Jim Harding

Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System

Jim Harding and I got together in Regina in November 2007. It was like meeting an old friend, even though it was our first encounter. We met at the heritage Hotel Saskatchewan downtown, Regina. Jim is a former Professor of Justice Studies and was Director of Research, Prairie Justice Research at the University of Regina. He is the author of After Iraq: War, Imperialism, and Democracy and Social Policy and Social Justice. He was on his way to teach an extension class later that evening on the University of Regina campus, and then off to the west coast to discuss his new book.

Photo Source: BC Bookworld

Aurora: Thanks for the book Jim. We’re going to talk about Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System. It’s a great Canadian story.

Jim Harding: I’m glad it’s between the covers and not longer.

Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System

Foreword by Helen Caldicott, (2007) Fernwood Publishing

Aurora: Why don’t we just start at the top. The book has a great dedication to your Dad, Bill Harding, with a photograph of him speaking at an anti-nuke rally in Saskatoon in 1979. So it is an activist story with a family connection. And then follows up a foreword from Helen Caldicott, the ‘conscience’ of the anti-nuclear movement for so many years, who pulls no punches in the Preface indicting Canada and Australia of hypocrisy in their approaches to international peacekeeping and nuclear issues. That’s a pretty great start to any book. I would like you to tell Aurora’s readers and listeners a bit more about the journey of writing this story.

Jim Harding: I felt I had to clear the decks and write it because since I sort of retired, I thought I should do something that others won’t do, and not try to do things that others are doing. And I realized nobody was going to do this if I didn’t do it. There was a story here and people who are active now didn’t know (its origins)…the inter-generational stuff was breaking down again and I knew how critical that was to my own sort of activism from my parents. Getting the stories from the Second World War and the trade union movement in the ‘40s and meeting mentor activists who had been doing peace work for years before the ‘60s, because then it gives you context for your own work. You can learn. And these kids here were just totally unaware of what had happened since, really, the ‘50s and, of course, my Dad was one of the elder activists in the peace movement. And then I started realizing, well he and I had worked through so many things and left so many files, why would I expect anybody to really go into them and make sense …. So I … started tackling this stuff. The voice wasn’t there because it had come from chunks of analysis and activism without a context. The history wasn’t there. I started creating a sort of historical chronology and I was surprised how little I knew, and then I started realizing, of course, I have to do this. I don’t know half of it – And I’m one of the people who know it. So I just struggled for a year to pull old stuff up and reconnect it and voice it differently... And there were periods of time where I just got so overwhelmed by it because …I was learning to write differently, as well as doing the content, and I’m glad I did it. I’m thankful to this guy, Richard Therrian, the guy who did some early to-and-fro with me.

Aurora: Had you worked with him before?

Jim Harding: I couldn’t do it by myself. I needed, I didn’t have a colleague, activist, who I could do that with here. So I’ll see him in Vancouver next week. I’ve never met the man.

Aurora: Really?

Jim Harding:I know him – intimately. He edited another book of mine, too. But my Mom had just died. I’d wanted to get this done before she died. She was, of course, very proud of Bill’s work after he retired because he’d had to re-tool around sustainability and non-nuclear stuff – because he’d grown up in that technocratic era in the ‘30s and was confused about the issue of nuclear power …until he was with the UN in the Philippines under Marcos, when Marcos was forcing nuclear power into the islands – he started to comprehend its impacts. So he had to do a lot of re-tooling.

Aurora: Since then your whole family, three generations, appears to have been involved in these issues?

Jim Harding: I‘ve got sons who are active on this. It’s been with us since the Second World War; I’m a war baby. We have to tell our stories. So I went at it.

Aurora: I think this will be a great book to teach. There are so many cross-cutting themes…but I want to start with the title: Canada’s Deadly Secret. It’s a good title. You’ve made what could have been just a Saskatchewan story into a national story – a global story.

Jim Harding: Let me tell you the debates with the publisher. “Oh, no, we’re not interested. It’s a regional story and we’re more interested in concentrating on global stuff.” So, I say to Wayne (Wayne Anthony, Acquisitions Editor from Fernwood Press), “But it is global. We’re the front end of the [nuclear] system.”

Aurora: He says, “Yeah, but, people elsewhere might not be interested.” And I said, “They’ve been interested ever since we had some major conferences. We’ve been networking with the importing countries for years. We’ve played a role in shutting down nuclear power in other countries with the networks we’ve built.” “Well, okay, but, you know, then will people in Saskatchewan be interested?” And I said, “Well, we’ve got to make them interested, but I think the truth is this is going to do better outside because of amnesia,” which was my original title.

Aurora: Why amnesia?

Jim Harding: Because I know how much resistance there is here to just even acknowledging the ‘50s and the ‘60s – let alone what might be seen as a little more complicated in terms of the weapons connections now. To me it’s not, but I can see the press sort of saying, “Oh, you don’t really know. You can’t trace the molecules, blah blah blah.” But Wayne finally said, “Well, you know, the title could be…” and we started, and I said, “As long as it has ‘ Canada’, ‘ Saskatchewan’, and ‘Global’, it’ll work.” So there it is.

Aurora: You certainly do lay out the tension in Saskatchewan around this issue. The divisions in the Province are strong and heated. The divisions in the New Democratic Party, the divisions between the Peace movement and Labour Movement, the divisions within aboriginal communities and the division in the public. Geez, even this morning as I’m reading it in the downtown Regina coffee shop, I looking around thinking “I wonder if I will get a reaction when I read this book out here at the table?”

Let’s pursue that deadly secret. You connect a lot of dots by starting the book with how uranium mining or the front end of the nuclear system is out of people’s consciousness. There is as you say amnesia about the whole mining end of it and, well, the back end is out of it too, and there you set up the link to nuclear arms and conventional depleted uranium weapons very well. But let’s start with the front end…

Jim Harding: When I was active in the ‘50s and the ‘60s and the ban the bomb work, we didn’t know that ( Saskatchewan) was the front end. When we had Tommy Douglas attend disarmament protests and he supported us, we didn’t know he knew, so we’ve been coming out of the dark for a long time. I only really understood our role in the early nuclear arms race in about 1979, when my Dad and I started digging. And including export data and uranium export data, and we started just looking at mineral resource data, and of course we realized the magnitude of it. Well, at the same time, we were being hit with the peaceful atom, and diversifying the economy, and Allan Blakeney’s strategy of dealing with reduced transfer payments and making Saskatchewan a ‘have’ province on the non-renewables. And, of course, we’ve made it now. You know, we’ve got to tell that story about the social democratic economic diversification strategy and how it was so hard to demystify that in the ‘70s and the ‘80s including, certainly in the NDP political party, but including the labour movement, because people were again looking at uranium only as a resource.

Aurora: Right, with its associated job creation.

Jim Harding: They weren’t looking at these larger questions of nuclear waste, low-level radiation, and weapons proliferation. So we had to scratch our way out of knowing almost nothing to developing a critique of what was being promoted as a way to make medicare stable.

Aurora: To describe this absence of critical consciousness you used the phrase — uranium was “just another Canadian resource.”

Jim Harding: It was promoted that way. It still is, on the stock market… I know people who have Cameco stocks and they’re really surprised. I meet them at the Y, at the health club, and when I say what I’m doing and they say, “Oh, I didn’t know that. Are you serious?” It goes from zero, from no consciousness – like smoking, you know; let’s think back about people who invested in the tobacco industry originally, or asbestos.

Well, that (failure to see mining as linked to weapons) was the battle in the ‘70s and we lost it again under Calvert, who was the last premier who went down in the recent election. He started straddling the uranium issue a bit. I had to analyze that because a lot of people were being duped. His wasn’t really a significant shift to renewables. They wanted to have it both ways – to look like we were doing the right thing in our own very small grid, but increase the exporting of both the radioactive and the climate changing non-reneweables. And the dilemma of our economy is that it is based, next to Alberta, we’re the second provincial economy most dependent on the non-renewables.

Aurora: The book addresses this in some classic Canadian political economy ways, too. I mean, early on, you set out very clearly that uranium mining really wasn’t a panacea for job creation, especially Aboriginal job creation in particular. So it is just like a lot of other Canadian primary resource industries in that way.

Jim Harding: It’s the same old story. I was at a book launch in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, which is the sort of gateway to the North here, and the thing that made me most excited is that half the people who turned up were Native women.

Aurora: Oh, really?

Jim Harding: And they’re young, and they’re interested, and they want to know this stuff. And we talked about how hard they say it is for their families with kin in the mines to even talk about this stuff. In so many words, they’ve just gone from what I’ll say is one stage of paternal colonialism to another, which might actually be a little more repressive – because they are afraid of the health issues. They’re told not to be. But there’s anecdotal things about illnesses increasing, there’s bound to be. And yet there’s no capacity to publicly discuss or resist or push. But this next generation is talking about the renewable alternatives and economic developments. So that kind of discussion is coming.

Aurora: Well, I have to admit that I didn’t understand the magnitude of the uranium tailings issue at the mining sites. Maybe we could talk a bit about that.

Jim Harding: Well, in the 1990s, when the anti-nuclear movement developed the slogan, “Keep It In The Ground,” that was really to say, since there are alternatives that don’t carry the toxic implications, why the heck are we making this uranium stuff more available to the biosphere? Of course it’s radioactive in its ore, but it’s not available to the wind, to the water, to the aquatic system, etc., in the same way. The pro nuclear supporters say “Ah, the tailings. It’s just the same amount of radioactivity,” That’s what we hear from the sort of one-dimensional engineers and physicists who work for the industry. And we say, “Well, wait a minute. You’ve created more volume than you had. It’s now on top of the earth.” And, climate change, of course, is changing the waterways. What they do is they take a lake and no longer call it a lake, so they can pass the water resources review. They name it a tailings pond. They dump the tailings in a lake, dam it off, and say, “Now it’s a tailings pond.” If it somehow leaks, if the tailings dam leaks into a lake, they’ll let that happen, dam up the other side, and rename it as a tailings pond. So, I mean, they’re playing silly engineering games. The truth is, what they’re doing is mining massive amounts of radioactive uranium, crushing it; a good 90 percent of the original radioactivity is left in the tailings.

So you can imagine, it includes thorium (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html), half-life 1600 years, which produces radium, its half-life is 1600 years, which produces alpha emitters, basically forever, into the local environment. And, they say, “No problem.” Well, everywhere there have been tailings, there are problems such as seepage into the food chain, etc. And this stuff is so highly concentrated; the concentration of the ore in this area of Saskatchewan is among the highest in the world, some of its 20 percent uranium. Elsewhere that could be called high-level wastes.

Aurora: But we seem to be blind to these issues at the mine site.

Jim Harding: The focus has been on the nuclear reactor wastes, and that should be a focus –but there’s a waste issue at the front end that’s maybe kept out of the public’s mind.

Aurora: Well, back to that nuclear waste issue. Let’s discuss that. In the later chapters of the book, you explore the proposal to return nuclear wastes from nuclear reactors in eastern Canada and the United States and to store this radioactive waste in the uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan or reprocess it for use in new nuclear plants proposed that will power more northern resource extraction, at the tar sands, for example.

Jim Harding: “Bring it back!”

Aurora: Right - bring the waste from reactors, the nuclear waste, back to Saskatchewan, to put it back in the actual mine sites.

Jim Harding: I tracked the first proposal to do that back to about ‘91, and it was the AECL and Cameco, so it’s an industry idea. Now it’s being adopted by governments. Bush as well as Harper and Howard in Australia seem to be moving in the direction of quote “repatriating the waste” and that would mean the major uranium producers, Saskatchewan and Australia at this point, (these two count for over half, probably 60 percent of the global uranium production) would contract to ship the uranium, bring it back as spent fuel, and then engage in very risky reprocessing and possibly use the new line of reactors that they designed and proposed for Alberta, in the tar sands, which would use spent fuel, could use spent fuel.

Aurora: Well that got my attention, living in Athabasca and on the Athabasca River. Recently the Town of Whitecourt unilaterally and without any wider public discussion invited a nuclear company in to establish a reactor there - along the Athabasca River - upstream from where I live. That project was scooped economically by the Mayor of the Town of Peace River. Happily he lost the last election and the nuclear plant proposal has come under much criticism. But the proposal is out there for a reactor in Northern Alberta, and the industry spin doctors have started their work.

Jim Harding: So they’ll call that the nuclear fuel site. Bringing the toxic waste back to the site of the mining, all justified as economic development. And I would say with the opposition to Yucca in the United States, including in the U.S. presidential election, several of the Democratic presidential candidates are now against it, Bush has mishandled it, along with everything else. I think in the next 5, 10 years that Canada, maybe Saskatchewan and Alberta will be battling a similar (nuclear waste repository) issue.

Aurora: The book notes that the French are players in this global loop also.

Jim Harding: Big, huge. The biggest is Areva. They’re an integrated system that does the weapons and the commercial reactors, and of course they’ve got the biggest commercial nuclear power system in the world, and they are vulnerable because of it because they (their reactors) are all aging, and produce about 80 percent of their electricity.

Stephen Harper says, “We’ve got to do it. Look at France, how clean their air is.” And, of course, they’re not talking about tritium or radioactive isotopes, they’re talking about lower fossil fuels, and that’s true, they are. But then there are all these radioactive problems. Well, what Harper also didn’t talk about is, the French don’t have a nuclear waste solution, and they’re building up these wastes at the reprocessing plant at the La Hague, and now they’re active in Alberta. They’re probably competitors with AECL for nuclear power in Alberta.

( Editor’s note: in Canada’s Deadly Secret on page 68, Jim writes that: “in 2001 the French Government created a single holding company for all its uranium and nuclear Crown corporations, named ‘Areva’ after a Spanish Cistercian abbey, which ironically means ‘symmetry and dignity.’”)

Aurora: Great.

Jim Harding: And my sense, based on what I’ve pieced together since the book, is that AECL might go down ‘cause they’re not that economically viable,’ they’ve been a sinkhole for subsidies since 1958 and Areva is an expanding system, and they’re here anyway. They’re the second biggest miner of uranium after Cameco.

Aurora: Well that part of the book set my political radar off. You know, you did some nice things here by tying it back to the current Harper minority Federal Government and the Prime Minister who have been talking within an ideological framework that you call scientism or what I call ecological modernization theory. No matter, it remains a partial view that believes in a technological fix, and that obscures more than it addresses. In fact I found this one of the most effective chapters, and I’m buying a copy or two to give to my MP who’s from Fort McMurray… If he reads anything, he should just read the economics chapter. It’s embarrassing how much federal money has been spent and wasted on this industry.

Jim Harding: Yes. You hear people try to justify it. Even I’m surprised at what I found because the 10 years that I wasn’t on the front lines on this stuff was when my parents were both sick and dying and I was caring for them because I’m the only kid here. … But I wasn’t staying on top of it from about ’93 until 2001; I pulled back in terms of my own activism, so I was beginning to be influenced by the propaganda, which is coming at us so hard through that period where there wasn’t an effective non-nuclear opposition. It whittles you down. … I went and looked at the economics, and I realized it was even worse than I’d ever imagined, and then I started to realize, well, why have they been able to count on these various kinds of pricing and direct and indirect subsidies? And, of course, it’s the weapons…. That’s why they’re keeping this thing going.

The nuclear power, from the very beginning, has been a way to sell it. It’s never met its expectations. The OPEC oil price crisis in the ‘70s led to the quote ‘energy crisis’, and then to this new wave of the nuclear energy. I went back and I looked at what they said was going to happen, what Allan Blakeney bought into, what the people here who didn’t look at this critically believed was going to happen with the oil crisis. Ha! It didn’t happen.

Aurora: What do you mean by that?

Jim Harding: As you know, they projected 1,000 gigawatts (of nuclear power) and we ended up with about 300, a third of their prediction. The reactor boom didn’t happen in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, and then I started saying, “Well, if it didn’t, where did all this bloody uranium go?” And then, of course, I started finding out the process of enrichment, and how it happens in France.

Aurora: Let’s talk about that part, then. We need to go there… and the connections to weapons.

Jim Harding: The economics is bad. I mean, why would all this excess public spending go into something that is producing less electricity than the renewables (like solar or wind or others) that have never had a level playing field? It’s the weapons. It’s like what Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” “It’s the weapons, stupid!”

Aurora: Alright. You convinced me, now convince the listeners.

Jim Harding: Instead of treating it as just another single issue, environmental impact, worker health, or the weapons like we did in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, where we tended to be piecing these together as almost like issues to debate, and not seeing it historically as a part of the nuclear weapons arms race. Not seeing uranium mining as part of the geopolitical, resource controlling world we’re in…

Aurora: I can see where you are going. But there is a kind of consciousness flip there that I’m going to make you teach us. When I was telling my partner about the book, she was uncomfortable with the weapons link to mining and she argued, “Well, you grew up in Hamilton. You worked in the steel mill. You made steel for cars. Why are you suddenly responsible for people who use cars irresponsibly, and die from accidents or kill others while driving? Its analogous to your argument. And I said, “Well, I’ll ask Jim.”

Jim Harding: Good question. You’re not responsible for how the car is built and whether they do the safety things but there are materials and other alloys that can potentially make a safer car, as we know back to Ralph Nader, and the companies won’t do that without pressure. And so the producer is, in fact, not responsible, except as a citizen, for the end use. But in this case of uranium, what can we use this for? This is the debate we continually have because Blakeney used say, “Well, what, are you going to do, ban lead, Jim?” “And we won’t have batteries?”- and I said, “Well, actually, Alan, they are banning lead in gas because poor children living near the freeways have high incidences of lead poisoning, and it’s affecting their learning curve,” and he went like, “Oh, God.” He didn’t want to hear it. This was before he lost.

Aurora: Right.

Jim Harding: He just wasn’t thinking that way, right? And then I’d use the asbestos example. I’d say, “Well, you know, it’s a carcinogen. If we found asbestos in there, in Saskatchewan, would you support that as an industry?” I said. And he said, “Well, how is that relevant?” And I said, “Well, because asbestos is killing thousands of people, and they’re still dying.” And they were asbestos victims, and they still haven’t shut down the mine in Quebec for straight economic indicator reasons and it remains highly subsidized by the Quebec provincial government. …

In terms of sustainability, we do have to ask these questions. What is the end use of production, and does it increase the risks to present and future generations? Does it basically postpone the burdens, costs and burdens on future generations undermine their capacities to meet their needs, and, in this case, the answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes. Whereas cars, we can recycle stuff, come up with hopefully a non-polluting form of transportation, public and otherwise, and there will have been people dying, but we won’t have been seeding cancers into the future.

Aurora: In the book you did some calculations, and I won’t go through them all that linked the peaceful atom ideology and the amount of yellow cake (unrefined uranium) that was being sold by Saskatchewan into the States. Could you talk a bit about how Saskatchewan’s uranium finds its way into weapons?

Jim Harding: Right now one of the major TV channels is debating whether or not to contract with someone I know who is a filmmaker who wants primetime to confront the Canadian public with the weapons connection that remains on uranium. And they want a smoking gun, so we’re trying to find the smoking gun. Reasoning and logic and deduction aren’t enough for them. Although we have one direct document that I quote that the Inter-Church Uranium Committee found, which actually does show the stuff going to the States, back to Port Hope ( Ontario) to make the materials used in weapons, to make the depleted uranium weapons.

But if you just stand back and say, “Okay, first of all, nobody ever admits they have uranium mines for nuclear weapons. The Russians didn’t. The Chinese didn’t. The French didn’t. The Americans didn’t. The British didn’t.” Somebody else is always doing it. No one’s ever doing it. Well, of course, they’re all doing it, right? And of course, it’s the same damn stream. It’s the same mining system that’s going into two directions. So we found out that France was an integrated system, and they hadn’t signed the nuclear proliferation treaty when the Saskatchewan crowns (Crown corporation uranium mines) and the federal Canadian government was approving the exports of uranium through AMOC to France, while France was exploding nuclear bombs still, atmospherically, and the stuff in southeast, in the Atolls.

Aurora: In the South Pacific.

Jim Harding: So that was a big, big battle for us here, and I think they lost ground on that because people started to comprehend that yes, we are, in fact, probably providing some of the uranium that’s going into the weapons streams for the French. But the Americans somehow, which was the big market ‘cause they were going to have a big nuclear power boom, which they didn’t, bought it, stockpiled it, all through Reagan. So what was going on is Reagan is building 37,000 nuclear weapons, more than the arms race in the ‘50s and ‘60s, meanwhile the nuclear power plants weren’t growing. So we started asking, “So what’s going on here? Is he creating security of supply for a boom in the reactor, or is this stuff actually being used?” And what do we find out, that nuclear proliferation treaty that the US signed doesn’t actually cover how depleted uranium comes out of the enrichment process. It’s not written in. Was it an oversight, or was it a way to say to the public, “We’ll just use uranium for peaceful purposes and not tell you how they’re interconnected?”

Well, here’s how they’re interconnected - for every pound, or say every 10 pounds of yellow cake that goes down, which is the non-refined uranium, uranium 235, they put it in enrichment to raise it to a higher percentage uranium, which works in the light water reactors in the States, and about 90 percent of the depleted uranium is left in a pile which the military has access to. And there’s lots of uranium there. So, what do they do? They take the depleted uranium into their own reactors, bombard it with neutrons, create plutonium for weapons, use the depleted uranium in the casing of H-bombs, and now, since the ‘90s, use that as the heavy metal in the weaponry – the bullets, the anti-tank bullets.

Aurora: I have read about these weapons elsewhere.

Jim Harding: And it’s not controlled. All that the nuclear proliferation treaty says is, “You can’t mine and go directly into a military reactor to create weapons,” so we were all again snookered on this thing. My calculations are that, of the 5 to 600,000 tonnes of depleted uranium that the US Military has access to, anywhere from a third to a half has its origins in Canada.

Aurora: You used a nice phrase, I can’t find it right now, but you say that it all becomes US uranium once it crosses the border, right?

Jim Harding: If you look under the Free Trade Agreement, that’s where these things – the connecting these dots – is interesting. David Orchard and I used to argue about why weren’t they dealing with this (during the anti-FTA struggles), and we tried to get Orchard onside when we were building the coalition here. He was too busy doing his stuff. Well, we’re now on the same page totally – he bought the book a couple weeks ago. Because as I did more research on the trade agreements in uranium, it all came together because of course, the issue was, if you’re going to enrich uranium in the US, and, … where else is Canada going to have its uranium enriched? We don’t have enrichment facilities.

Aurora: Why is that?.

Jim Harding: They’re extremely expensive. Only weapons powers have them. If you’re going to use enrichment stuff, then it has to be treated as though it’s domestic origin under law. So the free trade agreements, the loopholes in the non-proliferation treaty, and the monopoly that the weapons powers want to try to maintain on the whole nuclear technology, all, … I mean, I’ll be honest, I was naïve about all of these things and how they worked together until I went back and started connecting these things together. I’d written articles on the free trade. I’d written articles on uranium mining…so we’re reacting still. We got to get ahead of this so we understand it and we can start acting with some knowledge of how this works so that we’re not always caught off guard, or worse, having battles within the environmental movement in a reactive way, as some greens support nuclear to help ease the problem of climate change or whatever. But, yeah, that was one of the big discoveries.

Aurora: I agree.

Jim Harding: Gordon Edwards is a good man and he was helpful in that, in piecing that together.

Aurora: I’ve heard people talking about Fortress North America and deep integration but this is a perfect and specific example for Canadians to consider.

Jim Harding: Well, and I started using some of that language a little bit on the rewrite which wasn’t in the original because people have to understand that it’s a particular case – it’s a very important one because of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and radioactive contamination. So it’s understandable why the non-nukes get it in their minds and go with it so hard, but I’m trying to build understanding, build the bridges across movements- people who are looking for environmentally sustainable energy systems and people who are also critiquing the North American unfair, non-free trade agreements.

Aurora: Let’s go there for a minute let’s talk about the conversion economy. We need to find our way to a conversion economy – we know there’s going to be a transition as fossil fuels decline. The resurgence of nuclear is scary because they’re positioning themselves as the solution for the transition. I see that Cameco’s slogan is ‘Nuclear- the clean energy.’

Jim Harding: That’s right.

Aurora: It’s clean nuclear now?

Jim Harding: They’re very clever.

Aurora: And some of my friends in the movement, they’re saying, “Now, what are we going to do, Mike?” We have, we’ve got to go nuclear - this is the only way.

Jim Harding: I had this discussion with an ex-NDP-MP who freaked when he finally realized the global warming stuff. I’m not freaking on this because I’ve been studying the climate change since the ‘70s. I’m a bit pissed that people like Blakeney who could have made a difference in the ‘70s didn’t because we had a first real opportunity to start the conversion energy system, and we lost ground on that through basically a multi-national control of the market which some state utilities co-ventured, the French, the Canadians, and Cameco is a result of that sort of co-venturing stuff. This time round, the technology has proven it’s practical, the alternative technologies that is, but we still have to fight this control the market thing and the nukes are out there with public money propagandizing everybody, paying for Patrick Moore to go across the country telling … the kind of errors of omissions and half-truths that really amount to being lies, that this (nuclear) is the only way we can actually avert climate change. So I’ve looked at that in more detail even since the book, and the danger is not only the proliferation, but the incredible expenditure of capital.

Aurora: How is that?

Jim Harding: The notion of a mixed energy conversion, which Harper and some unthoughtful and somewhat freaked out people are thinking, including Calvert (Saskatchewan Premier) here, he talked about it, we need a mixed energy strategy. It will include nuclear, wind, solar, biofuels, and no consciousness of entropy or energy expenditure, in so many words, the actual sustainability, the physics of it. How can you get the best energy with the least expenditure of energy and the lowest waste?

Aurora: Right.

Jim Harding: And there are EU energy economists who are doing this stuff, which I started looking at, and of course, nuclear just doesn’t stand up in any studies I’ve looked at. It’s simply a) impractical; b) too cost ineffective and too risky, interest rates and other things, and then you have all these uncounted for costs that you just place on the next generation, like decommissioning, nuclear waste –

Aurora: As you argue we need full accounting for the externalities.

Jim Harding: To use that kind of language – Absolutely. I’m reading a book now –written by a conservative economist on sustainability, it’s called, The Greening of Conservative America, and I’m reading it ‘cause I want to understand how the conservative mindset can also make this transition to the conversion to a renewable system, and they’ve got it all in there.

(See a review of this book at: https://www.questia.com/library/100492269/the-greening-of-conservative-americaservative-america)

Aurora: Oh, that’s interesting.

Jim Harding: If you think about small-c conservatives, they also started voting green in Germany in the ‘80s because they began to understand what the multinational system was actually doing to weaken their local economies. And now, some people are catching on that there are wind farm potentials for diversifying agriculture that the only option isn’t to go and send your sons to the tar sands or to the uranium mines, that you can actually build your local economy.

Aurora: Well, just for a minute let’s talk again about nuclear and the tar sands –

it’s real - as I said there has been one proposal for a plant on the Athabasca River Basin from the town of Whitecourt.

Jim Harding: Then they picked Peace River, and you never know if that’s not a game. Get rejected at Peace River and then take it over to Whitecourt –Areva’s active in Whitecourt too, they’re doing promotional work there. Ariva’s everywhere. Ariva’s active in the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspaper Association, which goes into rural Saskatchewan, and they’re wining and dining staff people, taking them to France, setting them up as independent columnists to write columns for weekly papers in Saskatchewan as though they’re independent journalists.

Aurora: Really?

Jim Harding: It’s my latest investigative journalist project. I’m going to write something about that soon because people are leaking it to me from those newspapers ‘cause they’re just feeling overwhelmed by these forces from France or United States. But the tar sands, of course, it’s part of Harper’s way to salvage the Canadian nuclear capacity in AECL, which just isn’t viable if you look at their history of CANDU exports, and to give them another run at it, and to pretend to be dealing with the climate change crisis by, say, reducing carbon emissions.

Aurora: You’re kidding.

Jim Harding: It’s worth going to Just for Laughs and doing standup –

Aurora: It’s obscene.

Jim Harding: Okay, so we’re going to produce heavy oil, which produces 3 times the greenhouse gases as regular oil, by not using natural gas, which produces maybe one sixth the fossil fuels of heavy oil and replace it with nuclear, which actually uses as much fossil fuels along the fuel system, particularly as the high grade ores go down, as natural gas, to appear to be cutting emissions in Alberta. While all this is going to be exported to the US and used to produce emissions anyway. So in other words, it’s like Alice in Wonderland

Aurora: All this and in the end they will produce even more emissions.

Jim Harding: That’s right. But you know Harper’s getting a bit of a rap anyway. The Round Table on Environment and Economy (National Round table on Environment and Economy), which is somewhat political but has a lot of fairly good analysts in terms of this stuff. They went and calculated his and (Federal Environment Minister John Baird) Baird’s recommendations for not doing it the Kyoto way, but actually the calculations didn’t add up.

Aurora: Right.

(See also the critique of Canada’s Position on Kyoto by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at: http://www.ipcc.ch/)

Jim Harding: So his own people around him are nervous, its lots of optics and not very much - no commitment, lots of optics and actually not very much thought. Now, there are people in Alberta who think this is a bigger thing than the tar sands. They think it’s a grid issue into the States, exporting electricity. My feeling is the Americans may be smarter than we think, including the California governor. Why would they want exported electricity from far away when all of their own people tell them the cost effectiveness is enhanced massively by producing close as possible to the end use which is why we have nuclear parks, nuclear power like Pickering, Darlington.

Aurora: Right.

Jim Harding: And in China, France, around industrial areas, they’re largely industrial parks.

Aurora: Right.

Jim Harding: Nuclear power and the spin offs to the locals. We sell the idea to the public and say, you know, “You won’t freeze in the dark.” But the idea of building a nuclear park in the north, in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and then somehow hooking it into a grid to the States, I don’t think so. The economics of it in the tar sands (does not compare) to the geothermal, the waste heat, these tar sand plants look to me like they’ve got all the capacities to generate alternatives to natural gas themselves, so you know, on this one, I’m thinking, hmm, it looks like just a little bit of hardcore economics on this (nuclear plant in Alberta) stuff might bring it flat on its face.

Aurora: I hope you are right.

Jim Harding: Unless there’s another strategy behind it, and that’s the nuclear waste because they need reactors that can reprocess waste. And you see, in Saskatchewan, when we battled this in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, because they almost got a nuclear reactor industry going here –the CANDU 3, a smaller scale for 50 megawatts to challenge the coal plants around the world.

(See Saskatchewan to Get Prototype Candu Reactor?)

They were targeting the third world. They thought they could get an export industry up and going, and it fell on its face and it was one of our victories. Well, they used that same strategy. They tried to con people here into believing they had to have a reactor ‘cause the grid couldn’t handle the demand’ but their demand curves were all inflated. They had no energy efficiency or demand side management in it at all. In fact, they’re (the nuclear energy industry) hostile to conservation because they need growth, and once we crunched the numbers and started critiquing their stuff, it all fell flat on its face, and even SaskPower finally said, “Well, we’re a small grid. Why would we build a nuclear power plant? We’ve got some other options” and now they’re going co-generation on the grid, small scale –natural gas turbines, wind, etc. But it was the same ploy: “You need it, and you might as well get the advantages of an economic development industry from it.” And I hear the same thing in Alberta.

Aurora: Loud and louder.

Jim Harding: “It’ll be good for the tar sands. Start reducing emissions and down the road, you might get the advantage of the nuclear waste reprocessing plant –

Aurora: Just like we did with Swan Hills and Ralph Klein’s dream to take in the world’s PCB’s and other hazardous wastes. Albertans were not too smart about that ploy until all the money was spent and the damage done.

Jim Harding: And whether we’re as vulnerable and connable to these economic development bribes, I don’t know, but in the drought period in the ‘80s in Saskatchewan, we were pretty vulnerable to these.

Aurora: You’re right in reminding us of historical context. Right now there is that kind of peak oil fear – they play that card often –‘because we’re going to run out of time. Let me take you back to one other theme in the book - you raise the issue of moral responsibility. We’ve an ecological part to the story, we’ve a political and economic part, but you, you mentioned early on the Nuremberg syndrome at work here.

Jim Harding: Do you know what I’ve realized? I’ve realized the same lesson I think my Dad learned. He came out of the social gospel movement, secularizing of the social gospel. But really, when you track it back, its vision, and its concept of commonwealth and community, it is a Protestant Christian worldview, secularized with, you know, the social humanists and the democratic socialists and the social democrats…. Well, I kept wondering, why wasn’t the environmental movement more responsive to this uranium mining stuff that we had been digging up?They were responsive to environmental impact questions, but then, they had difficulty sometimes if we talked about our global connection to weapons and our complicity. In the ‘60s and the ‘70s, the anti-war movement had that. That was why I think we got somewhere with Vietnam. I’m not sure we even got that now with Iraq, that sentiment that we are involved directly and we need to do something about our complicity. That sentiment was very strong in the ‘60s that global consciousness was growing.

Well, I kept looking for colleagues and allies, and the only place I could find them was in the ecumenical movement. So I ended up working with Kairos. I’m not a Christian but I am active in the multifaith groups, and my spirituality is very ecological, and I see connections between that and the history of religion, which I’m actually pulling out in this new book I’m writing. I’m trying to maybe, instead of us reacting to each other’s worldviews, maybe we need to ground them and demystify them and get a sense of where we are right now in human dilemmas with sustainability and evolution and, you know, we’ve got a global crisis on our hands -- it’s huge – The ecumenical people understood this issue of uranium mining involvement for outcomes, for end uses. The Protestant, the Mennonite, and the Catholic - the Catholics have been particularly good recently, and many of the activists who’ve worked in the uranium, Inter-Church Uranium Committee, are Catholic theologians. They’re professors, retired professors of theology. I’m not into moralism but somehow we’ve got to get a morality back into this discussion of ecological interdependence and globalization - because if you don’t have that, who cares?

There’s a reason why we’re passionate about this, and it’s because we realize our interdependence is real. This is not a CBC News report. It’s actually happening, so when those depleted uranium bullets were blasted into Iraq in the shock and awe and the uranium aerosols went up into the atmosphere and apparently went as far as England, but mostly went into the lungs of fighters and civilians on land there’s a little bit of Saskatchewan right there going into them.

Aurora: As you said – we’re at war with ourselves as a species.

Jim Harding: Well, and I think we really have reached that point. People understood that after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Aurora: Amnesia again?

Jim Harding: The Ban the Bomb Movement was fuelled with that shock that we actually have created this destructive technology. It’s all been massaged through ‘atoms of peace’ and loopholes in the non-proliferation agreements and double standards, and then of course the Iraq War – when you deconstruct it, it’s filled with this stuff - now its Iran and nuclear fears. Geopolitics, comprehending it, and globalization – the ecological fate of the Earth – and this particular industry are so interwoven. What we don’t have is, I’m sorry to say it; we just don’t have the militant activism. The consciousness that is emerging now would contain a militant activism different than the ‘60s where people were groping, and their activism often went overboard because they didn’t have that comprehension that we work within. Now we’ve got the comprehension, what we could use is a good dose of activism. And I really think it would be different. This next generation might, maybe have a more holistic sense of vision and also a more holistic sense of action. Maybe we’re just taking a little bit longer to get there, but it scares the pants off of some of us … the consciousness is there – it’s just not being triggered, even with the war in Iraq. If that can’t do it, I’m puzzled.

Aurora: Thanks Jim. It was great to meet you.

Publications by Jim Harding

Social Justice and Social Policy: The NDP Government in Saskatchewan During the Blakeney Years (1995) Wilfrid Laurier University Press

After Iraq: War, Imperialism and Democracy andSocial Policy and Social Justice (2004) Fernwood Publishing

Student Radicalism & National Liberation: Essays from the New Left Revolt in Canada, 1964-74 (2006) Fort Qu'Appelle: Crows Nest Publishing

Publications by Jim Harding

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