AN INDEPENDENT assessment of the various technologies used in the world’s nuclear power plants would likely rank CANDU among the best, at least in terms of safety, reliability and potential longevity.

Yet the slavish adherence by the current government in Ottawa to a controversial element of neoconservatism has effectively led to CANDU having no future.

The same logic that led the Harris Conservatives in Ontario to sell off the province’s only toll road to a consortium, thereby saddling the public with the world’s highest tolls, has led the Harper Conservatives at Ottawa to try privatizing CANDU’s developer, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

The ill-founded logic that AECL would somehow perform better under private ownership and in the interim should get little or no financial or other support has now cost AECL the only domestic contract up for grabs, New Brunswick having decided, reasonably, to purchase the power reactor from France’s Areva Group.

If for once Harper & Co. looked to history as a guide, they would discover that it was only because of solid government backing that the CANDU technology came to be tested and in the space of a little more than a decade successfully moved from a 20- megawatt research reactor to 200, 500 and 750-megawatt commercial reactors, which all outperformed U.S.-built reactors while not requiring the enriched uranium that’s needed for weaponry.

Interestingly, although AECL was established in 1952 by the St. Laurent Liberals, the crown corporation also got strong support from the Diefenbaker Conservatives as it embarked on developing the unique technology so rapidly that the risks involved were truly fearsome.

In fact, the 20-MW NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) plant had not begun operation in 1960 when the Ontario (Conservative) government of the day agreed to have Ontario Hydro partner with AECL in the construction and operation of the 200-megawatt Douglas Point Generating Station, the first commercial-size nuclear power plant. And before that station was up and running the two levels of government agreed to share the risks involved in building two 500-MW units at Pickering. Even more spectacularly, in 1968, the year the Douglas Point station went on line and three years before the two Pickering reactors went into service, plans were announced to build four 750-MW units at the Douglas Point site, now called the Bruce Nuclear Power Development.

Clearly, none of this would have happened if the two crown corporations (Ontario Hydro and AECL) had not cooperated and enjoyed the full support of their political masters.

Today, that’s sadly not the case at either level of government.

At the provincial level, the McGuinty Liberals have given us the worst conceivable combination of policies — a commitment to shut down the province’s remaining coal-fired plants without any corresponding commitment to expand the power systems base-load capacity, while offering astronomical prices for power produced from wind and solar energy.

Meanwhile, at Ottawa, the Harper government is simply trying to rid itself of AECL at a time when it has been trying desperately to compete internationally with an advanced CANDU design involving reactors capable of producing more than 1,000 megawatts.

Word last week that New Brunswick had given up on AECL as the source of its planned new reactor has led to speculation that Ottawa’s bid to privatize AECL will find no buyers unless the deal involve only a purchase of assets, not liabilities.

As we see it, what’s really needed now is the same sort of courage and cooperation once witnessed between the two levels of government.

For its part, the federal government should abandon plans to sell off AECL at least until the new CANDU 9 design can be proven. And that clearly would require a risk-sharing agreement with Ontario similar to the ones employed at Douglas Point and Pickering, which effectively protected Ontario consumers from paying too much for the power produced. (In reality, the power was produced at less cost than power from Hydro’s coal-fired plants.)

As for the McGuinty government, a “twinning” of the four-unit Darlington Generating Station should be possible at reasonable costs, so long as it’s done speedily. After all, the main reason Darlington’s cost soared was that its construction schedule was repeatedly extended (because the power wasn’t needed), at a time of record high interest rates.

Clearly, use of the proven CANDU 6 technology and a construction start during last year’s recession would have reduced the risk of cost overruns to a minimum, while providing thousands of relatively high-tech jobs.

In the circumstances, it’s too bad the sort of inter-governmental cooperation that gave us the 13 per cent HST was nowhere to be found when it came to dealing with this unique form of public infrastructure.