The Air Canada Centre, the Power, and the Glory

Things are not yet all right in Toronto. Though recovery is proceeding apace, getting more rain in an hour than in a typical July brings down a strain on the systems that many of them just weren't built for. As I understand there are still spots in the west end that haven't had electricity since before the rain started falling, and while the policy of rolling blackouts that Toronto Hydro instituted yesterday may have spared the city from a further collapse of its electrical grid, the simple fact is that in parts it really is "hanging by a thread," as has been said. Mayor Ford was right when he asked the people of Toronto to cut back their power consumption--the less juice is being sucked up, after all, the less strain there is on the transmission system and the less chance that something new will break before the flooded transmission stations in Etobicoke get returned to service.

It seems that no one told this to the management of the Air Canada Centre... or, more realistically, they just didn't give a damn. Last night at 7 o'clock, when the rolling blackouts were flickering their way through west Toronto, the twelve-meter big-screen that overlooks Bremner Boulevard was lit up as if power was free. A big-screen that probably consumes more electricity than entire houses. A big-screen that shows nothing but an endless loop of commercials. God forbid the people milling around waiting for the One Direction concert be unable to learn about the price of pitchers at the Real Sports Bar & Grill or watch the same goddamn car commercials over and over.

Oh, thank god! If I couldn't watch silent car commercials on a television bigger than my apartment, I would just die.

I was here in Toronto for the 2003 blackout as well. I remember the entire city being dark, I remember the electricity coming back only gradually, the next day, with the TTC still shut down so as not to tax the grid, and I remember the pictures and video of City Hall with practically every light in both towers burning. As I recall, the municipal government took some flak for that. While yesterday's power situation was far less grave, that doesn't mean that the ACC should get off easy. Turning off their exterior screen is quite literally the least they could have done to help conserve power--but, hell, this is a screen that keeps flickering well after the sun has set, just on the off chance that anyone wandering around Maple Leaf Square may never have known there is a thing called Kraft Dinner which they could buy.

I know that this one screen is just a drop in the bucket--and while it's an exceptionally large drop, the bucket isn't too small itself. For hell's sake, though... the ACC didn't even bother to put up the appearance of power conservation, and for fundamentally worthless shit at that. What am I supposed to think here?

In the Long Shadow of Fossils

It's easy to not follow an idea to its logical conclusion; after all, inaction always takes less energy than action, and this is particularly true when it comes to the question of energy generation. Many people, upon being presented with information "A," will jump to point "B" and make a vociferous stand, but will act as if they're entirely unaware that the existence of point "B" implies the existence of points "C" and "D" and so on.

This sort of thing comes up most frequently in connection with nuclear power. Nuclear power is practically synonymous with protests these days. While Japan's post-Fukushima nuclear stall officially ended yesterday with the achievement of a critical reaction at the Oi Nuclear Power Plant, tens of thousands protested in Tokyo. Closer to home, Ontario Power Generation has recently been inviting comments on its planned Deep Geologic Repository at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. This will be a facility buried six hundred and eighty meters underground and a kilometer away from the Lake Huron shoreline, used a storage facility for low- and intermediate-level waste. Just what is this waste? Intermediate waste is primarily used reactor and water filter parts, stored in steel-lined receptacles, and low-level waste takes the form of "mop heads, rags, paper towels, floor sweepings, and protective clothing used in the nuclear stations during routine operation and maintenance."

It says a lot about the Ontario nuclear industry that it goes to this sort of trouble to dispose of items that are only minimally radioactive. Unfortunately, the big problem here is not only that the average person doesn't have much idea of what nuclear waste is, but that the vague ideas they do have are probably informed greatly by The Simpsons - that is, rusty containers of fluorescent green ooze. Given that, it's no surprise that the public review process for the Deep Geologic Repository has attracted detractors.

Last week, the Toronto Star reported on the nature of many of the comments that have been received. Some are calm and reasonable, like the Bruce Peninsula Environment Group's request for further investigation into temperature increases in underground works. Some are less so - many are Americans calling for the cancellation of the repository because of its proximity to Lake Huron, with messages that give me the impression that they jumped straight to point "B" and looked no further than "Lake Huron" and "nuclear waste disposal." There's one, however, that after reading it left me infurated for hours. It's from Rich Moser in Santa Barbara, California, and funnily enough, the original email the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency was flagged as SPAM by its email system.

"It's time Canada leads the way and does what Japan finally found out is the best thing for the Earth: quit nuclear altogether," Moser wrote. "If canada leads, maybe the stupid USA (my country) will follow."

I can understand people who think nuclear power is dangerous. I can understand people who don't want nuclear reactors near their homes. I can even understand the protests in Japan, as much as I think they're counterproductive. To claim that a nuclear phaseout is "the best thing for the Earth," however--that's going way beyond ideology. It's planting your flag on the summit of Mount Look How Goddamn Ignorant I Am, and what that flag says is that you don't actually know anything about nuclear power that's more advanced than "ATOMZ = BAD."

I mean, look at all that steam! Isn't that just so sinister?

Hell, though, I'm game--let's go through this hypothetical. Nuclear power currently accounts for around 13% of the world's electrical generation capacity, with most of this found in France, Japan, and the United States. Now, a knee-jerk anti-nuclear person who makes claims like the above would probably say that all that nuclear power would be replaced by clean, green, renewable power like solar and wind. That's what's happening in Germany, right? Think again. Last year, Germany embarked on a plan to use a clean energy fund to finance the construction of--wind turbines? Solar farms? No! Coal and gas power plants! Because, you see, they have to make up for the thirteen gigawatts of generation that will disappear when its nuclear plants are taken offline over the next decade, because oh my god! A nuclear plant built next to a seismic zone on the other side of the planet and operated by a criminally negligent company got swamped by a thousand-year tsunami and experienced a meltdown!

Let's take this back to Ontario, though. Let's say that for whatever crazy reason, the Ontario government agrees with Mr. Moser and phases out its nuclear capacity. Is it going to be replaced with renewables? Don't make me laugh, man. Ontario's renewable energy infrastructure is essentially limited to two wind turbines, one of which is already on the grounds of a nuclear plant. New hydroelectric plants are not particularly likely; as early as 1955, almost all of Ontario's hydro-potential rivers had already been dammed. They didn't go up to survey the Little Abitibi for their health, you know. Not with all those blackflies. No, especially given the current economic climate, what the Ontario government would most likely do would be tear up its phaseout pledges and build new coal power plants.

Coal power plants like the Nanticoke Generating Station, the last coal plant left in Ontario, the largest of its kind in North America, and Canada's largest single producer of greenhouse gases. People have been agitating for its shutdown as far back as 2004, and though the original shutdown timeline of 2007 was missed, Ontario seems on-track to step away from this most primitive of generating technologies in 2014. As for its emissions? Well, that's a thing.

In 2002, according to PollutionWatch, Nanticoke's pollution output included 5,514 tonnes of toxic particulate material with a diameter less than ten microns, small enough to penetrate the lungs and be absorbed into the bloodstream. In 2006, when unit shutdowns were already underway, it produced 1,640 tonnes of hydrochloric acid, 5,500 tonnes of carbon monoxide, and nearly sixty-two thousand tonnes of sulfur dioxide, one of the building blocks of acid rain. These pollutants were spewed in a shadow that stretches as far as Montreal, a shadow that I lived my entire life in until I moved out west.

For comparison, here's how much hydrochloric acid, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide a nuclear plant emits into the atmosphere: zero tonnes. Oh, and there's also the issue of greenhouse gases--each 676-megawatt CANDU-6 reactor, the kind used at Gentilly in Quebec and Point Lepreau in New Brunswick and Qinshan in China, prevents the annual emission of 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would happen if that electricity was instead produced by coal.

I found that out back in 2003, when I was doing research into the history of Ontario Hydro for a university essay. That was one of the big things that convinced me that nuclear power was the best way forward, and that nuclear power was the best for Earth.

Another Case for Distributed Generation

It's been hard for me to come to terms with the fact that it's summer. You wouldn't know it if you'd spent the last little while in the Pacific Northwest, where Juneuary has dominated from Vancouver down to Portland; I understand that June 2012 in Vancouver may end up being one of the coldest on record. Personally, I prefer ice to fire--and as it turns out, that may be one of the advantages of having mountains to the east.

In that vast and sprawling land beyond the mountains, things aren't nearly as cool. Over the past few days, high heat and tinderbox-dry conditions fueled wildfires that still burn across huge stretches of Colorado. On Friday night, the area around Washington, D.C. was hit by powerful thunderstorms that clobbered the power lines; millions of people were left without power and states of emergency were declared in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.

Power outages can be unpleasant at the best of times, but this one comes in the middle of a heat wave. On Friday, the temperature in Washington topped 40 degrees Celsius. As I write, at 11:30 PM ET on Saturday night, it's still 30 degrees there and the next few days promise more storms and more scorching heat. If that wasn't enough, it could be as much as a *week* before electricity is fully restored to the affected area. Given the fury of the summer storms that passed through, leaving enough knocked-down trees and other debris that the National Guard has been called in to clear it up, it's no wonder that the distribution systems have been interrupted.

Still, it's not like this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Everyone's been through a power outage, and with the North American infrastructure deficit getting bigger and bigger with each passing year. Those towers and wires don't stay up because it's just their nature to stay up, you know. It's a problem that will have to be addressed, sooner or later--whether it be because we want to, or because we have no choice but to.

Get a load of those kilovolts!

The modern power delivery infrastructure is pretty much unchanged from the dawn of the electrical age: we have central power plants, be they nuclear, hydroelectric, natural gas, or what have you, and from them power lines reach out to connect cities and continents. The interconnections of the power grid make it possible for electricity generated in one place to fill the demands of another, but it can also lead to cascading blackouts such as the one experienced in the northeast ten years ago. It's highly centralized, and centralized systems are highly vulnerable to disruption.

The potential of a decentralized power generation system is just that, right now; potential--still, it's more feasible now than it ever has been before. Solar and wind generators have been steadily dropping in price for decades, and as prices decrease and efficiencies increase their possibilities become more and more apparent. Even now, Canadian Tire sells a line of personal wind turbines for $800 before tax. Admittedly, that's a fair chunk of change, and the turbines only generate six hundred watts of power--but that's more than enough to run, say, a desk fan. During a sustained power outage in the middle of a heat wave, six hundred watts is a hell of a lot better than zero. For people particularly sensitive to heat, it could be the difference between life and death, and the greater the extent to which personal generating systems like these are adopted, the more the price will go down.

I'm not saying that power generation would be completely decentralized, of course--there will always be a need for consistent baseload generation of the sort that consistent generators like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear excel at. Nevertheless, if every house and apartment had its own wind turbine and solar panel, along with a battery bank to be charged when generating conditions are good, that would vastly decrease the strain on the system as a whole. A system that isn't strained is a system that can be more effectively maintained, and it's resilient. We shouldn't be satisfied with brittle, fragile infrastructures that are brought low by storms. We should tolerate them if need be, but only as long as need be.

saisho ni sekitan ga kesu

The lights are still on in Japan, but a year after Fukushima the question on everyone's mind is how best to keep them on. After experiencing such a massive shock to the system, the whole idea of nuclear power is being approached very skeptically in Japan; it's a vast change from before the tsunami, when government plans were for Japan to continue increasing the nuclear foundation of its generation capacity. Considering the incompetence with which Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors, approached not only the disaster but disaster planning - ignoring or dismissing multiple opportunities in past years which, if implemented, could have prevented the meltdown - along with the dream of "absolute nuclear safety" being shattered in such a dramatic way, it's absolutely reasonable for people to have second thoughts. Of all the nuclear reactors in Japan, by the end of this month only the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido will still be generating power, with the remainder suspended for checkups and stress-testing.

Utilities across Japan are, therefore, confronting hard choices: not only what to do to keep the lights on for the immediate future, but how to approach power generation in the years and decades to come. Earlier this week the Japan Times reported that the Kansai Electric Power Company, which supplies electricity to Japan's populous Kansai region partially from eleven nuclear reactors, is potentially facing demands from some of its shareholders - namely the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka - to phase out its nuclear generation capacity, accounting for nearly half of its total supply, and replace it with renewables.

When taken in isolation, this is a laudable goal; however, laudable goals don't easily translate into reality, and it's possible that the highly understandable reaction to the Fukushima disaster may end up worsening things in its own way.

The Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. Photo by Mugu-shisai, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The nuclear power plants that supply the Kansai region are situated in Fukui Prefecture, on the coast of the Sea of Japan and about seventy kilometers as the crow flies from Kyoto. What's significantly closer is the northern coast of Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan and a reservoir used by fifteen million people. A sufficiently bad nuclear accident could contaminate the lake - which, to me, is just another reason for safety measures at the existing plants to be beefed up. It's not as if the plants are going to be decomissioned tomorrow; hell, by the original schedules, Fukushima Daiichi was to have already begun the decomissioning process on the day the tsunami struck.

Japan is in a difficult place when it comes to nuclear power for the very reasons that led it to install nuclear power in the first place; it's a geographically small, relatively resource-poor country. Germany may be trumpeting the fact that it's shutting down all its reactors and increasing the presence of renewable power sources in its mix, but what tends not to be mentioned is how Germany is bringing more and more coal-burning power plants on line to fill the gap - which, if you care about air pollution and the increased deaths it absolutely causes or atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide, is a significant problem. It's hardly the "environmental" choice.

Fortunately, the mayors aren't pulling for coal - however, in addition to their drive for renewables, they want KEPCO to replace its nuclear reactors with liquefied natural gas power plants; granted, they're not as polluting as coal-burning plants, but they still pollute and still emit carbon dioxide.

My own view of this is simple - if KEPCO is to replace its reactors, it should first demonstrate that it's capable of replacing a substantial mix of its generating capacity... how fortunate for my argument that its mix also includes twenty thosuand megawatts worth of "thermal" generating sources. It's unclear which of these are coal-burning plants, since that lovely word "thermal" hides so much, but with more than a quarter of Japan's electricity coming from burning coal I don't think it's a much of a leap to suggest that at least some are.

So - let KEPCO first mothball its existing coal power plants, replacing them with renewables and - if necessary - LNG. If there aren't any problems with that kind of switchover, then the drive toward a local phase-out of nuclear would at least have the precedent of a functional solution. The real enemy here is coal; personally, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than even within sight of a coal-burner's smokestacks.