Murray,
A couple points, and I am not picking a fight here...
Hi Bill, no fight perceived
There is no consensus in Canada about oil, and there are very regional differences of opinion across the country. Alberta, of course, is for the most part all for any pipeline going any direction. The problem with Alberta is they are land locked and decided to 'go all in' with delivering diluted bitumen instead of refining or upgrading. (More on that lower down).
Funny you should mention Enbridge. The Kalamazoo Enbridge spill happened while the company had a massive dual pipeline and supertanker port proposal from the Alberta tar sands to my home town of Kitimat about 11 years ago. It didn't get built.
The Kalamazoo was a huge wake up call as to how difficult it is to clean bitumen from the bottom of a river, particularly when they had to shut down cleaning attempts when the river got cold. Up here the rivers would be too cold most of the year.
BC has had a moratorium on oil & gas exploration off BC's coast for decades because we don't want to risk our coastal environment or the fish and other species that live or migrate through here, or the livelihoods of those people who derive cultural or financial benefit from them.
Why then, British Columbian's ask, should we shoulder all the risks from pipelines through the Coast Mountains or supertankers zigzagging around islands getting into and out of Douglas Channel if we aren't willing to do it for our own resources?
Again, if it was upgraded oil products being delivered out of Alberta and not diluted bitumen (which would sink into the salmon spawning gravel of BC's rivers) there wouldn't have been so much opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway project.
There are some people on TF who work in the tar sands, so I expect some to offer an alternative view. I'll ask them; Why did Alberta go all in with diluted bitumen? Why is Alberta in debt? Why is Alberta not charging higher royalties? Where did the money go?
Albertan's might want to answer those questions first before they start pointing fingers at others for their problems.
On nuclear, isn't there a type of reactor with some sort of "salt plug" which will not allow the reactor to have a meltdown? Seem to remember that from a Ted Talk where the young fellow giving the presentation suggested there could be many of these built underground which could run using materials generated and in storage from nuclear weapons manufacturing, and could run on that alone for decades. Something to look into...
