Former Telegram political reporter James McLeod may have moved on to greener pastures, but he hasn’t forgotten this province. In fact, he’s even done a little window-shopping on our behalf.
Now, he hasn’t bought anything for us just yet, but he has found a price for something that’s worth at least pondering.
That thing? Well, the world’s most-modern aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The Ford is brand new, in aircraft carrier terms, and, at a cost of US$13 billion, not really all that far off the price of a certain hydro dam project in Labrador.
You may not see McLeod’s logic yet, but wait.
Related story:
Brian Jones: Ches Crosbie’s historical revisionism
Buried deep in the all-electrically-powered USS Ford are a pair of Bechtel nuclear reactors specifically designed to meet the aircraft carrier’s needs, powering everything from magnetic lifts for massive weapons payloads to a magnetic-power catapult to launch aircraft from the deck into the air. (The name of the reactors already has a local connection, kind of — the twin A1B reactors share the first three digits with one of the St. John’s postal codes, after all.)
But this is where the argument (though specious) gets to be a little fun.
The reactors have a 90-year lifespan, and a classified output that’s believed to be in the 700 megawatt range. In other words, its power output is Muskrat Falls on one of its best days, and the asset is about as long-lasting as the Muskrat Falls facility is, too.
And the power wouldn’t even have to be shipped across the province — if we’ d bought the aircraft carrier instead, a ship some three football fields long, it could simply have been sailed to a new berth close to the power-hungry Avalon peninsula. We wouldn’t need the costly power lines to Labrador, we wouldn’t need to maintain those lines at a cost of tens of millions of dollars a year, and we wouldn’t need to share the power we generated with Nova Scotia at the super-low rates that province managed to negotiate from “no-more-giveaways” us.
Worried about the danger of nuclear power? Well, the World Nuclear Association writes: “The U.S. Navy has accumulated over 6,200 reactor-years of accident-free experience involving 526 nuclear reactor cores over the course of 240 million kilometres without a single radiological incident, over a period of more than 50 years.”
Now, I know the whole idea’s a bit of a farce: buying an aircraft carrier and what would essentially be a super-massive set of jumper cables was never going to replace the output of the Holyrood generating station. (The US$13 million, by the way, was the whole kit and kaboodle. There are all sorts of weapons systems, radar installations, ancillary weaponry and other bells and whistles that we could probably have done without,)
But what it does point out is that if the true price of Muskrat Falls had been known from the outset, we would have had many, many other options to look at, some of which would likely have been far cheaper than the mess we are now looking at. (That’s especially worth knowing because politicians who said that there would be no Muskrat Falls cost overruns and delays when the project was in the process of being launched have subsequently said that they always knew that there would be overruns and delays.)
And there’s another benefit as well: not only would we have a massive tourist attraction, but we’d have the kind of weaponry that seems to garner all the right kind of attention from the bombastic president of our neighbour to the south.
McLeod had a different idea: he suggested the reactors could be stripped out and used on shore. After that, the ship is so long that it could actually be beached with the stern in Portugal Cove and the bow pointing towards Bell Island, and we’d have a head start on a causeway.
Now, the only real question would be what to name the ship/causeway/generating station.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 39 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.