Tag: CRED-NB Action

Electricity from burning wood pellets is a scam

In its recent Energy Plan, the New Brunswick government proposed that the NB Power Belledune power plant should switch from burning coal to burning wood pellets. The federal government has mandated that all coal-fired electricity plants stop burning coal by 2030.

However generating electricity from forest-based biomass is a false climate solution. Burning wood for heat is one thing but burning it to generate electricity is incredibly inefficient.

Research has shown that burning wood pellets generates more carbon emissions at the smokestack than coal. It also creates many toxic particles harmful for the health of surrounding communities.

Two years ago, more than 500 scientists sent an open letter to world leaders calling on them to not burn forests to make energy.

How can governments get away with claiming that biomass-generated electricity is renewable and carbon neutral? It’s a scam.

International carbon accounting rules state that carbon losses from forest harvesting have to be reported in the land sector section of the carbon audit for the country where the trees were cut.

Every time a hectare of forest is cut, that counts as a reduction of forest carbon uptake. The harvested forest wood, if it’s burned, can’t be reported as a CO2 emission, because that would be counting it twice.

So the country or province that burns trees reports that as zero carbon emissions. That means that producers can treat biomass as being equivalent to zero emissions technologies, like wind and solar. Scam!

Scientists and environmental activists everywhere are lobbying hard for constraints to be put on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel.

In November, CRED-NB signed a letter to federal Energy and Natural Resources minister Wilkinson, with 26 other climate groups across Canada, calling on the federal government to take immediate action on biomass. These are some of our demands:

• Work with other levels of government to ensure forests are off-limits to wood pellet production for export.

• End all subsidies to the utility-scale wood pellet industry

• Redirect funding to Indigenous land use, stewardship or restoration projects and real climate solutions such as wind and solar power.

• Support value-added jobs that provide more substantial and stable economic opportunities
locally.

• Encourage utilities to take a public stance against burning forest biomass as an energy replacement for burning coal.

• Advocate on the international stage for an update to carbon accounting mechanisms that closes loopholes which falsely represent industrial logging and utility-scale exported biomass as carbon neutral.

Hydrogen: super fuel or another big distraction?

New Brunswick this week released a “5-year roadmap” for hydrogen development, predicting that the strategy will make the province a clean-energy powerhouse.

Hydrogen will be an element in a future energy system that emits fewer GHGs. However the government’s plan misses the mark.  Here’s CRED-NB’s initial analysis:

  • Electricity and heat pumps are a far cheaper solution to heating buildings than hydrogen.
  • It is far better & cheaper for transportation to be muscle or battery powered. Green hydrogen is too expensive except for flight and long-distance shipping.
  • Hydrogen is hard to contain so exporting it will be difficult. That’s why most hydrogen is produced close to where it is used.
  • Green hydrogen (produced by renewable energy) can be a clean back-stop to wind and solar electricity generation but the priority should be using more efficient storage.
  • Green hydrogen must be made with wind power to keep the cost down. There will be no market, local or export, for hydrogen made with nuclear power as it will be far too expensive.

CRED-NB spokesperson Tom McLean got a few words in about this during a CTV clip about the government’s plan the day it was launched. Watch it HERE.

NB government’s energy plan is ignoring reality

NB government’s energy plan is ignoring reality.

Rothesay, New Brunswick, December 13, 2023 – The Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB) is astounded that the NB government would produce an energy plan that ignores the reality of where energy systems and the global energy economy are headed.

Tom McLean, of CRED-NB, said “Today, at the conclusion of the UN climate change conference, COP28, the global community committed to triple the use of renewables and transition away from fossil fuels. It makes no sense for New Brunswick to plan to frack fossil gas when the world is deploying wind turbines and solar panels.”

The government’s plan is also based on a nuclear technology that may never exist. In the presentation in February by CRED-NB to the NB Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship, we quoted the authoritative U.S. National Academies’ of Sciences 2023 report. It states that the advanced reactors planned for New Brunswick, ­ molten salt and sodium-cooled, ­ will have difficulty achieving commercial operations even by 2050.

“Premier Higgs’ energy plan is not sensible, sustainable or just,” said Ann McAllister, Chair of CRED-NB. “Fracking for fossil gas has no social license in NB due to its health and pollution risks. Hydrogen production is so expensive and inefficient that it makes more economic sense to use the electricity directly.

The SMRs proposed for New Brunswick will come too late to reduce carbon emissions now, when we need them. To export them would provide client countries who don’t yet have nuclear weapons with the plutonium to produce them. This is not the plan we need in these times of climate change and escalating global conflict.”

Meanwhile, the planet is burning, and the clock is ticking. While we’re waiting for these nuclear SMR experiments to fail, the government is wasting time that we must spend urgently on genuine climate action.

CRED-NB recommends guidelines for the ARC-100 Environmental Impact Assessment

NB Power is proposing to develop an experimental nuclear reactor design, the ARC-100, on the Point Lepreau nuclear site on the Bay of Fundy. The Government of New Brunswick, which is funding and promoting the project, will also conduct the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The government asked the public to provide feedback on the draft EIA guidelines. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this important effort! The CRED-NB submission to the guidelines consultation is HERE. Our page with information about the ARC-100 is HERE.

New video: Nuclear Energy and the Bomb

Most people around the world learned about power of the atom from newspapers on August 7, 1945 after the U.S. military dropped a nuclear bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in Japan and killed or injured 140,000 people. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.

After the war, governments realized that nuclear energy to generate electricity would be unacceptable to the population unless people could be convinced that it was completely separate from nuclear weapons. The U.S. began an “atoms for peace” propaganda campaign to convince Americans to accept nuclear energy despite their knowledge of its terrible destructive power. The campaign to deny the link between the two continues today in every country that has nuclear energy, including Canada.

CRED-NB was co-host of a lecture by University of British Columbia professor M.V. Ramana on Oct. 12 at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. The link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons “is a truth that has been systematically masked” says Ramana. See the video HERE.

CRED-NB brief to federal committee on natural resources

On October 3, CRED submitted a brief to the House of Commons standing committee on Natural Resources. The committee is studying Canada’s clean energy plans in the context of the North American energy transition. Our brief consisted of a document, Eleven reasons nuclear energy should not be part of Canada’s plans for a clean electricity grid in future. Read the document:
In English HERE
In French HERE

Share your comments about the ARC-100 nuclear project

Today the NB government opened the first opportunity for public comment on NB Power’s ARC Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Demonstration Project proposed for Point Lepreau. During the next 30 days, First Nations and the general public have the opportunity to ensure that their concerns help to determine the topics that NB Power studies and reports on during the Environmental Impact Assessment process.

HERE is the page on our website about the ARC-100 experiment and many of the concerns we have about the project. If you share these concerns, please submit them to the government so that the impact assessment will include these topics.

How to send your comments? It’s simple: send them in an email to EIAEIE@gnb.ca. There is no word limit. The comments deadline is Oct. 28.

CRED-NB is engaging in this process, and we encourage everyone to share your concerns and thoughts. You don’t have to be a nuclear expert to voice your concerns about the safety, environmental, economic, cultural, security, and intergenerational concerns you may have about the potential impacts of this project. It’s us and those who will follow us that will live with – and pay for – those impacts.

Please share this notice widely with your networks.

NB Power has its head stuck in uranium

NB Power seems to want to be a nuclear utility no matter how much it costs or whether or not the nuclear technology works because… well, just because. The utility’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) released in July states that small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are critical to developing a clean and cost-effective power grid in New Brunswick, although NB Power does not know when, or if, SMRs will become available or the cost.

Read the full article published on Sept. 1 by the NB Media Co-op, HERE. A revised version was published by the Telegraph Journal on Sept. 28.