For years, successive BC governments have forbidden any new large-scale hydro dams. When I was on the BC Hydro Board of Directors in the mid-1990s, the Board passed a motion that all government land-holdings associated with Site C should be sold. The BC Hydro Board was against building Site C, or any other large dam, because of the negative effect on people and the environment and because there was no crucial need for new large-scale electricity projects.
Despite these reasons for being against Site C, I now believe that the dam should be built, because the damage caused by Site C would be considerably less than the damage now occurring due to the government’s energy plans.
Under the Energy Plan, instead of the government building new generating facilities, a system of private power projects were to be undertaken, including small “run-of- river” (ROR) hydro projects. There are serious problems with this approach: the private nature of these undertakings, the lack of coordinated planning, and the disjointed nature of environmental assessments that occur for each individual project.
Here is a comparison of Site C with the biggest private project currently under consideration at Bute Inlet:
Site C would have a capacity of 900 megawatts, providing 4600 gigawatt hours per year of energy. It would have a net reservoir area of 5,341 ha, double the width of the current river for 83 km, and impact 10,303 ha of land. The new transmission lines would use and widen the existing right of way. Site C would have 30% of the capacity of The Bennett Dam, BC’s largest dam, with only 5% of the reservoir area. The environmental impact would be significant, but because the dam would be on a regulated river below two existing dams, it would be much less than creating a new dam on an undeveloped river.
The Bute Inlet project is to be built by a private company, Plutonic Power. It will encompass three major drainage areas and 17 interconnected hydroelectric facilities with a total capacity of 1,027 MW. The projects will be connected to a substation through 216 km of collector transmission lines on new rights of way. The substation will need an additional 227 km of transmission to be connected to the electrical grid. The environmental devastation here will be huge because of the enormous reconfiguration of the hydrology of these watersheds.
All of the new “green” private power projects have a negative environmental impact. However, because they are assessed individually, rather than as an interconnected system, they tend to receive environmental approval easily. While small-scale hydro plants (usually less than 30 megawatts) are normally defined as renewable, and preferable to large-scale hydro, size alone cannot determine environmental impact levels. According to the Pace University Center for Environmental Legal Studies, which evaluates the environmental impacts of different sources of electricity, size is an especially poor indicator of the environmental impacts of a hydropower facility. For example, small facilities that de-water river reaches and block fish passage can be more environmentally destructive than larger facilities designed and operated to reduce environmental impacts. Unfortunately, the notion that small is good and large is bad has gained widespread political support.
BC Hydro’s Long Term Acquisition Plan identified 8,242 potential sites for electricity generation in the province. So far over 500 applications have been made by private corporations for the water licenses on these potential sites and 46 projects are now either built or under construction.
Since it is clear that strong regulations reducing electricity consumption will not occur in BC, Site C now makes sense. It would obviate the environmental disasters that occur through projects like Bute Inlet. When new project building is totally in the public sector it receives the oversight that is normal in a coordinated system. This includes transparency with regard to the total impact on the environment, local communities and resources, and Aboriginal people.
This is a shorter version of an article that appeared in BC Studies Number 161, Spring 2009
seth // Sep 15, 2009 at 11:28 am
Nuclear power is less than a fifth the cost per kwh of Site C and would snuggle nicely in at Burrard Thermal. No land flooded or destroyed. Thats based on the Areva quote for Ontario Hydro. The Westinghouse sale to China is almost half that.
We could also import clean green baseload nuclear power from Alberta at a lower cost than Site C.
Marjorie Griffin Cohen // Sep 15, 2009 at 12:05 pm
The nuclear power industry promotes itself as ‘green’ because it does not contribute to greenhouse gas effects. But it has more troubling environmental problems: the spectre of a disaster like Chernobyl looms large, and only about 1/3rd of the heat produced in nuclear reactors is convered into energy, so considerable waste occurs. And, a minimum of 250,000 years of isolation from soil, water, and air is needed to decontaminate the radionuclides produced during nuclear power generation. The long-term planning required for this is of a spectacular nature!
seth // Sep 15, 2009 at 1:01 pm
The costs I quoted are for electric energy. The waste heat can be used for tar sands steam, home heating or greenhouses just as with gas or coal plant waste heat.
There is no chance of a Chernobyl with modern reactor design – reactor slows down and stops as heat builds up..
The Nuclear waste problem is blown well out of proportion by propaganda from Big Oil/Coal. All of it can be reused as reprocessed fuel in Gen 3.5 nukes, or as fuel in generation four nukes like Sandia’s new product. The tiny bit of general 4 nuclear waste is no more dangerous than the original uranium. Mid Ocean clay deposit storage has also been proved in as more effective than ground storage except for the reuse factor.
Of course we could just take all the waste to the nearest coal plant and meter it slowly into the smoke stack. The nuclear waste would increase the coal plants already radioactive emissions by only a tiny percentage and wouldn’t add any more lead, arsenic or mercury to the air.
Or lets store the nuke waste under a half acre or so of the thousands of square miles of desert solar greenies were planning destroying forever by covering them with toxic solar cells.
Seth Klein // Sep 19, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Seth Klein here, BC Director of the CCPA. Just wanted to clarify for the record that the Seth commenting above isn’t yours truly. Happy to have this other Seth join the conversation, but don’t want readers thinking he’s me.
FYI, I did my Bar Mitzvah speech on the dangers of nuclear energy almost 30 years ago, and you can still count me in that camp. While it is true that nuclear energy generation does not produce greenhouse gases, the earlier mining and processing stages certainly do. Until we’ve gone a great deal farther down the road of energy conservation and alternative energy production, I don’t believe we should be pursuing this risky option.