’t get near for thousands of years.
We need to pick apart what “radioactive for thousands of years” actually means.
Half life is how quickly an atom decays. When it decays it releases energy in the form of radiation and that atom turns into a different type of atom.
Let’s say you have 100 atoms. They have a half life of 1 day. After one day 50 of your atoms have released radiation and become a different type of atom. The next day 25 atoms, and then 12, 6, 3, so on and so forth.
The important takeaway from this is the shorter the half life an atom has, the more quickly it releases radiation. The ones with a short half life are the dangerous ones. The ones with a longer half life are slower to release radiation and thus safer.
My favourite video to illustrate this is workers preparing CANDU fuel bundles. Natural uranium has a very long half life and it’s safe to be around and handle.
https://youtu.be/c7ehyxRBMbw?t=266
You really need to understand half life in order to understand spent fuel storage. Spent fuel is the most dangerous right when it’s been removed from a reactor.
It has a lot of different radioactive atoms with VERY short half lives. They are going crazy, decaying and releasing radiation. But, because they have a short half life, they only stick around for a short amount of time. It loses 80-90% of its radiation in the first 10 years.
The curve of radioactivity after being in a reactor looks like this.
https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/3b44d04c-31ad-47f8-8217-344f0d9c516b/Decay-in-radioactivity-of-fission-products.png.aspx
It spends its first 10 years in a cooling pond, and afterward goes into dry cask storage. It’s now safe enough that it just sits there releasing small amounts of heat. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a single fatality in regards to spent fuel in the entire nuclear industry.
The question now is, if we wanted to at what point could we put that spent fuel back in the ground? The general answer: When it’s the same radioactivity as when it came out of the ground. This is where we have an issue. The shorter half life atoms are gone and now we only have longer half lives. It’s a long wait to go from “somewhat safe” to “completely safe”. This is a negative and something the industry has to deal with. But it’s also not something to overreact to.
I recommend this video where they calculated how long it would take before you could cuddle a spent fuel bundle for a two hour movie. Spoiler, it’s 400 years. Or only 100 years if you want to remain ten feet away from it. I do recommend the whole video though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM-b5-uD6jU&t=895s
ON WASTE: High Level Nuclear Waste (HLW) is referred to as spent fuel because that is how the entire industry refers to it, including the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency. There are also Intermediate Level Wastes (ILW) and Low Level Wastes (LLW). These all emit various types of radiation. The danger is in release of radionuclides into our environment and therefore into our bodies. Radionuclides are the products of any nuclear reaction. They mimic the atoms in our bodies, trade places (in bone, muscle, DNA in fetuses, etc) where they continue to emit radiation, causing cancer and genetic defects. Health Canada has no jurisdiction over the CNSC. Community studies on the bioaccumulative effects of radionuclides in exposed neighbourhoods are few and far between. Here are some on Tritium, but there are other radionuclides we need to study. https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/new-evidence-on-tritium-hazards/
As a politician who's taken the time to knock on doors and speak with affected Canadians, I can personally tell you that there is a cancer epidemic in these communities, far beyond what one might consider 'normal'.
FACT: You can not simply stick the fuel from one kind of reactor into another.
Messing around with Spent fuel (HLW) from CANDU reactors is called reprocessing, but nuclear proponents tend to mislabel it 'recycling' (a form of greenwashing). Reprocessing creates at least seven new waste streams when solid CANDU HLW is liquified. The magic ingredient being extracted is plutonium. Plutonium does not exist anywhere in the universe except here on Earth. Humans created it, and with plutonium we can destroy Earth in about ten minutes. When India was given the materials and technology to reprocess, igniting a middle-powers nuclear arms race, Canada and the USA were responsible. There has been a global moratorium on reprocessing ever since. Now, with the ARC-100 design, with the Moltex design, with the Terrestrial Design (Stephen Harper) and with the experiments supporting all this at Chalk River (SNC-Lavalin: world renowned for corruption) we face the spectre of Canada being ground zero for a reprocessing renaissance - to profiteer off future exports of these SMRs to developing nations. THIS IS A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION NIGHTMARE.
CNSC approves incineration of LLW just 1.5 km from a small Indigenous nation, without their free, prior, informed consent. CNSC approves Cameco turning lakes in our true north into millennia-long radioactive wastelands https://youtu.be/6k-GRbgqwzQ?si=h0pxjqXY0Zzn6383 CNSC can't be trusted, nor it's frankenchild, the profit-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). The Crown MUST TAKE BACK CONTROL OF NUCLEAR WASTE and all aspects of the uranium fuel chain.
Seeing as this motion seeks to gag me, silencing my FACT BASED opinions on nuclear power, I'm taking the liberty of being as verbose as my pro-nuclear counterparts. Fun times.
Hi Sarah, nice to hear from you.
I agree that the release of radioactive material that you can absorb into your body is a concern. But we also have to draw lines on where we think issues appear. For example all of us eat food, and a lot of food contains Potassium-40 which is radioactive.
Here is a list of foods and how much Potassium 40 they have.
https://www.philrutherford.com/perspectives/K-40.pdf
My understanding is that tritium has a half life of 12 years. As it's a different version of hydrogen it behaves just just like hydrogen. So it has the same bio accumulation as water in the body. It basically goes in and out. For example we can compare tritium to potassium 40. If you had a banana smoothie you would need to drink 15 liters of Fukushima tritiated water and get the same amount of radiation.
https://ionactive.co.uk/resource-hub/blog/a-banana-smoothie-or-a-glass-of-tritiated-wastewater-from-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-plant
At very low radiation levels we really don't have a full understanding of what's going on. There are currently experiments trying to determine what happens to yeast at various types of radiation levels to try and understand this. Right now it looks like eliminating all sources of radiation would be bad for us. But I do believe that study hasn't released their findings yet.
For putting fuel into another reactor. It looks like the DUPIC fuel process is indeed that. They do need to take apart the fuel assembly and build a new one for a CANDU reactor. But it looks like they don't seperate any fissile material
https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/521401
"The DUPIC fuel cycle concept is characterized by burning spent PWR fuel again in CANDU, without separating any fissile material, taking advantage of high neutron economy of heavy water reactors"
I wish these comments had longer character limits because I would like to talk more than just throw talking points at you. But yes, Plutonium does occur naturally. It was found at Oklo in a naturally occuring nuclear reactor. It's a fascinating place because it lets us study how fission products and nuclear elements move in rocks.
I'm also not following. Can you please explain to me how the Moltex waste burner reactor is a nuclear weapons prolifferation nightmare? I'm not sure I'm understanding the point you're trying to make. Please elaborate.
I don't think anyone here is going to be a pro "turning lakes into radioative wasteland". It's a bit gruesome but if there is health issues being caused by nuclear it's usually pretty easy to discover. It stands out when doing statistical analysis. Seeing as you're into fact based opinions I'm sure you would agree. For example in Chernobyl they found thyroid diseases pretty easily. If true statistics should backup these health claims easily.
Part 3 of 5
What do we do with the spent fuel then?
There are a couple of options. In France they recycle their fuel. They remove the elements they don’t want, which go into storage. Then the rest can go back into a reactor.
We can put spent fuel in a deep geological repository. That I feel like is a waste of time.
My personal favourite is to put the spent fuel into a fast reactor. This is getting into nuclear physics. The quick and fast of it is that in a normal reactor you slow down the neutrons. In our CANDU reactors we use deuterium to really slow neutrons down. That’s how we can use natural uranium. A fast reactor as you might have guessed has really fast moving neutrons. In our spent fuel there are atoms heavier than uranium. The one that scares people the most is plutonium. In a fast reactor those atoms get split and then no longer exist. After being in a fast reactor your spent fuel only needs to be stored for 300 years. The long half life atoms have now been split. You’ve also used the fuel twice to generate electricity. Lastly, we can build a box that lasts 300 years, we have the box technology.
We are currently working on such a reactor in New Brunswick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCm-kmUWA8
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