Sask. Party refusing to learn nuclear lesson
By any reasonable measure, the most important narrative facing Saskatchewan residents is one of bearing the brunt of the Saskatchewan Party’s poor choices.
Workers terminated from shuttered potash mines have to wonder why the Saskatchewan Party subsidized the elimination of their jobs, even while watching control over the industry shift out of the province. Parents are facing the reality of schools bursting at the seams with insufficient staff to support students. And people struggling with stagnant wages and high debt loads are seeing the government make decisions to benefit its friends and donors instead.
But there’s another story which particularly highlights the Saskatchewan Party’s simultaneous disregard for economic realities, public input and environmental imperatives.
When Brad Wall first took power, his party was determined to push nuclear development. It spent millions on a “Uranium Development Partnership” to have the nuclear industry write a wish list as to how to expand its operations, then tried to get that list approved through a public consultation process.
Needless to say, the results weren’t what the party hoped for — particularly when it came to nuclear power generation.
Even the Uranium Development Partnership couldn’t mount a particularly enthusiastic case for nuclear power.
The UDP noted that nuclear power was seen as unacceptably risky by the corporate sector, meaning the province would bear the downside of any development. It recognized that a long-term solution for nuclear waste still hasn’t been found — even after that waste has piled up for decades where nuclear power has been deployed.
And it pointed out that relying on “first-of-akind” technology was particularly dangerous — suggesting that even if Wall was determined to go ahead, he’d be best off waiting for another jurisdiction to absorb the burden of design and licensing phases as well as the performance risks of unproven concepts.
(Needless to say, the carbon capture and storage fiasco should have offered a reminder of that issue.)
When the public had its say through Dan Perrins’s consultation process, the response was unequivocal. Eighty-four per cent of respondents opposed any nuclear power in Saskatchewan, leading to Perrins’s conclusion that opposition to nuclear power was “overwhelming.”
One might have expected overwhelming public rejection to be the last word on the matter. And that goes doubly since the economic realities facing nuclear boosters have only become more dire: Financial markets have concluded that nuclear construction is an indicator of poor risk management, and the plummeting cost of renewable power generation (with new storage and distribution options following close behind) has confirmed that there’s no economic case for nuclear.
But the Saskatchewan Party never accepted the public’s verdict. And Premier Scott Moe’s recent attempt to pitch modular nuclear reactors shows that he’s determined to operate in denial of that public rejection.
Rather than merely pushing for an updated version of existing nuclear technology, Moe is promoting an even more extreme form of risk, focusing (and making our climate change policy dependent) on a concept that is still at a preliminary design phase, and which wouldn’t even see a prototype ready for at least another decade.
Meanwhile, our neighbours have moved on to more affordable and sustainable options. The province of Alberta has signed wind and solar production contracts for a lower cost than non-renewable alternatives, while improved interprovincial connections (backed by the federal government) are increasing our ability to use Manitoba hydro power to cover our base load needs.
We thus don’t have to look far to see how progress is being made on our most important challenges.
But Saskatchewan will never enjoy that progress as long as we’re stuck with a government determined to avoid learning from its past failures.
Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005.