Comments on nuclear…

Comments on nuclear emergency plan update

The Ontario Government has prepared a report on how it is going to proceed with the management of a nuclear energy emergency in Ontario. The government says that it has analysed and learned lessons from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011 in Japan and states that these lessons are reflected in the changes proposed in the report.

The only lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster (and the nuclear disasters that preceded it) is that nuclear energy is not safe and it is not cheap. The expensive but inadequate attempt to manage and contain the nuclear disaster in Japan is ongoing more than 7 years after the malfunction .

The location and condition of melted fuel in the three most seriously damaged reactors has not been identified. Removing it safely represents a challenge unprecedented in the history of nuclear power. Water is constantly being pumped into the reactors to keep the fuel cool. They are running out of room to store the water which contains tritium, and the current plan is to dump the contaminated water into the ocean. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that radiation levels are 530 sieverts an hour. A single dose of one sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea; 5 sieverts would kill half those exposed to it within a month, and a single dose of 10 sieverts would prove fatal within weeks.

A serious nuclear crisis continues in a wealthy, sophisticated country known for its innovation, technology and science.

In response to Fukishima, many countries are reducing or even eliminating their nuclear reactors. Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, and Portugal have no nuclear power stations and remain opposed to nuclear power. Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power while Netherlands, Sweden, and Taiwan have the same intentions.

Germany - one of the world’s most modern countries known for leading in science and technology - will close all its plants by 2022. Italy closed all of its nuclear stations and Austria never used its first nuclear plant that was completely built. Due to financial, politic and technical reasons, Cuba and Libya never completed the construction of their first nuclear plants. Australia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ghana, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Peru, Singapore, and Venezuela never built their planned first nuclear plants. France, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine are the only countries to use nuclear energy as the source for a majority of electricity. France has committed to reduce it nuclear energy – recommitting to this under Macron, the new president. Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine are not countries that Canada usually boosts emulating. They rank 40, 43 and 89, respectively, on the UN human development index.

And what is the Ontario Government doing? It is proposing to make some minor tweaks – a few changes - to its already ineffectual and ineffective nuclear emergency plans.

The planned measures, as outlined in the Ontario government report, are to “evacuate the area or asking people to remain indoors for a period of time (sheltering)” and distribution of thyroid pills. This is ludicrous. The former is not practical given the density and large numbers of the at risk population. The effectiveness of sheltering for up to seven days and the provision of pills – with the timing of taking the pills being crucial – ranges from being basically ineffective and/or impractical to submitting people to very dangerous levels of radiation. Sheltering in place and thyroid pills are only workable in the case of minor accidents. The current plan is wishful thinking. It’s like small children hiding their faces with their hands and thinking that no one can see them because they cannot see you.

One lesson the government has apparently learned from the Fukishima disaster is that the size of the emergency planning zone associated for the nuclear generating station in Michigan (across the Detroit River from Ontario) can be reduced to a radius of 16 km to align with the American standard. We admonish our children to think and not just follow their friends. Yet, the Ontario government is reducing the size of the emergency planning zone because of what the U.S. does. Where is the science and evidence? A highly populated area is at risk in Ontario in case of an emergency with the U.S. reactor.

The Ontario and Canadian government knows that the nuclear energy is dangerous and expensive. A clear acknowledgement of this comes from exemption of the nuclear industry from any liability in case of a nuclear disaster. Citizens of Canada hugely subsidize the industry in many ways – but this subsidy is particularly egregious. Being liable for any and all nuclear emergencies, when the emergency plans are so weak and do not realistically take into account the range of possible accidents, makes the responsibility that Canadian citizens bear particularly onerous.

At a minimum the Ontario government should acknowledge the possibility of serious accidents – not the minor accidents it currently plans for. It must put in place measures to protect the public in the event of a Fukushima-scale accident.

Ontario should commit meet or exceed international best practices for nuclear emergency response planning and preparedness. It should match the best practice set by Switzerland and put in place emergency plans to protect the public in the event of an a level 7 accident on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES). Switzerland is preparing plans for large-scale evacuations and the need to care for evacuees for long periods of time. Ontario should too.

Ontario also needs to protect drinking water supplies in the event of a nuclear accident at any of the twenty-five reactors that line the Great Lakes. Emergency plans also need to be adapted to meet the special needs of vulnerable communities, such as the elderly or hospital patients.

Planning for major accidents means Ontario needs to expand emergency planning areas. Ontario should expand its evacuation zones to at least 20 km around each nuclear station to match real-world experience and the best practices set by other countries, such as Switzerland. Ontario’s nuclear emergency response plan should be reviewed regularly and transparently.

I am even more dubious of the effectiveness of the proposed nuclear emergency plan in light of a reckless nuclear proposal that is moving forward that the emergency plans do not cover. The proposed Chalk River “Near Surface Disposal Facility” mega-dump for radioactive waste is an accident waiting to happen. The dump would be enormous. It would be seven stories tall and cover an area the size of 70 NHL hockey rinks.

This giant mound of radioactive waste would be created less than one kilometre from the Ottawa River. The proposal is to have liners for the dump, although the liners would not last as long as the waste is radioactive. The site is in an area of porous rock that has significant flow to the Ottawa River and is also in an area that experiences frequent – and not just minor - earthquakes. The dump could contaminate the Ottawa River which flows into the St Lawrence, past millions of Canadians who take their drinking water from the river.

The proponent of the dump is a consortium of profitmaking multinational corporations (although the Chalk River site and its wastes remain under public ownership). The consortium proposes to produce more nuclear products and dispose of the resulting radioactive waste in the dump. Their current contract ends in 2025 and they can then walk away from any responsibility at that time, although as mentioned previously, the nuclear wastes would NOT be the responsibility of the consortium.

The proposal is for the nuclear waste to be abandoned in the dump. This would set a horribly dangerous precedent. Nuclear waste requires active management. Such a facility for permanent disposal of nuclear waste has never before been licensed in Canada. Regulations to limit radiation levels do not currently exist. Parliament currently allocates over half a billion dollars a year to nuclear clean-up. We don’t need more waste produced by a private consortium, especially when Canadians would be responsible for dealing with the nuclear waste. The plume of radioactive water - that was dumped in ditches about 1600 meters from the border of the Ottawa River during the clean-up of a nuclear accident at the Chalk River site - is migrating towards the Ottawa River, and should be managed instead.

In addition, the consortium’s proposal is being examined by a flawed process. In 2012 The Harper Government gutted the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA). It gave the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission sole authority to approve nuclear projects, eliminated any decision-making role for the Minister of Environment, eliminated independent panel reviews, and fast tracked project approvals. This is the process that will be examining the proposal. A proposal where to the private sector would profit from creating nuclear waste which the public sector is responsible for managing. Yet, there is no known way to manage the waste – which remains dangerous for 250,000 years and more.

It is clear that the proposed nuclear emergency plan is not realistic or practical. As explained above, the proposed emergency plan would not be effective in managing anything other than small nuclear emergencies. And the plan only considers a narrow range of nuclear emergencies that Ontarians could face. Other types of emergencies, such as the radioactive plum migrating towards the Ottawa River, are not currently being managed. And the plan will not be effective in dealing with the emergency of the increased nuclear waste that will be produced and disposed of in a dump which is designed to fail before the radioactivity levels of the nuclear waste fall below the danger level.

[Original Comment ID: 210334]