Green Alternatives to Nuclear Power
Posted Mar 16, 2011 03:16:04 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The impact of the earthquake and tsunami on Japan’s nuclear plants has raised the question about nuclear safety all over the world.
Ontario’s NDP critic, Howard Hampton is opposed to nuclear expansion and wants the government to look towards greener alternatives.
Hampton says in the short term we have a number of nuclear plants in the province that are getting older. Some are shut down to be refurbished, others are closed permanently. It’s the NDP’s position that we should not be building any new nuclear facilities, and we should be careful about how many we renovate.
He says it’s expensive and there are a number of safety issues. In Ontario, the CANDU reactors have a number of back up systems with safety features, but even those would suffer in the same situation that has happened in Japan.
Hampton says we are energy hogs in Ontario, and we still don’t have an effective energy conservation strategy compared to other jurisdictions.
In Manitoba, the government will give low interest loans to re-insulate your home, put in a high efficiency natural gas furnace, and purchase high efficiency appliances that use less electricity. You pay back the loan based upon how much you save on your hydro and heating bills. Hampton says that’s something people can afford. As well, we have a lot of wasted heat, like energy that escapes from factory stacks from steel mills and auto assembly plants. He says we can use that wasted heat to generate steam and create electricity.
We also need to become more reliant on wind and solar energies. If we start now, Hampton believes that in the next 20 years, we should be able to cut our use of nuclear energy by about half.
