Well, if I may, I could make some points. If you look at what we call in statistics a “normal curve” of opinions about things, you will see that there is going to be a small percentage of people who you will never convince. For whatever reasons, ideological or others, they're opposed to pipelines, they're opposed to nuclear power, and they're opposed to anything except what they particularly propose.
As my colleague pointed out, when they were doing surveys of attitudes towards nuclear in Ontario, there was a percentage that was highly supportive. Most were in the middle. Then, of course, there were the ones who were completely opposed to it. There are a number of reasons for this, I think, aside from the ideologues who you just won't convince, and to my way of thinking, there's no point in even thinking you can do that.
In the case of the strong supporters, in part it is because, without this, the communities in Darlington and Tiverton would never have had access to the employment that a nuclear plant provides. The Bruce Power plant has roughly 3,600 employees, while Darlington has slightly less, at slightly over 3,000. These jobs are extraordinarily well paid, and otherwise, without them, you would have rural communities that would not have access to those 3,000-plus jobs with salaries of $100,000 or $80,000 per year, so it's not surprising that the support is so high.
As for the bulk of the population, a very large part of the issue is that as a species we're extraordinarily poor at assessing relative risk. Opponents of nuclear power will get up and say that it's risky. Opponents of pipelines will get up and say they are risky. Of course it's risky, because everything is risky. You can't have zero risk; the laws of physics don't allow it.
The question is, what is risky relative to something else? I'm getting off the point of nuclear, but in terms of pipelines, we know, because we've had an event, that shipping oil by rail will kill people. It killed 47. I have not heard of a pipeline spill, ugly though the spill might be, that has actually ever harmed a human—ducks, perhaps, but humans, no.
Similarly, with nuclear power, if you take the Fukushima incident as the most recent episode, you will find that more people died from the evacuation, from the stress of leaving their homes and not knowing when they would be allowed to go back, than would have been damaged by the radiation in those homes, because in actual fact there was not that much radiation released. It was released into the water supplies, but not so much into the air.
Again, with nuclear power—and it's an educational process—there are isotopes, particularly Iodine-131, that are long-lived enough or concentrated enough in the human body to be of concern, but like all highly radioactive substances, these also have relatively short half-lives. You can prevent this by taking iodine tablets in the event of an accident, because it gets concentrated in the thyroid, which is where iodine would normally concentrate, so it never gets concentrated in your body and just gets flushed out.
Over the longer term, these are isotopes that are relatively heavy and will plate out of the atmosphere in relatively short distances from the site of the accident. The rest of it is low-level radioactivity that in fact the human body can well tolerate. There was a documentary some years ago showing the site of Chernobyl, where people are still not allowed to live, although some have snuck back. It's a wildlife refuge. The numbers of bison, boar, and whatever are far in excess of what would have been around had the plant been operating, simply because nobody is hunting them. There are no people there.
How to educate the population is a difficult thing to do, particularly in this age of Twitter and Facebook and everything else, where a negative review will blast out and find hundreds of thousands of supporters simply because it sounds true. There is an unfortunate aspect of current society—