Daily Gleaner | Readers' Forum
As published on page C7 on March 7, 2005

Try learning about nuclear power

Dear Editor: A recent letter ("Power hike fuelled by stupidity") starts out with an interesting, if impractical, idea for saving New Brunswick taxpayers money by refusing to pay executives the huge sums they usually collect.

Then, with a casual "and by the way," he launches into an anti-nuclear rant that contains many statements passed as fact which are actually completely unsubstantiated.

First he confidently states that no CANDU reactor on the planet has ever been refurbished. I guess the complete replacement of pressure tubes at the four CANDU's of Pickering A in the early 1980s doesn't count?

Not to mention the recent return to service of Unit 4 at the same station and the impending return of Unit 1 which is approximately 80 per cent refurbished.

India has also successfully undertaken pressure tube replacement of its CANDU's and CANDU-derivatives.

New Brunswickers are also hardly Guinea pigs; whether Lepreau goes ahead or not the Quebec government is well into the planning stage to refurbish the similar vintage CANDU 6 at Gentilly.

Remember, these pressure tubes and feeders had to be done when AECL originally built the dozens of CANDUs around the globe.

Perhaps most perplexing is the statement, "Let's face it, our nuclear plant didn't work too well even when it was new."

The letter writer is obviously not a reader of Nucleonics Week, which publishes rankings of all the nuclear reactors in the world.

For much of its life Point Lepreau was not only the worlds best CANDU, it was the number one nuclear reactor, of any type, on the planet.

Typical of the anti-nuclear movement, the letter writer throws in a sentence about the station blowing up. In response to this I can only implore him to educate himself on nuclear power.

For the lucky residents of Fredericton, there is an option. Why not pay a visit to the engineering faculty of UNB (or register for some courses)?

The nuclear expertise among the professors there is considerable and thanks to them I was able to find employment in the industry.

And nuclear power is an industry that prevents the release of six million tonnes of air pollution in Canada every month. That's a lot of clean air and that sounds good to me.

- Andrew Daley Toronto, Ont.