The Canadian province of Ontario announced yesterday that it has suspended a plan to build two new nuclear reactors.

The reason?

According to government officials, concerns about pricing and uncertainty regarding the future of Atomic Energy Corporation (the favored bidder for the nuclear projects), prevented Ontario from continuing with the procurement.

But the Globe and Mail newspaper reported the following...

"Canadian nuclear safety regulators say they have underestimated the seriousness of a design feature at the country's electricity-producing reactors that would cause them to experience dangerous power pulses during a major accident.

If reactors are not shut down quickly, their ability to keep radioactivity from escaping would be put to the test, according to an internal commission document.

The document says Canada's seven nuclear stations, which all use Candu technology, have a feature known as 'positive reactivity feedback,' in which their atomic chain reactions automatically speed up if the water pumped into the reactors to cool them leaks, one of the worst accidents possible at a nuclear station. If reactors aren't immediately shut down during this type of incident, positive reactivity leads to a quick snowballing in the pace of nuclear reactions, which in turn could cause potentially damaging overheating.

The fear is that with a large loss of coolant, such overheating could put the nuclear facilities' containment features - the concrete domes and other protective mechanisms around reactors that are the last-ditch defences to stop the spread of radioactivity into the environment - to a dangerous test.

The commission is monitoring the problem closely because positive reactivity could lead to 'severe core damage and early challenge of containment integrity if not arrested in time' during a severe loss of coolant accident, the document said."

Now I'm not a nuclear engineer, and I don't pretend to understand much about nuclear power generation. But I am your typical consumer. And no matter how many times I hear from pro-nuclear types that nuclear is safe, it's stuff like this that makes me realize we're probably a lot better off spending our time and money expanding our renewable energy and smart grid infrastructure.

Of course, I'll probably get quite a few hostile comments to that statement. But the fact is, if a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines overheat - I don't need to be worried about radioactivity issues. And that makes all the difference.

Jeff