Climate change and Ontario electricity: federal court clarifies the choice

Should Ontario electricity stay as clean as it is right now? Right now (six thirty a.m. on Friday May 16), every kilowatt-hour of Ontario grid power comes with a carbon footprint of 38.5 grams; Table 1 on the left gives last hour’s CIPK (carbon dioxide intensity per kilowatt-hour) in grams. Thirty-eight-point-five grams of CO₂ per kWh is nearly thirteen times cleaner than grid electricity in Germany. I think the answer is yes, Ontario electricity should stay as clean as it is now. And I will qualify that by saying I also think we should aim for an even smaller carbon footprint.

It is easy to see why Ontario grid electricity comes with such a low CIPK. At six thirty this morning, the total output of the 139 generators that were feeding the Ontario grid with electricity was roughly 15.9 million kWh. Of those 15.9 million kWh, 9.5 million—nearly 60 percent—were coming from the provincial nuclear plants on Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Nuclear, as you can see in the tables at the left, comes with zero CO₂. Almost all of the CO₂ at that time, 600 metric tons, came from the provincial natural gas-fired plants. Which were at the time providing less than seven percent of our electricity.

Which is to say, Ontario’s 38.5-gram CIPK at six thirty this morning was due almost entirely to a fleet of generators that were not even providing seven percent of our power.

Today is a very, very low load day. That means there is not a very big load on the electricity grid. Temperatures across the province are in the “easy” range: 6 to 9 °C. Nobody has their air conditioner on; nobody has their electric heat on.

In spite of this, gas-fired generators, if they continue to produce at the same low level as at six thirty a.m., will take less than five hours to dump enough CO₂ into Ontario’s air to fill up Rogers Centre with its roof closed.

If Ontario did not have its nuclear fleet, then gas-fired generators would be producing the 9.5 million kWh that nuclear generators were generating at six-thirty. In that case, instead of dumping 600 metric tons of CO₂ into our air, they would have dumped over 6,000 tons, ten times as much. See Item 1 on the right sidebar. The provincial grid CIPK at that point would have been 355.6 grams, instead of 38.5.

These are simple facts. Not enough people know them. But they are vitally important. Here is why.

It is imperative, urgently imperative, that mankind stop dumping CO₂ into the air. As I mentioned a week ago, the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has gone over 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. This means that every responsible jurisdiction must do whatever it reasonably can to reduce its emissions of CO₂.

Ontario is exactly such a jurisdiction. And we have a plan to at least hold the line on CO₂ emissions from power plants. That plan includes building new nuclear generators at the Darlington nuclear station. This is something we should have done decades ago; if we had we would not have dumped 40 million tons of CO₂ into the air in 2000. But better late than never.

Incredibly, there are groups, professing to be environmentally conscious, that oppose building new reactors at Darlington. They would prefer to burn natural gas, which as I mentioned would dump many times more CO₂ that we are dumping today.

Some of these groups are celebrating a recent federal court ruling that says the utility that would build the new reactors, OPG, must incorporate consideration of the environmental implications of spent nuclear fuel into its application for permission to build the reactors. These groups claim this as a victory that will halt the construction project if and when it is decided to start building.

This claim is absurd. The utility will do the required consideration, and will find that there is no environmental implication to the spent nuclear fuel. It has been accumulating spent fuel since the 1970s and there has been no environmental implication from that.

I look at the federal ruling as a shining opportunity to actually put the spent fuel issue to bed. There are something north of 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at Ontario’s three nuclear plants. That is from more than four decades of continuous operation, providing most of Ontario’s electricity.

Gas plants, in one single day last summer, dumped more than 60,000 tons of CO₂ into the air. Those 60,000 tons are part of why the global atmospheric concentration of CO₂ hit 400 parts per million recently.

Environmental groups have a problem with 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from four decades of continuous operation, but support gas plants and dumping 60,000 tons of climate-destabilizing CO₂ into our air in a single day?

Bring it on. Let’s talk about this.