Author: CRED-NB

One of CRED-NB’s core guidelines is: “Support solidarity actions with communities experiencing harmful impacts of our energy choices in New Brunswick, across Canada and globally.” The transition to real clean energy has impacts that extend well beyond New Brunswick’s borders.

This week, a coalition of groups from the Global South released the “Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South,” with eight core demands. CRED-NB has endorsed it. The Manifesto states that “clean energy transitions” of the North that have put even more pressure on the Global South to yield up cobalt and lithium for the production of high-tech batteries, balsa wood for wind turbines, land for large solar arrays, and new infrastructure for hydrogen megaprojects. This decarbonization of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South, which affects the lives of millions of women, men, and children, not to mention non-human life. In this way, the Global South has once again become a zone of sacrifice, a basket of purportedly inexhaustible resources for the countries of the North. Read the full Manifesto and support it, HERE.

Plutonium reprocessing has never been done commercially in Canada – and it was informally banned in the 1970s. Now the New Brunswick government and NB Power are supporting a plan to reprocess plutonium at the Point Lepreau Nuclear site. Reprocessing operations are the most contaminated sites in the world. So why are we planning to do it at all, and why beside the Bay of Fundy? We need to stop this plan now. Send a letter to federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, HERE.

For more information, including fact sheets, videos and links to scientific reports, check out the website of the national campaign to ban plutonium reprocessing in Canada HERE. The direct link to the factsheet on reprocessing and environmental contamination is HERE. Check out our webinar with four international experts on the topic on Feb. 28, Plutonium: How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Turned into a Nightmare, info HERE.

Finally. Finally! On Feb. 14 and 15, the public has a chance to learn more about plans by the NB government and NB Power to build two experimental nuclear reactors (SMRs) at Point Lepreau on the Bay of Fundy. The NB Legislature’s standing committee on Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship is meeting that week, including two days of hearings on SMRs that will be webcast. Please tune in to learn more about the SMR plans and what our elected representatives have to say about them.

The 13 presentations over the two days each have a one-hour time slot, with 20 minutes by presenters followed by 40 minutes of Q&A with the MLAs on the committee. CRED-NB will be represented by Susan O’Donnell at 11am on Tuesday, Feb. 14. The full schedule of presentations is HERE. The link to the webcast is HERE (the webcast link will appear when the Committee is in session).

More than a dozen environmental groups including CRED-NB co-sponsored a webinar hosted by Nuclear Waste Watch: Ban Plutonium Reprocessing in Canada. The international expert panel included M.V. Ramana from the University of British Columbia, Ray Acheson Ray Acheson from Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and environmental journalist Joshua Frank, author of the recently released Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Book, 2022). Watch the video HERE.

Tuesday, Feb. 28 @ 8pm Atlantic. NB Power and the NB government are supporting a plan to build a plutonium reprocessing plant at Point Lepreau on the Bay of Fundy. To inform the public about this development, CRED-NB is co-sponsoring a webinar featuring a conversation with international experts on plutonium reprocessing and nuclear weapons proliferation. With Frank von Hippel, senior research physicist and professor of public and international affairs emeritus with Princeton’s Program on Science & Global Security; Jungmin Kang, a former chairman of South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission; Masafumi Takubo, an independent nuclear policy analyst based in Tokyo and member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials; and M. V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. More info HERE. Register for the webinar HERE.

CRED-NB representative Gail Wylie (Council of Canadians) prepared a comment to the Energies and Utilities Board (EUB) responding to the proposed NB Power rate hike. Read or download the submission HERE. The document outlines the choices available to NB Power moving forward and includes a history of NB Power’s nuclear activities and a critique of its plans to develop SMRs.

CRED-NB member Dave Thompson of Leap Forwards made an oral presentation, text HERE. The Conservation Council of New Brunswick also submitted a document to the EUB, details HERE.

CRED-NB core member Ann McAlister, representing Council of Canadians Saint John, was featured in an NB Media Co-op article and video. Ann explained the history and outcome of CRED’s application to the federal Environment minister requesting that the SMRs planned for Point Lepreau in New Brunswick should undergo a federal impact assessment. Read the article HERE.

CRED-NB was represented on CBC’s The Current this morning by Susan O’Donnell. CRED-NB is fighting for a nuclear free renewable energy future. We unfortunately need to spend much of our time countering the misinformation spread by the nuclear industry (and their government collaborators).

Have a listen to the interview with The Current’s Matt Galloway. The recording HERE is the discussion between Susan and Joe McBrearty, the CEO and President of Canadian Nuclear Labs. To listen to the full segment on the CBC page, including a presentation by a nuclear energy representative in Europe, click HERE.

The Hill Times and the NB Media Co-op published a commentary this week outlining some of the reasons why CRED-NB requested an impact assessment for NB Power’s SMR demonstration project. Federal Environment and Climate Change minister Steven Guilbeault rejected the request in December. You can read the NB Media Co-op article HERE, written by CRED-NB core member Susan O’Donnell (RAVEN project) and M.V. Ramana (University of British Columbia).

The photo with the article is Japan’s Monju demonstration reactor, one of many sodium-cooled reactors shut down because it didn’t work the way it was intended. That project, including cleaning up the radioactive waste it generated, cost upwards of $10 billion. The ARC-100 sodium-cooled reactor is one of two SMR projects planned for the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy.

The new nuclear reactors (SMRs) planned for New Brunswick propose plutonium reprocessing as part of their designs.

Plutonium reprocessing – extracting plutonium from used nuclear fuel – was informally banned in Canada in the 1970s because of concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation.

Plutonium reprocessing is a dirty, dangerous distraction from real climate action, a ridiculously expensive process that creates difficult new radioactive waste problems and nuclear weapons proliferation risks.

Now the nuclear lobby is pushing hard to include plutonium reprocessing in Canada’s new radioactive waste management policy. The industry is claiming that plutonium reprocessing is necessary for SMRs to fight climate change.

The Ban Plutonium Reprocessing in Canada webinar, organized by Nuclear Waste Watch with more than a dozen co-sponsors including CRED-NB, features three expert speakers.

Register HERE for the Ban Plutonium Reprocessing in Canada webinar, Thursday, Jan. 19 at 8pm Atlantic, 7pm Eastern.

Speakers:

Ray Acheson is Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a member of the steering group of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist and author of “Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America” (Haymarket Books, October 2022)

Moderator: Theresa McClenaghan, Executive Director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

Register HERE for the Ban Plutonium Reprocessing in Canada webinar, Thursday, Jan. 19 at 7pm Eastern.

Hosted by Nuclear Waste Watch and co-sponsored by: Beyond Nuclear • Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility • Canadian Environmental Law Association • Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick • Conservation Council of New Brunswick • David Suzuki Foundation • Inter-Church Uranium Committee Educational Cooperative • International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War – Canada • Northwatch • Ontario Clean Air Alliance • Regroupement des organismes environnementaux en énergie • Science for Peace • Sierra Club Canada Foundation • Voice of Women for Peace.

Nuclear Waste Watch and partners are leading the Ban Plutonium Reprocessing in Canada campaign launched this month. The campaign website is: reprocessing.ca