By Kevin Potvin

Uranium is the new savior. You see it mentioned everywhere these days. It’s the method by which Alberta will manage to meet it’s obligations to quadruple output from the oilsands to meet America’s energy demands. It’s how electricity demand across North America will be met without burning more coal. It’s the foundation of the so-called hydrogen economy, the means by which hydrogen will be separated from oxygen in water, making for an alternative mobile fuel to lessen private cars’ dependence on Middle East oil. Even Charles Krauthammer, reprinted in the National Post, acknowledged that oil has no future and greenhouse gas emissions are wreaking climate change, then pointed to nuclear power as the answer to everything: “It doesn’t pollute the atmosphere. At all,” he wrote January 29. Nuclear is, in short, the way the world will heroically avoid greenhouse gas-induced climate catastrophe, devastating resource wars, and economic depression.

But.

There are two big “buts,” one old and familiar and the other new and less well-known. It may well be, as nuclear power’s champions are quick to repeat, that all the nuclear waste created in the world since the inception of the industry can fit in your average school gymnasium. But what they aren’t so quick to point out is the fact that all the nuclear waste that can fit in your average teaspoon is enough to kill a city and leave it uninhabitable for longer than there’ve been humans.

Nor is anyone nearly so confident about how to transport nuclear waste from generating sites around the country to that one gymnasium—or underground burial site somewhere in the Canadian Shield, the preferred method. Do you load up transport trailer trucks that drive for days on the nation’s highways to get to the remote site? Do they drive in winter? Do you load up train cars? Will train cars or trucks loaded with nuclear waste move through built-up urban areas, which is where all highways and train tracks go? How would emergency responders be prepared if there is a traffic accident or train derailment? Which municipal and provincial authorities would be alerted when a load of waste is on the move through their jurisdiction? How would this information be kept from saboteurs and terrorists? And how are the trucks or train cars loaded at the nuclear plant, and how are they unloaded at the burial site?

These are not inconsequential questions. They are the main reason why all nuclear power plants so far store their waste on-site. Moving it off the plant grounds is too dangerous. And so long as waste is stored on-site and not buried underground in some deep rock formation, it remains a terrific hazard. When anyone tells you the waste problem is solved by burial under rock, ask them the simple question of how they see the waste getting to that burial site.

The other big “but” involves the opposite end of the uranium cycle, the mining and refining of the stuff. Gary Lunn, federal conservative minister of natural resources, began his discussion this week in an interview on CBC Radio, regarding the prospects of nuclear power plants built to help make oil out of Alberta tar, by saying, “nuclear energy is absolutely pollution free.” He went on to say that “if you believe in climate change, you have to support” nuclear power.

While it may be that nuclear power generation itself is pollution free—aside from those pesky questions about waste—getting uranium out of the ground and delivered to nuclear power plants is not so pollution free a process. While the technology and safety standards inside nuclear power plants built today may be impressively high, the technology and safety surrounding the mining of uranium is very low. The job consists of the same activities all mining consists of: exploration, drilled cores, torn-away surfaces of hillsides, large-scale crushing of ores, accumulated heaps of tailings, run-off from those tailings into watersheds and by wind into airsheds, and a great deal of burning of energy of the fossil kind in each of these steps.

Uranium spot market prices have recently shot through the roof (increasing more than 1,000% since 2001) and analysts at a large mining conference last week in Vancouver, speaking on a panel called “The Uranium Rush,” predicted the price will stabilize at today’s high levels or go higher still. The reason? The world has entered the period of peak uranium production. Most sites in the world where uranium might be found have been found. Most of the easily-mined sites have been mined, leaving only the more inaccessible and poorer grade sites left. The low-hanging fruit is gone, and any new sources of uranium will involve many more exploratory holes punched through the surface, much larger mining holes in the ground, much larger volumes of ore per ounce of refined uranium, and much larger piles of potentially radioactive tailings exposed to prevailing winds and river systems. (There is growing evidence that depleted uranium in the air around the world, including here in Vancouver, has increased remarkably because of uranium mining, among other nuclear industrial reasons).

Some sites where uranium deposits are known to exist have not thus far been mined because they are too close to built up urban areas. As demand grows just to supply the world’s existing plants and war-munitions makers, not to mention all the new plants and war-munitions makers coming on stream in the next decade, the market price of uranium will rise, putting even more pressure on authorities to look at mining sites closer to urban areas, or in more environmentally sensitive regions. Some of the biggest un-tapped sources of raw uranium in the world are in British Columbia, and new Alberta nuclear power plants built to serve the needs of tar-sands refiners will likely depend on new permits issued for uranium mining sites in the pristine valleys of British Columbia.

Some supporters of the nuclear solution have dismissed concerns about the pressures on uranium supplies, pointing to the ability of suppliers to consistently meet sharp rises in demands thus far. What they don’t say, or know, is that nearly all of the increased demand for uranium in the last twelve years has been met by recycled decommissioned warheads in the old Soviet Union arsenal of nuclear bombs. While that provides a nice update to the urge to beat swords into ploughs, it is not a sustainable supply. It is in fact nearly depleted.

Rising prices of uranium and increased exploration and mining has all taken place just to maintain existing volumes of supply from mining as old mines are depleted or drop in productivity. When increased demand can no longer be met with recycled warheads, an event apparently as close as two years (though numbers are understandably obscure), the pressure on the uranium mining industry will be doubled. And it remains unclear whether it is even possible to substantially increase the world’s supply of uranium, no matter what market prices rise to.

Even if all these concerns are addressed, or ignored, there is still the problem in Alberta where greenhouse-gas emitting fuels are manufactured, even if it’s partly done with nuclear power. If a pollution-free nuclear power plant helps quadruple the production of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels, how can this “solution” be seen as a rational response to climate change? How could someone who “believes in climate change,” as Lunn, the Conservative minister, clumsily put it, support nuclear power when it promises to help massively increase the production of fossil fuels?

Proponents of nuclear power as a savior for our electricity supply problems, our greenhouse-gas emissions problems, and our oil and natural gas-supply problems, focus solely on the nuclear plant itself as an effective, safe, and pollution-free source of power. What they don’t look at is the whole uranium cycle, which includes the exploration, mining, shipping and refining of uranium, followed by the storage or shipping of the waste by-products on the other side. When the whole nuclear cycle is taken into consideration, the so-called pollution free, safe, and abundant solution to all our energy problems remains as elusive today as ever. There is no magic solution and uranium is just as problematical, if not more so, than fossil fuels.

There is a solution: we simply have to use much less energy, we have to stop flying and driving so much, and we have to stop consuming so many things. In short, make less and buy less. The problem is, nobody can make a lot of money with that solution, so it doesn’t get promoted, unlike nuclear, biofuels, ethanol, windmills, solar panels, hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas, fusion power, and so on and so on.