In New Brunswick, cancer clusters. One unlucky town has ovarian cancer rates 200 percent higher than the national average. In another region, you’re more likely to get brain cancer. Each cluster has one thing in common: heavy industry. Inside the radical fight to kill the economy and save lives

With a small plastic tote in one hand and a trowel in the other, Inka Milewski walks alone into the open field behind the spruce-lined schoolyard. Six kilometres away, there is a smelter, and a single smokestack peeks up above the tree line. The eggy, persistent smell of sulfur is faint—at least today. It’s October 12, 2003. Milewski knows there are secrets buried here, in the yard behind New Brunswick’s Belledune Elementary School. They have been festering since the late ’60s, and now, at last, she is ready to dig them up.

Milewski works until sundown, scraping soil samples from three school yards and 25 properties into 39 sterile, glass jars. Each sample is meticulously collected and labeled. She refuses to let improper sampling be grounds for the inevitable criticism from the New Brunswick government and industrial companies. Milewski packs everything into a cardboard box and FedEx-es it off for testing. Three weeks later, results confirm what she already suspected; there are high levels of lead, cadmium and arsenic and in the soil—heavy metals all known to cause cancer.

As a marine biologist living in Miramichi, N.B., 58-year-old Milewski has always studied health at the community level. She worked with marine ecosystems, examining eel grass environments and the impact of salmon  farms, linking environmental factors to community health. But then, she started hearing the same ominous worries. Things like: “We have high rates of cancer in our community” and “10 people on my street have died of cancer.” Such chilling comments prompted her first round of sampling in Belledune. Since then, she’s shifted her focus to health risks in human communities, and last spring she published a study called “Identifying At-Risk Communities for Action on Cancer Prevention.”

Gathering data from 14 local communities, Milewski found that different areas were prone to different types and amounts of cancer. In Upper Miramichi, for example, brain cancer in women was 50 percent higher than the provincial average. And in Dalhousie, ovarian cancer was more than 200 percent higher. Factors like socio-economic status and smoking behavior were consistent and could not explain the different cancer patterns. But there was one factor that did vary between communities: industry. Areas with lots of cancer also happened to be those with lots of industrial activity. And men in those areas were particularly vulnerable. While it wasn’t proof, the evidence was scary enough. Certain industries in New Brunswick were causing people to get sick, and in a very predictable way.

Milewski’s most recent report makes several recommendations to help address cancer rates at the community level. Based on her results, she calls for the New Brunswick government to stop industries from releasing known carcinogens. Shortly after the study was released, Milewski sent letters to the minister of health and minister of environment offering to discuss her findings and recommendations. She also sent letters to all 14 mayors in the province. Then she waited to hear back. And waited.

In many ways, curing cancer, rather than preventing it, is considered the epitome of scientific success—a goal motivated by the depressing fact that 46 percent of men and 41 percent of women will get cancer in their lifetimes, and one out of four of them will die from it. Milewski argues this approach is deeply misguided. She says it prevents us from asking the bigger question: why? What is it about a person’s lifestyle in her community that causes her to get cancer?—food? location? environment? Together with other researchers, Milewski is part of a growing faction that believes such money and resources would be better spent on addressing “cancer hot spots.” To them, shifting focus to disease rates at the community level just makes sense: Studies consistently show that factors in a person’s neighbourhood are directly linked to that person’s health. If you can identify the factors, the theory goes, you can thwart the disease and illness linked to those factors—not just cancer, but other industry-spurred things like lead poisoning and cardiovascular sickness.

This line of thinking, however, is wildly controversial—and largely unpopular—in small industrial economies like New Brunswick’s. Once disease is linked to a specific industry, the community faces a dilemma: prevent cancer or preserve the economy. As Milewski puts it, “We would have to change our entire economic [structure] to deal with this scourge of cancer.”

Belledune—so called for its “pretty dunes”—doesn’t live up to its name anymore. The transition from pristine coastal hamlet to industrial town began in 1961 with a $50 million complex that would include a mine, a concentrating mill, a lead smelter, and an acid plant. It was set to create two thousand jobs and appease New Brunswickers eager to domesticate the mineral and forest industries then controlled by foreign (mostly American) companies. The complex would also release five metals into the surrounding environment: copper, zinc, silver, cadmium, and lead.

The province made legal exceptions for the company in charge of the project. It was allowed to expropriate and rezone public land as it pleased. It could divert streams and rivers, and was immune to “nuisance prosecution,” eliminating a 200-year-old common law that allowed citizens to protect themselves, their properties, and communities from damages such as noise, odours, and industrial pollution.[xii] When citizens challenged the concessions, the province assured they had no reason to be afraid of a “puff of smoke.” At a public interest meeting, K.C. Irving of the Irving empire (and an investor in the smelter) said that although the smoke from the smelter may be “a little unpleasant” sometimes, “the nuisance clause was necessary to avoid petty interference with operations.”

A year into the smelter’s operations, the first rumors of lead poisoning started circulating. By year’s end, 33 of 450 workers were relocated from the smelter due to high levels of lead in their blood. Another 32 workers were given warnings. More and more miners appealed to the Workers’ Compensation Board and still, the smelting company would not look into pollution problems in and around the facility. In 1968, the Steelworkers Union requested a federal investigation. By 1972, compensation claims for lead poisoning were higher in New Brunswick than all mining communities in Canada combined.

A similar story was unfolding in Belledune’s Bay of Chaleur. In 1969, the new chemical fertilizer plant was producing 4,600 tonnes of gypsum (calcium sulfate) by-product per day. At the time, there were no markets for the product. The only solution seemed to be to dump it in the ocean or landfills. The province couldn’t afford to give up an acre of land to gypsum each day; into the bay it went. Two years later, a toxicity test showed gypsum was killing fish. A 1985 Environment Canada study found acutely lethal effects on amphipods and lobster larvae. When the fertilizer plant had to cut costs later that year, however, it ignored the study and instead changed the manufacturing process in a way that boosted gypsum output. It eventually shut down in 1996, after years of unfulfilled promises to fix its gypsum conundrum.

Since then, the government has made small concessions. They’ve cleaned private properties and improved ventilation systems in factories. And as a result, chemical emissions have declined in New Brunswick—about 85 percent since the data was first recorded annually in 1975. Lead emissions have decreased from 2,270 kilograms per day in 1968 to 7,784 kilograms per year in 2011. And zinc emissions, once 41,000 kilograms per year, are down to 1,200 kilograms. It’s easy to see these numbers as encouraging, but Milewski says these scant reductions are not enough. You could say they’re a bit like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

Cancer clusters. That’s what it does. Mutant cells replicate in a host and cluster together. Cancer clusters in the body, forming tumors that start out too small to notice, then grow, then spread. Cancer clusters in communities, too. It’s not something we like to talk about. Industries and governments especially prefer to weigh all other options before declaring a particular cause of cancer. As a result, cancer clusters are often ignored until they are too big, or too obvious, which, usually, is too late.

Researchers like Milewski believe this wait-and-see method can only result in more death. If we truly want to cut cancer rates, she argues, we must adopt precautionary approach: one that identifies cancer patterns and avoids suspected causes of disease. For her, evidence, rather than proof, is enough. Milewski is realistic about what it will take to push governments into action, however. It will take a significant shock, such as a meteoric rise in youth and twentysomething cancer rates. “As people run out of excuses for why the rates of cancer are going up,” she says, “they’ll start looking to industrial and environmental sources.”

In West Salem, Oregon, this is already happening. Since 2010, seven young people—all from middle school and high school—have been diagnosed with osteosarcoma. The rare bone cancer typically affects 800 people per year across the United States. In West Salem, with a population of 19,000, the diagnosis rate should be about one case per generation.

The Public Health Division of the Oregon Health Authority is calling the situation in West Salem a “cancer cluster”—a confirmed and unusual high number of a particular type of cancer in this small geographic area. It’s a similar situation to what Milewski identified in communities across New Brunswick. But in Oregon, the government is addressing the surge in cancer in a systematic way.

The investigation of cancer clusters usually stems from public concerns, says state epidemiologist Dr. Katrina Hedberg. Community members send a query to the state cancer registry if they suspect some toxin in their environment is causing cancer. The Public Health Division then investigates the concern and offers the community information about the cancer: what the risk factors are, expected disease rates, and so on. “Then we put the responsibility back on the public,” says Dr. Hedberg. “We say ‘tell us the people you know and in what time frame they were diagnosed.’”

If a cancer cluster is identified, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is responsible for cleaning up the environment, jumps in to investigate. Right now, the EPA is testing West Salem for carcinogens known to be linked to osteosarcoma.

West Salem is a relatively new neighbourhood in the larger Salem community. One possible factor being investigated is whether the houses and parks were built on land that was previously contaminated by industrial activity. But little is known about what causes osteosarcoma. “At the end of the day, we may not be able to prove that one type of industry caused the cancer,” says Ben Duncan, of OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon and chair of the Oregon Environmental Justice Task Force. “It’s very hard to make that connection.” And a lack of scientific evidence isn’t the only barrier. Duncan goes on, “To say this is a causal link costs a lot of money. I hate to say there’s politics tied up in this, but” he pauses, then concedes, “it’s rife with politics.”

Milewski flips through the marked-up pages of Silent Spring. She’s lost track of how many times she’s read the book. But every time she does, she’s drawn to this one passage: a letter, dated 1958. It’s from a housewife in Illinois writing about the recent void of songbirds in her yard. DDT, she suspects, is killing them off—the then new chemical was used to preserve elm trees along the road. At the time, DDT was considered safe for human exposure. We now know it attacks the plasma membrane of cells, kills small organism, and is suspected to cause cancer in humans.

“I think a lot about her,” Milewski says referring to the book’s author, Rachel Carson. Carson was a biologist and writer from the late ’40s–’60s. She had a vendetta against the post-war chemical revolution and doubted its promise for a brighter tomorrow. “I’ve thought a lot about her,” Milewski continues, “I found myself 10 years ago doing work that was completely out of my comfort [zone], out of my capabilities, but I was compelled to do it. I couldn’t say no. Somebody needed to step up.”

Like Milewski, Carson’s marine biology career led her to conservationism. She devoted the latter part of her life to writing for the public. Although she was from Springdale, Pennsylvania, Carson wrote extensively on the Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick. Her writing took off just after WWII, at a time when New Brunswick was battling the spruce budworm’s threat on the lumber industry. The budworm was eating away at old trees, priming the forest for natural burns, and creating ideal conditions for germination. But what’s good for the forest is not always good for industry, and New Brunswick was quickly losing large lumber to this hungry little pest.

With the war over, fighter planes and mass amounts of chemicals were available for commercial use. In 1952, New Brunswick launched the most rigorous aerial-spraying program the world—to this day—has ever seen. They used DDT to fend off spruce budworm. And it worked. But each year the budworm came back, and each the forests were sprayed.

Carson’s work, particularly Silent Spring, inspired the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and influenced the eventual ban on DDT. By the time New Brunswick’s aerial spraying program ended in 1990, at least 220 million pounds of pesticides had rained over New Brunswick forests. Today, Upper Miramichi has high rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ovarian and brain cancers—all known to be linked to pesticide exposure.

As a woman scientist during Cold War times, Carson had to fight for all the respect she had. She was the subject of a Monsanto parody published in the company’s magazine, and the National Agricultural Chemical Association launched a $250,000 distortion campaign against her. After publishing Silent Spring, a Time Magazine article called her “unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic.” In her final years, Carson retreated to her home in Silver Spring, Maryland where she died of cancer in 1964.

Milewski and her husband, Ben Baldwin, live on 100 acres of farmland in the Miramichi. The property was a land grant from King George IV in 1828 and has been in Baldwin’s family ever since. Milewski’s time is split between working here, in her home office, and out in the field. Back in 2003, she was on the road a lot—at least three days a week. She’d be up at 6 a.m. and home by midnight, making the hour and forty minute drive to and from Belledune at dusk and dawn. “They were long days,” says Milewski. “Also very rewarding days because something was going to happen. I was working with citizens who, for decades, had been kept in the dark. They were about to get the answers they were looking for.”

That year, the provincial government was set to approve a toxic waste incinerator in Belledune. The incinerator would be the latest “smokestack industry” in the 1,700-population town. The government and the company leading the project, Bennett Environmental, were reciting the same rhetoric that came with each new industrial development: chemical emissions from the facility would pose little, if any, health risks on the community. And of course, the development would create “millions of dollars and thousands of jobs.”

Peggy Gordon was skeptical. Gordon, a nurse working in long-term care, lived in Winnipeg for most of Belledune’s developing years. When she moved back to Belledune in 1995, she heard grumblings from residents apprehensive of yet more industrial development. Together, with a group of six other women, she launched an objection against Bennett Environmental’s building permit, arguing the development would lower residents’ property values. “We were concerned about what [the incinerator] would do to our health,” says Gordon. “But property values brought the issue out in the open. It rings in people’s ears better than health issues.”

Some women had stories about their fathers or brothers getting sick, not just from cancer but also respiratory illnesses and heart disease. The women suspected the area’s industries were the culprit, but also knew they needed help to prove it. They contacted the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and Milewski agreed to look at Bennett’s public health and environmental assessment—a 900-page report, muddled with jargon and invalid methodology that underestimated the exposure to chemical emissions.[xlvi] Milewski now looks back at this moment as the launch point of her side-step into the realm of cancer research, and community health in general.

Milewski determined that Bennett failed to accurately consider its incinerator’s environmental and health impact and completely ignored the decades of built-up toxins from Belledune’s chemical industries. Instead, Bennett imagined the incinerator would exist in a vacuum. It was as if its emissions would be the first to pollute the air, land, and waters of Belledune. Such models of risk were all hypothetical; Milewski wanted to look at the community’s actual cancer rates—how industry might already be affecting Belledune’s population. She began to collect all existing environmental monitoring data for the area. Thousands of pages poured in, all of them revealing an astounding level of contamination in the area. And here the province was, about to carry on Belledune’s toxic industrial legacy.

With Milewski’s help, Gordon and the citizen group mobilized against Bennett. They engaged hundreds of people around the Bay of Chaleur, from Belledune to Grand-Riviere, Que. to the Gaspe Peninsula in Nova Scotia. As one mega group, they rallied 2,500 protesters, organized a petition—more than 50,000 signatures strong—and presented it at the legislature in Fredricton. Bennett fought back, and launched a defamation suit against Milewski, her organization, and her colleague. Milewski says she wasn’t particularly concerned about the lawsuit: she believed it was meant to silence her, and, of course, it couldn’t. (After three years, Bennett dropped the lawsuit.)

Milewski made the history of Belledune’s industrial contamination public for the first time in a 2006 report called “Dying for Development: the Legacy of Lead in Belledune.” Although the Bennett toxic waste incinerator was approved and built, it never received an operating permit. “The citizens,” says Milewski, “were quite successful in preventing the plant from operating.”

Roger LeBlanc worked in New Brunswick’s Bathurst zinc mines for 17 years. When he was 51 he got sick from lead exposure and stopped working. That was in 1996. He hasn’t been healthy since. Initially, lead gets into a person’s bloodstream and poisons the body that way. You may have pains in your abdomen, or persistent headaches, or feel anemic. Then the lead settles in your bones and goes dormant for a while—your symptoms soften and may even go away. But as you age, your bones decay, and as they decay lead leaches back out into your blood and you are re-victimized. The slow, constant release of lead continues in tandem with the slow, constant decay of your bones. Your mind and body eventually succumb to the poison which, inevitably, kills you.

A decade after he had stopped working, LeBlanc read Milewski’s report, “Dying for Development.” He was in a battle for workers’ compensation and his advocate knew nothing about lead poisoning or its link with zinc mining.When the compensation board told him the high levels of lead in his blood didn’t amount to an “industrial disease,” he couldn’t refute it. Over and over, the board rejected his request—maybe, they suggested, toxins had entered his blood from paint on old cars or hunting wild game with lead bullets. Milewski’s report convinced him he was suffering, deteriorating—like so many others in his community—because of those years of zinc exposure. With new hope, LeBlanc reached out to Milewski.

“I may not be a lawyer,” says Milewski, “but hey—what the heck! Sometimes you have to do the heavy lifting. I thought, ‘I’ll just read about it. I’ll figure it out.’” After 157 chelation sessions—hopeless attempts to rid his body of lead—LeBlanc had no money left for legal aid. Milewski volunteered to help him get compensation for his treatments in 2010, the year of his first appeal. That’s how she found herself sitting in the courthouse, right beside LeBlanc. Like with so many others in the province, Milewski’s been his advocate ever since. This time, she’s up against six lawyers representing the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission and Xstrata Canada Corp. Zinc Division. LeBlanc’s final appeal was heard in March 2013. “Maybe I’m just fearless,” she says about the trial “or maybe I’m foolish.” Certainly, she’s been called both. For now she waits, with patience, for the court’s ruling.

Fort Chipewyan residents are increasingly afraid to consume the fish pulled from Lake Athabasca.

Canada’s oil sands are the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. So far, oil sands development has eliminated 602 square kilometers of Boreal forest and emits 29.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses annually. The process involves strip-mining bitumen, a tar-like, sandy earth also known as “tar sands,” then processing it into various petroleum products. This process produces 1.8 billion litres of liquid toxic waste every day, which is stored in man-made “tailings ponds.” These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan is located 300 kilometres downstream from the oil sands. In 2006, Fort Chipewyan’s family physician, Dr. John O’Connor, reported that alarmingly high rates of rare and aggressive cancers were killing local residents. As of 2010, band elders reported that cancer had become the leading cause of death in the community. Fear and grief consume Fort Chipewyan as fishermen are finding tumour-laden fish in Lake Athabasca and residents continue to lose their friends and family to cancer.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers continues to tell Canada and the world that there are no lasting impacts upon human health or the environment from the oil sands. Conflicting statements from CAPP, the Government of Alberta, scientists, environmentalists, non-governmental organizations and First Nations people have led to widespread public confusion over the true effects of the operation. Meanwhile, the people of Fort Chipewyan continue to die. Those who survive are afraid to consume the moose, fish and water that have sustained their families for generations.

Pollution from tailings ponds.

Tailings ponds line both sides of the Athabasca River near the oil sands—their toxic contents held back by man-made sand dikes that are hundreds of feet tall. A 2008 study by Environmental Defence showed that the tailings ponds were leaking 11 million litres of liquid into the surrounding environment every day. The Athabasca River runs past the oil sands, through Lake Athabasca, past several indigenous communities including Fort Chipewyan, and eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Cherie Wanderingspirit worries about her children's health.

The abandoned Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan.

Young people in Fort Chipewyan are increasingly disconnected from their traditional culture.

Like many Fort Chipewyan parents, Cherie Wanderingspirit (above) is worried about her children’s health. Today’s younger generations in Fort Chipewyan not only face the threat of cancer, but also live with the social trauma passed down to them by family members who lived at Fort Chipewyan’s Holy Angels Residential School (above) which closed in 1974. The torture and sexual abuse endured by the aboriginal children who attended the school have left lasting wounds upon the social and cultural fabric of Fort Chipewyan. Substance abuse, sexual assault, depression, and suicide are ongoing problems within the community. As a result, young people here are largely disconnected from their traditional First Nations culture. Rather than leaning to hunt, fish and trap, the youth (above) are often more interested in video games and urban fashion.

A willow branch marks the passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta.

Other than working in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of the last ways to make a living in Fort Chipewyan.

Lake Athabasca fish being smoked.

Fish that can't be sold are thrown to the sled dogs.

A young willow branch (above) stuck into the mud by a boater, marks the deepest passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta. Fort Chipewyan’s band elders are concerned that water being taken from the Athabasca River to process bitumen into oil is contributing to declining water levels. Tar sands processing requires almost four barrels of water for every barrel of crude produced; Alberta Energy projects production will reach 3 million barrels of oil per day by 2018. Aside from employment in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of Fort Chipewyan’s last viable means of making a living. Over the last five years, more and more fish with golf-ball-sized tumours, double tails, and other abnormalities have been caught in Lake Athabasca by commercial fishermen. In 2010, fishermen in Fort Chipewyan were unable to sell any fish commercially due to growing concerns over contamination from pollution, according to Lionel Lepine, the traditional environmental knowledge coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Most of the fish caught during 2010 were smoked  or thrown to sled dogs.

Band elder Wilfred Marcel lost his daughter to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

After more than forty years of chiefs and band elders complaining about the effects of pollution from the oil sands and tailings ponds, it took the publicly stated opinion of Dr. John O’Connor and independent environmental assessments by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Kevin Timoney to finally draw media and public attention to Fort Chipewyan’s health and environmental concerns. The chief and council of Fort Chipewyan have called upon the Canadian government for an independent public health inquiry for over a decade. In that time, hundreds of Fort Chipewyan’s residents have died of unexplained cancers. Band elder Wilfred Marcel (above) lost his daughter Stephanie to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

The cemetery in Fort Chipewyan. Hundreds of residents have died of unexplained cancers.

Visualizations of DNA strands. Pink Army Cooperative aims to sequence personalized cancer treatments using open-source principles. Creative Commons image via Wikipedia user Zephyris.

Andrew Hessel

The Pink Army is preparing an ambitious invasion, and Andrew Hessel is its general. This is one war you can actually feel good about supporting, though: namely, the fight against breast cancer.

Hessel is the founder and managing director of Pink Army Cooperative, the world’s first open-source synthetic biotechnology firm. Founded in Edmonton in 2009, Pink Army is pioneering a radical new way of researching breast cancer treatments, built on the same free and open software principles that drive huge firms like Mozilla, developers of the open-source Firefox internet browser. Pink Army is fully member-owned and democratically run; anyone can join for just $20. Using that grassroots support, the firm will work on developing custom cancer treatments, tailored to patients’ individual DNA. The idea is to affordably create bespoke treatments that definitively cure a single patient, instead of one-size-fits-all drugs that merely treat millions.

Hessel, a University of Calgary-trained biologist, is now a world leader in the new field of synthetic biology, a hybrid of traditional biology and engineering. Practitioners in the field see cells—the building blocks of all living things—as tiny computers that can be modeled, manipulated, duplicated, and more. “Cells are processors; DNA is a programming language,” Hessel said in a 2009 presentation. “We can look at biological systems much like computer networks. And because we have so much experience today with hardware, software and large scale computing, we are actually learning about our biology through the building out of these systems.” The same forces that drove the price of a desktop computer from $10,000 to $299 have also made it increasingly possible to quickly and cheaply sequence DNA. Once you can untangle a cancer patient’s genome, Hessel believes synthetic biology will point the way to a personalized cure—essentially a way to find the glitch in your cellular software and rewrite it.

Hessel acknowledges it sounds like science fiction, but says most of the technological pieces are already in place; what’s needed is a better, faster, cheaper research method. That’s why Pink Army is an open-source co-op: with no secrets, no patents, and no profits, Hessel believes he’ll be able to duplicate the enormous success of open-source software, but for biotech. Currently numbering 500 members, Hessel believes the co-op needs 2,500 to synthesize its first treatment, so it may be a few years before Pink Army is ready to treat its first patient. But their first shot may mark the start of a medical revolution.

Henrietta Lacks lived only to the age of 31, and it’s the acute case of cervical cancer that killed her that also brought change to the world. During radiation treatment, doctors scraped her cancer cells for research. Those cells eventually became known as HeLa, and they are immortal. HeLa cells continue to duplicate to this day, and they’ve been used in everything from polio vaccines to gene mapping to AIDS research.

It’s a truly fascinating story from a science and medical background – how one group of cells can live more than 50 years after the woman they came from died.

But it’s the back-story that sets The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by journalist Rebecca Skloot, apart. Lacks and her family were unaware that her cells were harvested and used in medical research, and they only recently found out about her scientific importance. Her immediate family, currently based in Baltimore, never received any compensation for her cells—despite the fact that they were taken without permission and subsequently used by wealthy research companies.

As Skloot develops the story into a profile of Lacks and her family, we get an intimate profile of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, as well as her sons and husband. Immortal Life reads like a murder mystery most of the time, even though we know who committed the crime.

Says her daughter Deborah:

“I always thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin’ about them takin’ her cells, now we don’t get a dime.”

It’s easy to praise The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: it’s engaging and well-written. But the importance of the book might be just as overlooked at Henrietta herself, who has been rarely praised as the person responsible for saving lives around the world. This book goes some way toward correcting that original injustice. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks shouldn’t be placed on the bookshelves of only those interested in medical research and history—the story weaves itself through various genres, and is related to politics, race relations, gender studies and health care. Skloot proves that Lacks is: “An unsung heroine of medicine.”

In the end, medical research is about people, and it’s people like Lacks and her family we should be reading about to understand our current health policy, what it means to the average Canadian, and what our health system could become. The media is often to blame for taking science reporting and leaving it at that—cells and researchers and technical terms. But it’s who that research is helping that should be the focus.

Microscopic image of Asbestos. Despite being banned here, Canada remains the West's biggest exporter of the deadly mineral.

Over the past two decades, Canada has spent millions stripping asbestos from the walls and ceilings of schools, the Parliament Buildings, and hospitals. The national outcry against asbestos has led to some government restrictions on its use and production, causing many Canadians to believe its heyday is over. Yet while the government has put effort into stamping out asbestos use at home, it’s put even more into boosting its use abroad.

In recent years, Canada has become the biggest western supporter of the asbestos trade. Kathleen Ruff, founder and coordinator of Right On Canada’s anti-asbestos campaign, says she believes the government’s success hinges on its ability to use Canada’s credibility as a marketing tool: “We use our reputation of helping others to oppose an international ban on asbestos and to fight the knowledge that asbestos is hazardous.”

For many, however, it’s no secret asbestos is dangerous. To date, asbestos is recognized as a carcinogen and is banned in all 27 European Union member countries, Australia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Chile, and Japan. Not so in Canada, where politicians have repeatedly defied calls for a global asbestos ban from the World Health Organization, the Canadian Cancer Society, and the International Labour Organization.

Indeed, between 1999 and 2001, Canada’s government spent about $575,000 appealing France’s 1997 asbestos ban, only to have the World Trade Organization uphold it. Undeterred, in 2004 Canada successfully spearheaded a coalition of naysayers—Indonesia, India, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe—to block the addition of asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention, a chemical watchdog list.

Certainly, the Canadian government has a vested interest in keeping the asbestos trade alive. More than 240,000 tonnes of asbestos is mined each year in Quebec, 95 percent of which is shipped outside the country, making Canada the fourth largest exporter of asbestos in the world. The main destinations for Canadian asbestos are countries such as India and Pakistan, where safety regulations surrounding asbestos handling and use are either sparse or non-existent.

For Ruff, exporting asbestos is akin to exporting landmines: both continue to kill for decades. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to remove asbestos from buildings, schools, and hospitals around Canada,” she says. “There are huge costs associated with getting rid of asbestos once it’s in place and developing countries have none of that—they have no means of getting rid of it safely.”

If only journalists displayed this much facility with stats. XKCD comic by Randall Munroe.

A year of layoffs and anaemic ad buys has given journalists an excuse to turn inwards like never before. By now, even folks outside the industry must be sick of hearing about the Future of Journalism — my own fervent hope is to never read another article about social media for reporters. But I do think that an instinct for self-improvement is useful, so I’m going to add something else to the agenda — call it a Margin of Error manifesto. I’d like to talk about statistical literacy.

I know that it’s a bit predictable, even self-serving, to argue that everyone should have a skill that you have already developed. And I hate to add another job description to a list that is rapidly becoming unmanageable. Increasingly, it seems that we are all expected to be programmers and photographers, designers and copy editors, fact checkers and fundraisers. I’m not sure what to make of this job ooze, as an economist — we know something about the value of specialization — but so long as we’re all marginally employed and learning new skills, let’s try to pick up this indispensable one.

Craig Silverman has been saying smart things about journalism since before it was fashionable, and he is forceful about the importance of numeracy. But my point is not just about knowing how to add. When I say that we need to be literate, I mean that journalists should be comfortable enough with statistical methods to skim an academic paper, poll, or piece of market research and know whether the numbers say what our sources claim. We should have a clear hold on what it means to control for something, and when and why something is statistically significant. We should be able to compare contradictory studies. A couple rigorous university-level courses in social science methods would do the trick, more or less, but reading a few textbooks might be even better.

Unfortunately, most journalists don’t have a single course in methods, or any math past high school. We are, for better or worse, an industry of math-phobic English majors. And yet we report on statistics almost daily. Even crime reporters have to throw in the occasional paragraph on whether the murder rate is going up or down, and lifestyle columnists just love to write about neuroscience studies.

A few things happen when you have to report on something that you barely understand. You are forced to trust the researchers absolutely — whenever private companies release their own research, that’s a risk. You introduce errors by paraphrasing. You fail to communicate which results are suspect and which are nearly indisputable. Everything is reported as a breakthrough, because no researcher will admit to an incremental result. You can’t put contradictory studies in context, which drives readers nuts — who can remember whether red wine is good or bad for you, anyway? What are we supposed to eat, if everything causes cancer?

My sense is that political reporters develop some expertise on polling, and health reporters are getting serious about understanding drug and diet trials. A select group of journalists are making data what they do, and the New York Times has been doing some beautiful work with online infographics. But if you type “study” into Google News and scroll down, there is plenty of depressing nonsense to be found.

In August, the New York Times declared this the golden age of statistics, quoting Google’s resident math geek Hal Varian. Thanks to the internet, more data is more available than ever before. Statistics is only going to become more important. We can only hope that we will be able to cover it. Without statistical literacy, we will just be writing fiction.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, became a convert to nuclear power during a visit with James Lovelock, considered by many to be the godfather of the environmental movement. During a day spent strolling through the fields around Lovelock’s home, the two spoke of many things, but returned again and again to nuclear energy, which Lovelock insisted was the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Nuclear power: such a bright idea?

For Moore, it was not an easy argument to swallow. Like many in the first generation of the environmental movement, he’d cut his teeth protesting nuclear power and nuclear weapons. “Next to nuclear warheads themselves,” he once said, nuclear power plants were “the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.”

But he had to pay attention. This was James Lovelock, the man who had created the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the Earth is essentially a living creature—and whose research laid the ground for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, without which there might not have been an environmental movement. And he supported nuclear power?

As Moore listened, and Lovelock argued, he started to see why. Other than hydroelectric, what had done more to keep carbon emissions from skyrocketing? It wasn’t wind, it wasn’t solar, and it wasn’t hybrids—it was nuclear power. Without the electricity it had produced since the 1960s, global warming would have progressed much further, Lovelock argued, perhaps already passing a point of no return.

Moore became a convert. At first, some former colleagues chalked it up to greed—he has since worked as a consultant for nuclear power associations—but they soon discovered he was far from alone. Included in the ranks of pro-nuclear environmentalists are the likes of Steward Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog; Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a former longtime trustee for Friends of the Earth; Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; as well as a host of others grouped under the umbrella organization Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy. Their message is simple: climate change cannot be stopped without more use of nuclear power.

In Canada, it seems, the message is starting to resonate. A new nuclear facility is planned for Ontario and potential for a second is being evaluated New Brunswick, while Saskatchewan and Alberta are both considering building their first nuclear power plants. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, the result would be staggering: Canada could get nearly halfway toward its Kyoto obligations by doubling its nuclear portfolio. But are new nuclear plants the only way out? Are they worth the risk? And have we really entered an era when being pro-environment might also mean being pro-nuclear?

Not long ago, the idea would have been absurd. Thanks to aggressive lobbying, mostly by progressive organizations, nuclear power looked bound for the scrap heap. In Ontario, home to most of the countrys nuclear power plants, Bob Rae’s NDP government had banned the construction of new nuclear facilities, leaving coal plants to fill the gap instead of maintaining existing nuclear stations. South of the border, no reactors had come online for more than a decade.

At first, global warming changed none of this. Fresh from successful battles against acid rain and the ozone hole, there was even reason for optimism among environmentalists. But as carbon emissions continued to rise and Kyoto Protocol targets fell by the wayside, it became clear that halting the growth of greenhouse gases would not be so easy: beyond the ever-growing number of cars on the streets and the meagre success of well-intentioned conservation efforts, there was the fact that most of the world, Canada included, was hooked on fossil fuels for electricity generation. And there are no quick fixes.

“We’ve tapped out hydro in this country,” says Steve Aplin, Vice President of Energy and Environment with HDP Group, an Ottawa-based management consultancy whose former clients include the Ontario Power Workers Union. Aplin, who runs a blog on Canadian energy issues, points to the Albany River, considered Ontario’s most viable undeveloped hydro site, as a perfect example of whats left: the river drops so gradually that damming it would flood large areas upstream—some of it First Nations territory. It could be done, but it would be expensive, politically untenable, and environmentally disastrous. And the gains would be slight—a few hundred megawatts at most, equivalent to one nuclear reactor like Pickering or a small coal-fired plant.

“Plug-in hybrids are going to be featured on the roads within 10 or 15 years,” Aplin adds. “If that’s happening, then we need an increase in generating capacity.” The same goes for geothermal heat pumps and tankless hot water heaters, the two most promising sources of CO₂-free heating. They burn no natural gas, but can in some cases require much more electricity than conventional furnaces and hot-water tanks. In other words, even after conservation and improvements in efficiency, the future will require more electricity, not less. Together, three sectors—transportation, electricity, and heating—account for most of Canada’s emissions, but none can be addressed without a clean source of electricity. There are only three choices: wind, solar, or nuclear. Deciding what it will be has become one of the most important environmental questions of our time.

Whenever a new nuclear facility is planned, many people ask, why not just build wind turbines instead? The question seems so obvious, in part because it seems like the rest of the world is outpacing Canada on this front: just last year, for instance, Spain generated 40 percent of its electricity from wind power on a particularly breezy day. So why not us?

To answer that question, you just need to take a stroll to one of Canada’s most prominent wind turbines, located on the shores of Lake Ontario. This lone turbine sits not far from downtown Toronto, and isolated as it is, it should be an incredible comfort to a city where the smog is often thick enough to taste. But on those days— when heat and humidity trap smog, when tons of coal are shovelled into the furnace to power millions of AC units cranked to max—youd be lucky to see the blades make a single turn.

The shores of Lake Ontario, unfortunately, are just not all that windy—they produce, on average, Class 2 wind, which may sound quite good, but is actually the second lowest on the scale used to rate wind-power sites. (Compare that to northern Texas, home to North Americas largest wind farms, where the wind almost always blows at Class 4, often rising to Class 5.) Torontos turbine still produces electricity, and in educational terms, it’s an unqualified success: quiet, attractive, and no piles of bird carcasses at its base. But it does hint at the challenge facing wind power, especially in Canada: our best wind resources are simply not where most of us live.

“All this new wind requires transmission,” Aplin explains. “That’s not just expensive; it’s difficult. [Power companies] have to buy rights-of-way from property owners all along the route of those lines.” Such rights of way are costly at the best of times, but it can be crippling in places like Ontario, where the best onshore wind sites also happen to be the best places to put million-dollar cottages. And these Ontario sites are only moderately good. The best sites—off the coast of B.C. and Labrador, and on the Gaspé Peninsula—all happen to be in provinces that already get almost all their power from hydroelectricity. To connect them to hydro-poor provinces would require thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines.

“And what do you get when you put in all that effort, and pay for all of that?” ask Aplin. “You’ve got intermittent power, which you still need to back up.” It’s this need for backup that is proving to be the true undoing of both wind and solar power. While the technology continues to improve, the simple problem remains that if the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow.

To illustrate this problem, Aplin checks another website he is developing, which provides real-time tracking of power production.

“Right now weve got close to 900 MW of wind power installed in Ontario,” he says, clicking a link. “If you look at the output from just today, well, at 2 oclock this morning, wind was putting out 310 MW of electricity, then at 3 o’clock it dropped to 268, and then at 4 oclock it went back up to 309.”

Fluctuations aside, it’s hard not to notice the gap between capacity and actual production. Unlike a 900MW coal plant, which will produce pretty close to that amount, a wind system only produces maximum power if every turbine receives peak wind, all at the same time. Needless to say, that never happens. To guarantee 900 MW of power from wind, every hour of every day, something closer to 2,700 MW of turbines would need to be built—an expensive proposition at a base price of $2.2 million per megawatt, not including the cost of buying land and laying new power lines.

And this is a small problem compared to those fluctuations. Forty-two MW is no big deal, but how about 420, or 4,200? It’s a lesson the residents of northern Texas learned the hard way last February, when a sudden drop in wind weakened energy supplies so badly that the state had turn off the lights on non-essential customers to prevent rolling blackouts. And this is in a place that gets less than 10 percent of its energy from wind.

Batteries seem like the obvious solution, but they remain much, much too expensive: the best on the market costs $3.7 million and provides just enough backup to power a few city blocks—about 500 homes—for seven hours. That’s why the only real solution at the moment is buying power elsewhere, or using coal or natural gas as a backup. In fact, big wind-power success stories like Spain and Germany are heavily dependent on both— and ironically, a lot of the power they buy comes from Frances nuclear reactors.

Canada has no France to fall back on—the closest we have is Hydro-Québec. All plans to phase out nuclear power call on provinces to buy more power from HydroQuébec. But “Hydro-Québec makes a killing selling power into New England,” Aplin notes. If the rest of Canada wants their electricity, we’d have to match their prices. “No one is going to do that.”

That leaves using natural gas as a backup. In fact, many plans to phase out nuclear plants, in Canada and elsewhere, involve building redundant gas-fired generators to use when the wind falls off, or when the sun doesn’t shine. Conservative estimates are that natural gas emits only about 35 percent less CO₂ than modern coal plants, so calling it cleaner is a bit like trading in your Hummer for a pickup truck. Moreover, it makes the grid even more captive to oil companies and commodity speculators.

“So why not just add to your existing nuclear stations?” Aplin asks. The question is fair enough, given the benefits of doing just that: two of Ontario’s three stations— Darlington and Bruce—as well as New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau, all have enough room to increase the number of reactors on-site. This one change would all but eliminate CO₂ from electricity production, allowing Canada to realize the full benefits of plug-in hybrid cars and other substitutes for fossil fuels. So why not?

One word: Chernobyl. The catastrophic meltdown of the Soviet reactor in 1986 continues to weigh on minds today. In Canada, it is the basis for a website and Facebook group called 30km.ca, which uses the Chernobyl evacuation zone to show what would happen if the Pickering reactor went up in a similar way. It is promoted by a mock newscast on YouTube, where the anchor talks about “widespread chaos,” “mass exodus,” and “a cloud of nuclear fallout not seen since the Chernobyl disaster,” before the screen abruptly shifts to a test pattern, stopping the announcer mid-sentence. On related sites discussion boards, it’s clear that the threat weighs heavily in many minds: “at least wind power wont melt my face” reads one post, while another, echoing Moore’s early statement, claims nuclear “will be the end of the human race one day.” While no residents near Chernobyl had their faces melted—that can only be caused by extreme gamma and neutron radiation right after an atomic bomb blast—the comments do show how Chernobyl remains the ultimate deal breaker. If there is a chance—any chance—that it could happen here, the nuclear option is off the table. Period. But could it really happen?

It was a question asked by a team of scientists, including Nobel laureates, after the incident—Western governments were worried about the same thing, given the large number of reactors close to population centres. Among other tests, the scientists modelled the size of the explosion to see if would have been held by the containment structures that surround North American reactors.

These containment structures are seldom talked about, but they mark a big difference between Chernobyl and most other reactors. Chernobyl was essentially a nuclear reactor with a low-rise office building perched on top. When it blew, there was nothing between the radioactive cloud and the population. In contrast, North American reactors are surrounded by steel-lined, prestressed, reinforced concrete walls over a metre thick. The panel studying Chernobyl found that even under the Chernobyl scenario—impossible in non-Russian reactor designs anyway—this wall would contain any explosion. The U.S. military decided it wanted to be sure, and in typical Pentagon fashion, flew an F-4 fighter jet into such a wall at almost 800 kilometres an hour. The result? The jet disintegrated on impact. The wall, on the other hand, sustained a six-inch dent. Theres a reason bomb shelters are made of the same material.

“Post-[Chernobyl] accident analyses indicate that if there had been U.S.-style containment, probably none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths,” notes Bernard Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburg who studied the disaster extensively.

In fact, far from a Chernobyl, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island revealed what happens when an accident occurs in a non-Soviet reactor. The outer container was not even required: the partially melted core was held in the primary container surrounding the core, exposing plant workers to a small increase of radiation—the equivalent of a few additional X-rays—with exposure outside the plant not even reaching the level of a typical dental exam. There were no deaths.

Not ideal, but certainly less tragic than your average plane crash. More like a parking lot fender-bender. And just as it would be foolish to slap an “Apocalypse Averted” headline onto every non-fatal accident, it is unfair to exaggerate what happened at Three Mile Island. Cars are designed to withstand accidents. Thankfully, outside of the former Soviet Union, so are nuclear power plants. Yet a lot of opposition to nuclear power continues to raise the spectre of Chernobyl. Just last year, for instance, Greenpeace activists staged a “die-in” on the streets of Toronto with mock rescue workers treating radiation-sickened survivors of a Pickering explosion. While these tactics undoubtedly have an effect, it is probably growing more and more limited. After all, the fact that Pickering will not explode is more or less common sense: if a catastrophic meltdown was really possible, would successive governments, of every political stripe, allow thousands of motorists to drive by the reactors each day on Highway 401 or, for that matter, allow millions of citizens to live just a few kilometres away? It is easy to believe that a corrupt, totalitarian regime would do so, but not a government so obsessed with safety that today, every Ontario family must stick their children in special car seats until they turn seven.

That’s why for many citizens, the worry isn’t a meltdown—it’s the effect of low-level radiation and nuclear waste. This is a much more reasonable concern, because every year thousands of people worldwide will die from inhaling radioactive isotopes—atoms that have the “wrong” number of neutrons, making them unbalanced and likely to fall apart, damaging living tissue and sometimes leading to cancer. This may sound like a damning indictment of nuclear power plants, but it’s actually a damning indictment of going into your own basement: radon gas, produced by natural radioactive substances in soil, is found in almost every house. Every Canadian is exposed to radon to some degree, and it accounts for half of all the radiation were exposed to in our lifetime. But only a tiny percentage of us—a few hundred Canadians a year—will experience negative effects from it. In contrast, one-tenth of one percent of the radiation were exposed to in our lifetimes is attributable to nuclear power. Simple math demonstrates how low the risk is. Cancer patients are routinely exposed to far, far more radiation than the workers were at Three Mile Island.

But the dire warnings continue. A Greenpeace report released a few years ago said there were so many radioactive particles in the air around the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations that young children and pregnant women should not live within 10 kilometres, and no one should eat fruits or vegetables grown nearby. To Greenpeace’s credit, it is true that a small number of studies, mainly from Britain and Germany, have found small increases in the rate of childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer among people who live near nuclear power plants. But it is also true that many more studies have found no effects, and some have actually found lower rates of cancer near nuclear power plants.

The problem is that cancers such as childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer are already so rare—in Canada, 5 and 12 in 100,000 respectively—that the statistics are unreliable. A handful of cases in any given sample could double the number, or just as easily halve it. Moreover, when cancer cases appear to increase, it usually just means weve gotten better at spotting them (the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study attributing all increases in thyroid cancer rates to improved diagnosis).

Nevertheless, provincial authorities wanted a better test, especially in the face of Greenpeaces warning. In Darlington, the municipal health authority took a novel approach. Instead of just looking at rates of thyroid cancer and leukemia, they looked at all cancers. If the nuclear power plant was causing the cancer, you’d expect to see a pattern—increases in leukemia and thyroid cancers, small increases with other cancers loosely associated with radiation, and no increases in cancers that researchers knew were not caused by radiation.

They didn’t find that pattern. Their results “did not indicate a pattern to suggest that the Pickering NGS and the Darlington NGS were causing health effects in the population.” What’s more, when they compared their results to a control group—an area of Ontario with no nuclear power plants—they found an equally random pattern. It’s easy—intuitive, even—to blame nuclear power plants for health ills because they are so large and visible, but the reality is simply far more complex.

Yet many still dislike nuclear power, almost instinctively. Part of the reason undoubtedly has to do with its complexity. But passenger jets are also complex, and millions of us board them every day, despite the fact that statistically they are far more likely to kill us. Rationally, we know the thin aluminum shell can’t protect us from a crash, there aren’t any parachutes, and the thing is filled to the brim with highly flammable jet fuel. Nuclear power plants, in comparison, have walls more than a metre thick, multiple containment and safety systems, and emergency shutdown devices. They’re also less vulnerable to random flocks of geese. Yet we don’t trust nuclear power plants, and we do trust airplanes. Why?

The nuclear industry must take a lot of the blame here. It has operated behind closed doors for decades, failing to report problems that do occur and insulting the intelligence of the public with advertising that shows blue skies and children frolicking in fields of flowers, rather than levelling with us: this is complicated technology and it can be dangerous if not properly regulated, but here’s why you are safe, and here’s the absolutely staggering benefits of this sort of power. But instead, their PR has treated the public either as complete naifs or as opponents to be defeated, not as a constituency to serve.

Interestingly, France has taken a different approach. “Theres a famous story of an executive with [French nuclear giant] Areva who was having a meeting with locals who were concerned about radiation,” recalls Aplin. “She got them a bunch of radiation detection devices, and said, Here’s how to use them. Go up to the site, turn on the detectors, and wander around the site and tell me what you find. That’s what they did, and they found nothing that different from the background radiation.”

That sort of openness leads to confidence, which is why France has chosen nuclear power. In Canada, the story has been very different: just last December, there were two minor leaks at the medical-isotope-producing reactor at Chalk River—yet despite repeated calls from reporters, the leaks were not confirmed until late January. Although Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission are now reporting every incident, of any size, the public and media can’t help but wonder: if they seem to be hiding minor incidents, what else could they be covering up?

But if the nuclear industry is to blame, so are some environmental groups: not for opposing nuclear power—everyone has a right to do that, and to their credit, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and others have written proposals outlining how we could stop using coal and nuclear power (but not natural gas). Reasonable people can talk seriously about how realistic those plans are: how much they cost, how soon they can be accomplished, and whether the assumptions they make, about everything from importing Quebec hydro to changing human behaviour, are really realistic, especially given the short time frame to deal with climate change. This is a legitimate debate.

What is not legitimate is constantly raising the spectre of a “Canadian Chernobyl,” or claiming that a small uptick in a rare form of cancer is conclusive proof of the danger of nuclear energy. It just isn’t.

In the end, all of this back and forth may prove to be of little consequence because there are deeper forces in human psychology that are pushing us back toward nuclear power. The ultimate reason we get on the airplane is not only that we trust the pilots—it is also because there is a significant benefit to doing so: namely, that we dont have to waste three precious days of vacation time stuck in a car. In simple terms, most of us believe flying is worth the risk.

Soon, many people might believe the same about nuclear power. Partly this is because of a better understanding of the risks and how we can limit them. But mostly it is because the risk of not cutting global carbon emissions is far greater. No energy source is free of risk, but continuing to burn fossil fuels has become far more dangerous than even the worst-case scenarios for nuclear power. If fact, given what we now know about the numbers of premature deaths caused by airborne pollution, there is an argument to be made that nuclear was always the safer option. Climate change just clinches it.

While we undoubtedly have some lingering cynicism after years of hearing the nuclear industry over-promise and under-deliver, especially on costs and transparency, today much of the green-power industry could be accused of the same: solar power will get cheaper (honest!); a better battery is just around the corner (promise!); this time, people will take conservation seriously (we hope!); installing rooftop solar water heating is sexier than buying a flatscreen TV (really!). The question we must ask is: do we really have time to wait?

For all the warnings that our nuclear power plants are going to explode in a Chernobyl-like disaster, theyve kept chugging along. Yes, they are not perfect, and yes, they are expensive to build, but at last count, they were preventing about 85 million tonnes of CO₂ from entering Canadian skies each year. If we believe the growing body of research that says we may have just 20 years to stabilize emissions, we can’t make wind power our first and only choice. To do so would require many variables to fall into place: finding sites for as many as 100,000 wind turbines, building them, securing rights of way for new transmission lines, and then hoping someone invents a more efficient and longer-lasting battery. There’s no room for error, and that’s a lot of variables, some with potentially staggering price tags, and all of which would have to happen in a very short period of time.

The better solution is to double Canadian nuclear capacity. It could be done on existing sites, and even though it would take 10 to 15 years to build, the grid connections would be simple. The moment we turned on these new plants, Canada’s emissions from electricity drop close to zero (a new nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan or Alberta would be enough to supply Western Canada). Keep building wind turbines and researching solar, but lets not mistake where we want to be in 50 or 100 years with where we need to be in just 10 or 20.

To build these plants does not mean that nuclear is perfect—it is not, and many of its early proponents did more harm than good by claiming that it was. But hard as it may be to admit, we also know that without it, we would be in a much bigger mess than we are in today. Climate change is far too grave a problem to ignore any solution. If we are remotely serious about stopping it, we must give nuclear a fair chance.