Environmental Case Study James Bay: James Bay Hydropower

Home , Broadback River, Caniapiscau River, Great Whale River, La Grande River

In the 1970s, Hydro-Quebec, a government-owned electric utility, began to divert rivers flowing into James Bay, flooding more than 10,000 square kilometers (4,000 square miles) of tundra and coastal wetlands along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. If the whole project is ever finished, more than 600 dams and dikes will block nineteen large rivers and damage a pristine watershed area the size of Germany. Rivers as large as the Grand Canyon's Colorado will be dried up and diverted into new paths. The total cost may well be $100 billion.

The area affected is the traditional home of about 12,000 Crees and 6,000 Inuit Eskimos who live in hunting camps and small villages scattered across the rocky land. Under Phase I of this project, a series of reservoirs, dams and dikes diverted several rivers into the La Grande River. One of these was the Caniapiscau River, which used to flow east into the Atlantic but now flows west into James Bay. The 10,300 megawatts generated by this massive diversion is sent over high voltage transmission lines to homes and businesses in Quebec, New York, and the New England states. Phase I was expected to cost $1 billion, but overruns pushed the final total to more than 15 times that much.

Phase II, now under construction, is diverting the Little Whale and Nastapoca Rivers to feed hydroelectric plants on the Great Whale River. Phase III, if built, will divert the Nottaway and the Rupert Rivers into the Broadback River, storing the water in seven new reservoirs and transforming hundreds of

Environmental Case Study James Bay: James Bay Hydropower

kilometers of the diverted rivers into dry bedrock. The whole scheme would generate 26,400 megawatts of electrical power, three times more than all the electrical capacity now existing in Africa.

This project already has had adverse cultural and environmental impacts. In September 1984, shortly after Phase I was completed, 10,000 caribou drowned while trying to follow their traditional migration route across the swollen Caniapiscau River, which was flooded by releases from an upstream reservoir. Even more threatening to native people is poisoning caused by mercury leached from newly flooded land. Bacteria change inorganic mercury to a soluble organic form that concentrates as it passes from plankton to fish to humans. In the Cree village of Chisasibi, scientists found that two thirds of the residents had mercury levels in their bodies higher than is considered safe by the World Health Organization. Changing their diet from locally caught fish to canned or frozen food has reduced people's mercury levels, but has disrupted their economy and culture.

The extensive coastal marshes and estuaries of James Bay provide breeding grounds and migration routes for millions of shorebirds and waterfowl. Few other areas provide the biological richness capable of feeding such a large population during the brief summer months. Changes in river hydrology already have begun to degrade this vital ecosystem. Eelgrass, one of the keystone species in this food web, has disappeared from large areas of once-fertile tide flats. Furthermore, dams and river diversions have blocked salmon and other anadromous species from reaching their spawning grounds.

A critical source of funding for the whole James Bay venture is long-range contracts with utilities and cities in the United States. Native groups and environmental organizations had little success trying to persuade the Quebec government to reconsider this massive project. Attempts to influence public opinion south of the border, however, have been much more effective. New York, Vermont, and Maine recently canceled $19 million in long-term contracts for electric power from Hydro-Quebec because of both cost and ethics.

When these contracts were negotiated twenty years ago, American utilities were projecting continued growth at a rate of 2 to 3 percent per year. Lower economic growth rates, however, coupled with greater than expected savings from conservation and an upsurge in non-utility generation have lowered demand forecasts. New England is unlikely to need new energy sources before the end of this century, and energy consumption in New York is expected to decline until sometime in the next century.