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The recession appears to be having little impact on a multibillion-dollar bid by Ontario-based Bruce Power Ltd. to bring the first nuclear reactors to Alberta and Saskatchewan. Bruce Power chief executive Duncan Hawthorne says long-term atomic power projects may be able to sidestep the current global economic turmoil because they wouldn't actually be built for several years. "The economic climate is a cause for concern for all of us," Hawthorne said in an interview.

Alberta's six Catholic bishops say serious ethical questions must be answered before any decision can be made about whether or not to build nuclear reactors in the province. In a pastoral letter issued Wednesday, the Alberta Conference of Catholic Bishops called for more public input into the nuclear power question, citing concerns about stewardship of the environment, effects on water supplies, protection of human life, security threats and adequate consultation. Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry said expert opinions on nuclear energy are divided and the debate can easily become polarized.

Saskatchewan's public consultations on uranium development rolled into a major oil town, Lloydminster, where many people talked about nuclear energy - and emphasized their opposition to such energy. Lloydminster, a border community with residents from Alberta and Saskatchewan, is home to a heavy-oil upgrader plant and relies heavily on the oilpatch for jobs. While the community is tied to the energy industry, participants at the public forum showed little affection for nuclear reactor development in Saskatchewan. Several hundred people packed a college gymnasium for Wednesday evening's event. Representatives from a grass roots coalition calling itself Save Our Saskatchewan were on hand and expressed opposition to nuclear energy.

With nuclear power on many Albertans' minds these days, those seeking insight before picking sides may find it instructive to look to Europe, where France and Germany have adopted opposing philosophies on the issue. Germany has legislation in place that calls for the shutdown of all of the country's nuclear reactors by 2022. France, which is slightly smaller than Alberta, is building its 59th reactor. How did the two countries arrive at such divergent views? Matthias Eickhoff remembers April 26, 1986, as the day he became one of Germany's many anti-nuclear activists.

The proposed nuclear reactor is going to cost Bruce Power a lot of money. Guess again. The private sector does not invest in nuclear power - for good reason: the public will be on the hook for many generations for the biggest part of the costs. Nuclear power plants are usually over budget and start up behind schedule. If power is needed in the meantime, we will have to purchase elsewhere. It would be 10 years or likely more before a nuclear plant starts producing electricity. Construction of power grids to export to possibly Alberta and the U.S. will be a large expense - estimated at $1 billion, again largely at public expense. Power backup for both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance and refurbishing is necessary. Note that eight nuclear power plants were once shut down for a whole decade in Ontario. The UDP report says that nuclear is compatible with 'clean' coal. It better be, as coal will be required when the huge, equally highly centralized nuclear system goes down. Note that there is not an operational clean coal plant on the planet. $1.4 billion plus of our money is being spent on an experimental project to produce only 100 MW of clean coal power. What if it does not work or is too costly to expand? Where does the backup power come from? Old dirty coal that will cost us in carbon charges?

Alberta's anti-nuclear movement is touting a recent resolution by Lethbridge city council as a model for other communities to follow in asking the province to take a closer look at green energy options. Members of GREENSENCE - Green Sustainable Nonnuclear Chinook Enterprise - joined other environmental advocates at a meeting in Edmonton Friday to draw attention to their concerns with the Alberta Energy Ministry's current consultations on nuclear power generation. According to Lethbridge delegates, most participants in the meeting were from the Peace River region, which tops the list of potential sites for a nuclear power plant. "They feel the government has certainly misled them and biased the whole process," said Mark Sandilands, part of the local GREENSENCE delegation. "Everybody up there is pleased with what Lethbridge has done and they're looking for our materials so they can get their city councils and town councils to do the same thing," he said. "We're looking for a movement across this province to have the government look at renewable energy rather than tinkering with something that is dangerous and not even economic."

Bruce Power has temporarily withdrawn its application to prepare a site for a nuclear power plant near Peace River, and is now considering a second site. In a letter to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the nuclear power company says a new site was chosen partly because concerns were raised about an aquifer near the first location. The second site is on the west bank of the Peace River, about 30 kilometres north of the town. The original site is on the northeast shore of Lac Cardinal, about 30 kilometres west of the town. It was selected by Energy Alberta, which Bruce Power bought last March.

I heard Dr. Helen Caldicott speak at the U of C on Tuesday night, and was reminded that the entire nuclear industry is madness built upon insanity, and deliberate misinformation. They haven't been able to attract a penny of private investment or insurance for years; yet they manage to convince governments to prop up their reactors with subsidies and taxpayer-funded insurance in the event of a nuclear accident.

The Peace River Environmental Society arranged for a series of talks on earthquake risks surrounding the construction of a nuclear power plant near Peace River, one in Fairview at the Legion May 6. The speaker was J.R. (Jack) Century, a petroleum geologist, who suggested that building a nuclear power plant in the Peace country is both unsafe and unnecessary. Century has made a study of seismicity, vibration in the earth's crust, especially as caused by injecting or flooding liquid into and withdrawing liquid from the earth as is done for tarsands and heavy oil recovery where steam is injected to heat heavy oil to make it flow. Century says that underground fractures that help to trap oil and gas underground as well as making it possible to recover them more easily, can be both a blessing and a curse, the latter especially in a limestone structure such as underlies much of the Peace. He believes that injecting into the ground, whether it is steam to recover bitumen or carbon dioxide for storage purposes can alter the "pressure regimen" down below which can lead to increased seismic activity, which in turn could lead to collapses of underground limestone structures and/or possibly catastrophic earthquakes. He pointed to a CBC news story about Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant being damaged by a large earthquake. The damage included fires, water and oil leaks and pipes knocked out of place by the tremors. He implied that the same thing could happen in the Peace. He showed a map of the Peace detailing fault lines and both the original proposed location for the Bruce Power plant at Lac Cardinal and the more recent site are quite close to a fault lines.