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Nuclear power is not a proven safe power
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I'm not saying whether we should have a nuclear plant or not, but to claim that it is not a proven, safe power source is kind of ridiculous when there are over 400 plants all over the world (including in Canada and the US) and they are responsible for generating a higher percentage of the world's power than both oil and gas (not combined); approx. 15%. The waste is an issue just because it has to sit there for millions of years, but what's worse: breathing in polluted air from coal plants or somehow actually getting in contact with the waste that's buried in the ground? Placing a plant at Lake Diefenbaker is a little worrysome due to how much of the province depends on it for their water, but I'd have to research locations of other plants in relation to large bodies of sources of drinking water to make a solid judgement one way or the other.
I don't think that "possible meltdowns" is really a valid argument at this point either. There has been 1 occurance of a major meltdown causing serious, long lasting deaths that occurred occurred over 20 years ago in Soviet Russia where proper (well, lets say more current) safety/backup measures weren't in place. There have been other "close calls" (i.e. Three Mile Island where no one actually died and safety measures kicked in to prevent another Chernobyl), but in reality there are a lot more things in life that have a MUCH greater chance of killing or harming you than a possible nuclear reactor meltdown. Granted, solar and wind power provide pretty much 0 chance of death, unless a giant turbine were to fall on a person admiring how massive it was below
The issue that I always hear come up when talking about using solar and wind power as our main power source is that we always need to have a backup system to supply the same amount of power incase they go down (wind stops blowing, sun doesn't shine?), but that seems to be the case with the reactors as well when maintenance and whatnot needs to be done, as stated in one of the articles above. Anyone have more info on this? I'm assuming our current system can handle dropouts of one or more section of the grid?