Small Modular Nuclear Reactors.

 

I first heard of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors in 2017. Since the designs being offered were very similar to the early reactors of the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of which failed to produce electricity, the idea seemed to be just that. An idea.

 

The nuclear industry is, for all intents and purposes, a dying industry.  It continues to exist on government loans and assurances, not only in Canada but in France, United States, the UK, and around the world. There has been no new private investment in nuclear power since 1978.[i]

 

In the early 2000’s, the industry promoted a “nuclear renaissance”. There were going to be faster, less expensive builds. The renaissance turned into a fizzle as one by one the promised nuclear power plants (NPP) failed to meet their targets.

 

A notable failure in reaching the goals, “faster, less expensive”, the Olkiluota power plant in Finland, was eventually turned on in April 2023[ii]. Construction on it began in 2005 with scheduled completion in 2009. The cost rose from an estimated 3 billion Euros to 11 billion. It was plagued by failed supply chains and sloppy installations.

 

Westinghouse in the United States and Areva in France each declared bankruptcy over their builds, in both cases, after soaking up billions in federal funding. In the end only one of four planned reactors, the Vogtle 3 has been completed.

 

The media interest in Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) seemed sudden in 2020. By 2023, they dominated the conversations about nuclear power. 

 

The sale-pitch for SMRs. 

 

People were attracted to their claims of producing “safe, clean, and emissions-free” electricity to act as "baseload" "when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow".

 

The claim that we need nuclear power for “baseload” energy is an unclear concept that implies quick energy is available when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. People who already rely on nuclear power know that nuclear power cannot be ramped up quickly or turned off easily and safely. How have the rest of us not noticed that when nuclear fails it depends upon coal and gas? Baseload? The province of Saskatchewan (which plans to host an SMR) already have hydro power and can readily import more from Manitoba. Furthermore, battery storage is becoming much more of a possibility. 

 

Nuclear power simply cannot be turned on quickly. During the famed blackout over New York and Toronto in 2003, nine US nuclear stations were shut down. During the first three days after restarting, their output was a mere 3% of normal and after twelve days, they were still at only 50% of their capacity[iii].  The claim of its capability to produce “baseload” energy is baseless.

 

“Clean, Green and Emissions-Free” say the industry media. 

 

The claim that it is “emissions-free” is false. In June 2010, the Advertising Council of Canada ruled that it was inaccurate and unsupportable to call CANDU reactors “emission free”. While SMRs are not projected to emit the identical wastes[iv] to that of a CANDU reactor because they will be using different fuel, all nuclear power plants emit radioactive hydrogen as tritium. 

 

Accompanying the tritium will be a host of other radioactive gases and particulate matter including krypton and carbon dioxide (using carbon-14). Usually the tritium is released in a planned event but occasionally the release is accidental. It is usually described as “low-energy beta emitter with a short half-life of 12.3 years” and dismissed as having “no immediate danger”.

 

If the tritium stayed outside our bodies it would be of little concern but oxygen doesn’t know whether it is combining with tritium or normal hydrogen when it forms water. Our bodies are 93% water. The “low-energy beta” particle has enough energy to break chemical bonds when it is sitting right beside them.

 

A half-life of 12.3 years means that half of the tritium has turned into or “decayed” into helium, a non-radioactive gas in 12.3 years. Half of it remains. Aside from wondering what our bodies would do with helium (the decay element of tritium) in places where there should be hydrogen, at seven half-lives only 1% of a radioactive element remains[v], at ten half-lives it becomes undetectable. Neither 86 nor 123 years would be considered a “short” length of time.

 

So nuclear power is decidedly not “emissions-free”. What about the other claim that nuclear power is clean and green? 

 

From the environmental standpoint, “clean” energy is a relative term. “Clean energy is produced when the process of creating it emits fewer pollutants than the process for generating fossil fuel-based energy” (IPPC). Since no one has figured out how to deal with the long-lived poisonous wastes left over from the nuclear power production of electricity, neither of the adjectives “clean” nor “green” can be applied to nuclear power.

 

The fuel for Small Modular Reactors will be different than the fuel used in Canada’s CANDU reactors. The waste will also be different. The current DGR (Deep Geological Repository) proposal is not designed for SMR waste. 

 

There are many companies and over a hundred different reactor blueprints proposed. For the most commonly proposed SMR, a boiling-water reactor, Canadian-mined uranium would be shipped to Eunice, New Mexico, enriched and then shipped back to Canada for manufacture into fuel. (Need it be pointed out that mining and shipping is not carbon neutral?) After it was “used” in a reactor, it would be “reprocessed” which means that it is stripped of its plutonium by acid baths. Only the plutonium is “recycled” as fuel for the SMR while the waste has now become even more corrosive as an acidic radioactive soup. The plutonium could also be used by a state or a non-state actor (a terrorist) to create a nuclear bomb.

 

Does “reprocessing” decrease the amount of waste? Not by much, even by weight. Does extracting plutonium and re-using it for fuel qualify as “recycling” when all the other transuranics, activation products and broken pieces of uranium still remain? 

 

“Spent” fuel is a misnomer. Of the uranium-235 in fuel, only approximately 5% will have undergone the nuclear reaction that produces heat. The reaction slows down and then stops because the broken pieces of uranium and other elements effectively block neutrons from continuing the reaction. It becomes clogged with its own wastes.

Is nuclear a source of green energy? According to several sites on the internet, “green energy” is any energy type that is generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind or water. From the tech giant, TWI, “the key factor about these energy sources are that they don’t harm the environment through factors such as releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”[vi]

By these definitions, nuclear power is not green. 

 

The greenhouse gasses released during the mining, transportation and refining of uranium plus the construction of the nuclear power plant will take years to “pay back” by non-carbon-emitting nuclear energy. The amount of carbon required for full decommissioning and monitoring of the waste is still unknown.

 

The nuclear industry claims that nuclear power is reliable.

 

Nuclear power plants require downtime for refueling and maintenance – an average of one out every 18 months of operation is required. They require “back-up” power on site (Fukushima’s failure). Of the 132 nuclear power plants built in the USA, 21% were permanently and prematurely closed because of failed reliability or cost problems and another 27% have at least once been closed unexpectedly for one year or more[vii]. Most nuclear power plants run at 90% their full capacity. In fact, physicist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins, characterized nuclear power plants as “intermittent”[viii] because of both the planned outages and the unexpected sudden fails. 

 

“Refurbishment”[ix], meaning replacements of the miles of tubes within the plant and upgrading safety requirements, occurs within about 30 years after the nuclear power plant is first turned on. It may require a couple of years off-line.

 

Finally, Small Modular Reactors are expensive.

 

No one contends that this is not so. Not only are they expensive but not one has ever been built on time or on budget. The provincial government of Saskatchewan (a province with only one million people) has already agreed to pay $50 million for research and development and expects to put another $5 billion dollars into the building of a single 300 MW reactor by 2030. (The moving target for completion has been moved to 2035.)

 

The belief in a market for SMRs where none exists has dollar signs in politicians’ eyes. Their so-called “modular” manufacture will still require transportation of units 100 tons or more. Their large up-front carbon footprint will not be affected for decades. Dr. Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility has characterized them as “power-point reactors”, present only in theory.

 

Why?

 

As an emergency room physician, I did life-saving functions first. Air, Breathing, Heart. If the patient was hemorrhaging, we fixed that before we worried about the broken leg. If this is a climate emergency, and many scientists believe it is, we need to do the fast easy things first – energy efficiency, conservation and fast builds like wind, solar and geothermal. 

 

We cannot first invest in esoteric, as yet to be developed, reactors that have not even seen the light of day yet. 

 

So why are politicians so hell-bent on nuclear reactors however small or “micro”?

 

Lobbying can have an enormous effect on politicians. In April 2023, a small group of citizens representing at least a dozen NGO’s spent a week trying to speak to as many politicians in Ottawa (the seat of the Canadian federal government) as we could. We heard that they had been lobbied by the nuclear industry on a monthly basis and sometimes the Member of Parliament admitted that we were the first to provide a different point of view. 

 

Besides lobbying, could the attraction of nuclear be that it puts them into the “nuclear club”? Plutonium for sale? The rarefied air of the nuclear weapons’ states? Is this the attraction and the reason that otherwise smart people are diverted from a path to real “clean, green and emissions-free” energy and conservation?

 

Nuclear power, whether small modular reactors or the customary large reactors, is a distraction from the real task at hand, getting to zero.

---

[i] [i]MacAlister, Terry (April 9, 2008). "Westinghouse wins first US nuclear deal in 30 years". London: Guardian News and Media Limited. April 9, 2008

 

[ii] I’ve been informed that it is still encountering problems and this much-vaunted start as it claims on line may not actually have happened.

[iii] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927101054/http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly.

[iv] 2-propenoic acid, ammonia, aromatic hydrocarbon resin, benzene, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrazine, morpholine, nitrogen oxides, phosphoric acid and quarterly ammonium compounds, sulphur dioxide, suspended particulate matter, as well as tritium and krypton.

 

[v] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/isotopes.html#halflifeexample

[vi] https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-green-energy Accessed 20.5.23

[vii] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927101054/http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly.

[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_Lovins Accessed 20.5.23

[ix] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcY22LZf_EQ CNSC

Fraudulent and Forever

 I'm going to write a book with the title above. Maybe it won't get past this blog site but it's a start. I want a place to put the information that I'm learning. I want to share difficult concepts in a comprehensive form. This book catalogues my journey from true believer to strong critic. I was misled, I was taught a lie and I believed a lie. Not just one lie but many lies. Uncovering one lie after another, my conclusion is that the nuclear industry is completely fraudulent.

Nuclear power, the power of the atom, is fascinating. The centre of an atom is held together with unimaginable strength – when the nucleus is cracked, like cracking an egg, the energy released can blow up a city or boil water for electricity. It can cause disease or it can heal.

 

However, it is not “clean, affordable and reliable^[1].” The industry uses the media to say the same thing over and over again, so often that many people believe it. Clean? All nuclear power plants must emit radioactive hydrogen. Affordable? Westinghouse and Areva have gone bankrupt over the building of nuclear power plants in the USA and in Finland. Reliable? France has had to buy electricity from Germany during heat waves. When the blackout of 2003 resulted in the shut-down of the nuclear power plants in the affected region, it took more than a week for them to reach full power again. Point Lepreau in New Brunswick has been plagued with outages; refurbishment took over four years during which the plant was offline.

 

What if the only reason that there are so many supporters of this nefarious industry is that it has marketed itself relentlessly? Like cigarette companies in the 70’s and 80’s, full page ads appear in the magazines. They look like bonafide articles until, with our reading glasses, we identify the small print in the corner that says “advertisement”.  

 

I’m angry, angry that I was so misled and angry that so many continue to be misled. I’m angry with my profession – with its inability to come to terms with a scourge upon humanity and with its willingness to subvert health of populations to the nuclear industry. I’m also angry with the nuclear industry which has knowingly and purposely misled parliamentarians and populations and lied, denied and misdirected researchers.

 

Physicians knew that ionizing radiation affected human health from the very beginning of humanity’s interaction with it:

- miners in Czech and their “rotten lungs”

- radiologists in the early 1900’s who used their hands to focus x-rays 

 - dentists and doctors that diagnosed the “radium girls”, the clock painters in the 1920’s

- members of various International ionizing radiation protection associations

             

The same silence from physicians during atmospheric atomic testing continues in an environment where nuclear power plants emit ionizing radiation (especially tritium). 

 

The industry knew that ionizing radiation was bad for human health:

- International Atomic Energy Agency lobbied to silence the World Health

 Organization on matters affecting human health – and won in 1957.

- Researchers were fired or had their funds cut when their results didn’t comply with the industry’s sales model. Eg. Dr. John Gofman, Dr. Thomas Mancuso, Dr. Joseph Mangano, Dr. Sternglass, and Dr. Steven Wing. They were then trivialized or their work discredited.

            - Held international meetings on the health of Chernobyl victims behind closed doors. 

 

In 2009, I met one of the shills for the nuclear industry. He questioned me on my credentials in such a manner that I asked for his name. He coyly said that he was “just a concerned citizen”. Later I learned that he was the President of the Canadian Nuclear Association. 

 

The new President and CEO for the same CNA, a Mr. John Gorman, a long-time registered lobbyist has met with the government minister in charge with rolling out Canada’s energy plans, Mr. Seamus O’Regan, a recorded eight times. Which leads to the question of whether  Mr. O’Regan sought any opinion other than that of the industry.

 

Many people feel that they have to leave the decisions about nuclear power to “specialists” to form an opinion on nuclear power. This is not so; a science or engineering degree is not required. All that is needed are two facts. 

 

Fact one:  Nuclear power is a means to boil water – that is all that it does. Like coal, it boils water and the steam turns the turbines which produce electricity. Anything that will turn turbines would work as well. 

 

Fact two: The waste lasts for a hundred thousand years. It isn’t just a little poisonous, like a cup of bleach on the counter, it is big time toxic – standing next to a waste fuel rod, a fuel rod that has been “used up” in the reactor, for less than twenty seconds would result in death. This is not science fiction or hyperbole. There have been deaths among people in the early history of nuclear research. Not only is the waste poisonous but everything that the fuel has “touched” during the burning process is also radioactive and toxic. There is no recycling.

 

Ionizing radiation^[2] – the type of radiation produced by nuclear power plants – causes cancers, autoimmune disorders, teratogenic^[3] alterations and genetic damage. The nuclear industry itself does not deny this. It is not under contention. The industry simply fudges the truth, and then states that there is a level below which ionizing radiation is not harmful. This is a lie, uncovered countless times most recently by the National Academy of Sciences in its BEIR VII (Biological Effects of Nuclear Radiation) documents of 2007. The nuclear industry has successfully mothballed scientific research and trivialized researchers. It has even jumped past the financial sector to the governmental goldmine. It is truly a fraudulent industry.

 

The more we learn about small modular reactors, the more we dislike them. The words “recycling” or “reprocessing" are usually associated with the environmental movement but in the case of nuclear waste, the words are "repurposed". After a highly delicate process of dissolving the waste uranium fuel in high-temperature liquid sodium (salt?), the plutonium is separated to be burned as fuel – making more waste and the liquid sodium is now radioactive. 

 

Meanwhile plutonium is in high demand for the manufacture of nuclear bombs. That the push for SMRs coincides with the build-up of UK nuclear weapons and the refurbishment of those of the USA cannot be an accident. 

 

Hence, the story ends with the plutonium, the major link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are suicidal. There are many things that we should be doing with our money instead of proliferating plutonium and arming a second MAD[i] race to the bottom.

---

^[1] Opening statement on the Canadian Nuclear Association website, 20.01.21

^[2] The term “radiation” will be used throughout to mean this particular form of radiation, one that produces ions and oxidation products in molecules. The molecules might be in biological entities but also structural objects such as steel and concrete.

^[3] Effects on the fetus during development.

 

 

---

[i] Mutually Assured Destruction.  The term "mutual assured destruction", commonly abbreviated "MAD", was coined by Donald Brennan, a strategist working in Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute in 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction.  Accessed 26.5.2023

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

 

Response to the article “Nuclear energy plays a key role in meeting Canada’s net-zero goals” found in a publication from the Institute for Researach in Public Policy.

Authors David Billedeau and Nicholas Palaschuk are staffers of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and are certainly welcome to their opinions on nuclear power, but I challenge the two leaps of faith that they make about nuclear energy:

1. That small modular nuclear reactors are legitimate. You will discover that not one has been built if you have the patience to read the World Nuclear Association’s page on small modular reactors. No private investors have put money after them. Fantasy and government subsidies do not make a market.

2. That nuclear power is carbon-emissions free. To fulfill that claim, the industry has to incorporate the carbon “costs” of mining, refining, shipping the uranium to enrichment, in itself requiring the energy of a small city, shipping it back to the reactor, manufacturing the steel and concrete of the reactor, dealing with the waste and, finally, decommissioning, which produces even more radioactive waste. Protecting the environment from radioactivity at the mine sites and the tailings piles should also be added to the carbon cost of nuclear power. (A boiling-water reactor proposed for Saskatchewan will require enrichment, but not all proposed SMRs will. A proposed small reactor in New Brunswick from ARC Clean Technology will have different costs.)

Radioactive pollution is particularly noxious. It occurs at every step of nuclear energy production. Nuclear reactors are not emissions-free. They must vent hydrogen mostly in the form of tritium, which is accompanied by other radioactive pollutants:  krypton, carbon-14, caesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium-90. Tritium and carbon-14 can be taken up by every cell in the human body, bombarding them with radioactive particles or rays. 

In 1962, my physics professor cautioned a group of pro-nuclear students – of which I was one – that nuclear power “had some shortcomings.” We listened respectfully as he described the waste as difficult to contain and hard to accommodate. We thought of him as an “old fuddy-duddy,” unable to embrace our new and wondrous technology. We believed that the smart people who had split the atom would figure out how to take out the garbage. 

They didn’t. They’ve tried for over 70 years.

The current idea is to abandon the waste underground in deep geological repositories. So far, not one is successfully in operation. Two have utterly failed at costs ranging in the billions – in Germany and Carlsbad in New Mexico. Finland, with its Onkalo respository, is the closest to having one be operational but it is having problems with the containers in which the waste will be packaged and has been criticized for siting it on the Gulf of Bothnia.

The industry talks about “reprocessing,” “recycling” and “pyroprocessing,” as if the product is denatured, environmentally friendly and that the waste has magically disappeared. Whatever you might think these processes are, they are not environmentally friendly. 

I am completely in agreement with the writers that nuclear physics, energy and power should be included in our educational curriculums. We must include the ways in which ionizing radiation affects health. With a more educated public, we’d have a more honest discussion about the price we are willing to pay for electrical energy. Are we willing to have radioactive pollution for this purpose? Especially when there are much less harmful sources of energy to exploit? Who speaks for our grandchildren?

Dale Dewar, MD, FCFP, Wynyard, SK

SMRs in Saskatchewan

SMRs - Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

There has been a lot of hype about these. Full page ads that look like they are written by journalists. Federal and provincial governments have been investing in them when not even a prototype exists. Premier Moe has even selected the type of fantasy reactor it wants, a BWRX-300, a Boiling Water Reactor.

 

If it uses Saskatchewan uranium, the uranium will be shipped to an enrichment facility in Tennessee and then shipped back to us. The Canadian Nuclear Safety commission, supposed to protect the health of people and the environment, lobbied the federal government to waive an environmental assessment.

 

Moe says that we'll pay $5 billion in return for 300 MW of electricity. That is a lot. He also says that the SMR will be located close to elbow or to Estevan and will use their nearby lakes for coolant. The coolant wo't becoem radioactive but it will be returned to the lake significantly warmer. Of course, accidents can still happen. 

The absurdity of this begs the imagination. Where has Moe been all summer as headlines speak of France's dilemma - not only has the drought meant that their coolant wasn't available but the heat also meant that the water that was present was too warm to actually cool the reactors. When Saskatchewan has a drought, who will get the water? The people who drink, wask and play in it - or the nuclear power plant.

 

Nuclear power is not "green". It is not carbon-dioxide free from mining, milling, transporting, enriching, more transporting, construction and waste management.

 

"Recycling", "reprocessing" and "pyroprocessing" are misleading marketing. 

Nuclear waste is not "waste" in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a biological poison, a radioactive environmental pollutant with long term consequences, a boiling cauldron of tiny atomic explosions, the gift "that keeps on giving" as the decaying elements burn into another generation of decaying radioactive elements and so on for an estimated four billion years.

Many First Nations peoples speak of the need to consider seven generations. Who here is speaking for our granchildren?

 

Physicians: What do we say?

Physicians have been largely silent on two nuclear industry challenges before the federal government. Do we pour millions of dollars into research and development of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors? Do we bury our current nuclear waste in the vicinity of Wakerton, Teeswater and Kincardine and the city of Ottawa in Ontario?ⁱ

In fact, physicians have been silent about nuclear power in general. We have also been silenced as the industry has worked its mysterious media fantasy of “too cheap to monitor” into a myth of “necessity” for climate change energy. We have been silent, not because we have nothing to say but because we’ve been led to believe that these decisions are “political”, not health-related.

During the Canadian Covid epidemic, physicians were utterly unable to keep the primacy of health care out of the political arena. We saw our ICUs worked beyond capacity, and our colleagues quit in frustration. With respect to the threat of ionizing radiation we have been remarkably silent.

To reiterate, the two very different questions currently before Canadian legislators, both involve ionizing radiation, not merely that of nature (sun, rocks, air) but entirely man-made atoms, some of which will still be emitting ionizing radiation in a time-frame that is outside human comprehension (plutonium-239 will be around for 24,100 x 10 yearsⁱⁱ).

1. Nuclear Waste Management:

Having decided that the only way to “manage” nuclear waste was to put it into a Deep Geological Repository (DGR), the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO)ⁱⁱⁱ has spent the last two of decades searching for such a site. The process has divided communities even while much of negotiation with perceived leaders (mayors, chiefs and council members) has occurred behind closed doors. Health professionals have been silent.

These wastes will be toxic for a long, long time. They are not like ordinary waste simply degrading over time. Each nuclear element has its own decay chain. What is buried in 2030 will never be what it was again. Short-lived waste and decay products will disappear but longer-lived ones will continue to emit radioactivity. A cask of nuclear waste is like a boiling cauldron with atoms of ever-changing elements.

 From this graph, you can see that the total radiation has decreased over 10 million years.

 

While it is easy to understand that burying the waste in undisturbed bedrock changes the bedrock to a “disturbed” status, many people don’t know that the radioactivity of the waste can change the very containers in which they are buried. Refurbishing of nuclear reactors involves replacement of miles of metal pipes that have become corroded, why would we expect that containers in a DGR would fare better?^iv

DGR? This is not the only disposal in question – NWMO is fantasizing a Near Surface Disposal Facility^v (NSDF) at Chalk River only 200 km North of Ottawa. This proposed disposal facility would be an eight story mound that will be within a few hundred metres of the river from which Ottawa and Montreal draw their cities’ drinking water.

^vi From

Ionizing radiation directly affects the human genome. No one disputes this but many believe or pretend to believe (denial) that there is a low level at which it is actually beneficial. Hormesis is a fiction.

Physicians often find themselves at odds with an industry when, using the precautionary principle, we hesitate to approve a new drug or technical procedure. For example, thalidomide’s disastrous side effects became evident only after marketing. Our history with radiation in medical use has been a continual story of overuse followed by rationalizing behaviour.

A radiological example, X-rays and CT scans. The overuse of x-rays for removal of skin lesions led to discipline by the American Medical Association at the end of the 1920’s and use for hair removal forbidden. Using x-rays to treat Tinea capitus in Israel resulted in a significant increase in cancers of the head and neck decades later.

In 1996, I joined the multitude of physicians using CT scans “to rule out brain injuries” in children that had bonked their heads – a negative result tended to reassure both the parents and myself, only to discover that these investigations resulted in an increase in cancers years later.^vii Choosing Wisely, a program to guide physician decisions about lab and x-ray investigations, now recommends CT scans under a limited number of circumstances – none of which are “I want reassurance” or the “parents expect it.

The industry has settled upon a Deep Geological Repository (DGR). What could be simpler? Bury it deeply in the bedrock where it would be safe and immobile for time immemorial. Are we so brilliant and so prescient that we can know what will be safe for the next 100,000 years and more?

Currently the waste is stored in concrete containers above ground. They can be watched – providing jobs for generations of Canadians – and repackaged if they leak. “Rolling Stewardship” would provide laboratories in Canada and elsewhere with experimental material. Finally, perhaps our brighter descendants will discover a way to use ionizing radiation safely. Instead of choosing a DGR recklessly with our limited understanding of the waste, we have the opportunity to spawn years of research.

2. Building Small Modular Nuclear Reactors:

Full page ads about Small Modular Nuclear Reactors tout them as “safe”. How is anything that produces ionizing radiation safe? We use it extensively in diagnostics and treatment but we also know that it is implicated in causing cancer.

In the 1950’s we routinely x-rayed pregnant women for “pelvimetry”, measuring their bony pelvic outlet to ascertain whether they could give birth naturally or needed a Caesarian section. In both the USA and the UK, the cancer societies noted a rise in leukemia in children. Suddenly there was a boom in building pediatric hospitals devoted to treating cancer.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, there was a leukemia boom in North Armerica and the UK. There was a sudden increase in incidence from ~ 1:20 to 1:16 children. At that time it was almost always fatal.

Dr. Alice Stewart, a general practitioner in the UK and one of the first epidemiologists, and the Tri-State Health Study in the USA collected data and connected the dots. X-rays during fetal development doubled the incidence of cancer in the offspring. Doctors had been ordering x-rays to measure womens’ pelvises, a series called “”pelvimetry”. The technique disappeared. Lead aprons came out for dental x-rays.

In 2007, after decades of study and six reports, the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII)^viii, in publishing its seventh report concluded that any level of exposure to radiation was unsafe (although “at lose doses, the number of radiation induced cancers is small”).

Studies of significant increases in leukemia and other cancers within 5 to 25 km of operating nuclear power plants seem to yield conclusive results but research by both the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE, UK) and the Kikkⁱ study in Germany have had disputed by the nuclear industry.

iP. Kaatsch, C.Spix, S. Schmiedel, R. Schulze-Rath, A.Mergenthaler, and M. Blettner, Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung vonKerkraftwerken (KiKK Studie), Sltzgitter: Bundesamp fuer Strablenschutz, 2007, urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939.

In 2012, I mentioned the German study in discussion after delivering a brief to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). The health science person on the board dismissively called the effect “due to a virus.” If there is a special virus that affects only children close to nuclear power plants, we should endeavour to identify it. No such research appears to have been launched.

Before 1990, when it was forced to open its records, the United States Department of Energy not only controlled access to all information on the health effects of radiation on nuclear workers and the public but it also controlled all the funding of radiation research^x. It had successfully stone-walled independent research for decades.

We don’t know which ray or particle will cause any particular DNA molecule to turn the cell into cancer but we know that they do. Physicians have conducted studies on the medical uses of ionizing radiation. Here are a few examples:

a) Xray treatment of Tinea capitus:

The studies on patients who, as children, received x-ray treatment for Tinea capitis (fungal infection of the scalp) in the 1940’s and 1950’s have shown “excess incidences of tumours of the head and neck including the skin, brain, thyroid, and parotid glands”^xi. Needless to say, this technique of treating fungal infections is left in the dustbin of history.

b) Breast cancer after fluoroscopic examinations of the breast during treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis:

“The role of ionizing radiation as a cause of carcinoma has long been recognized, particularly in relationship to carcinoma of the skin, lung, thyroid and bone.”^xii Dr. Ian Mackenzie in Halifax found fifty cases of breast cancer in patients who had received this form of x-ray treatment prior to 1961. From length of time from the beginning of the x-ray treatments and the breast cancer averaged 17 years. There was also a high correlation between the side of treatment and the cancer-affected breast.

This method of treating pulmonary TB had disappeared by 1955 when antibiotics became available but This research carried out largely on indigenous women and largely had disappeared by 1955. Decades later when they developed breast cancer, I’m sure they were very grateful that they had contributed to show that breast tissue was sensitive to radiation. Should we take a closer look at the use of x-rays in mammograms?

c) PET, MUGA, MIBI and SPECT scans:

All of these scans use a radioisotope, an element that gives off gamma rays that can create images of various parts of the body. For example, I131 concentrates within 15 minutes in the thyroid. This can provide a very good picture of the thyroid. Some studies require two scans, one before the radioisotope is injected and then a later one showing where the element accumulates in the body.

In 2011 researchers in Montreal examined the charts of more than 80,000 patients who had received post-heart attack PET scans and concluded that there was a 3% increase in the incidence of cancer per 10 mSv of scan exposure^xiii. Scans require between two and 8 exposures to satisfy the demands of the test. (For comparison, 10 mSv is equivalent to the exposure from 100 chest x-rays).

d) Increased secondary cancers in post-radiation patients:

“Radiation-induced second malignancies (RISM) is one of the important late side effects of radiation therapy”.^xiv The exact risk is dependent upon so many factors^xv that it probably contributes only 5% increase of the 17 – 19% total secondary cancers.

What is quite amazing is the real paucity of good prospective research on the health effects of radiation. These ones briefly listed here concentrate on carcinogenic effects, there are other possible affects. Radiation-associated cardiac diseases^xvi is known. Hypertension with its related cardiovascular diseases and strokes has also been identified as associated with chronic exposure to low-dose radiation^xvii.

We know that background radiation has health effects^xviii but it seems that limited research has been conducted on diseases other than cancer.

Many of the residents of Port Hope, home to Canada’s uranium refinery since 1933, feel that they have been “researched to death”^xix but a casual review of papers shows that many have time-lines that are too short, populations sizes that are too small, and mixed outcomes which do a disservice to all. Quantity of research tells us nothing if it's poorly done.

Finally, the myth believed by many physicians and the public is that we need nuclear power for radioisotopes, for treatment or diagnosis. We do not. We already make radioisotopes more safely in cyclotrons or accelerators and could expand this to all medical radioisotopes.

In conclusion, ionizing radiation is not safe; nuclear power cannot be made safe. Physicians have been altogether too silent about this industry – or, in fact, silenced at its very inception. With the pressure on the government to support an industry that is too slow, too costly and too dangerous to respond to the threatening climate change, who speaks for our great grandchildren?

iBurying nuclear waste requires resources and uses energy as well – currently high grade steel containers covered in copper have been found to be the least likely to corrode. These do not seem to be costed out in either monetary or environmental terms.

iiThe half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,900 years; it takes ten half-lives to disintegrate to almost unmeasurable amounts.

iiiThe Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO, pronounced “Noo-mo”) was formed in 2002 by Canada’s nuclear electrical energy providers as directed by the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act (NFWA). https://nwmo.ca

ivNWMO engineers say that the containers won’t corrode because they are made of the “finest steel” and covered with relatively impervious-to-radiation copper. Does this mean that the tubing in nuciear reactors is not the “finest steel”?

vhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-nuclear-waste-management/

viFrom Geosphere: A blog hosted by the European Geoscience Union. Note that the graph starts at a “zero” of 1000 Bq. https://blogs.egu.eu/network/geosphere/files/2014/12/Untitled.png

viihttps://www.choosingwisely.org/clinician-lists/american-academy-pediatrics-ct-scans-to-evaluate-minor-head-injuries/

viiihttps://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_final.pdf

ixP. Kaatsch, C.Spix, S. Schmiedel, R. Schulze-Rath, A.Mergenthaler, and M. Blettner, Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung vonKerkraftwerken (KiKK Studie), Sltzgitter: Bundesamp fuer Strablenschutz, 2007, urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939.

xhttps://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Alice-Stewart-her-research-led-to-end-of-2800048.php

xiFollow-up study of patients treated by X-ray epilation for Tinea capitis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1244805/

This paper is merely one of many on this subject.

xii J. A. Myrden, J. E. Hiltz, “Breast Cancer Following Multiple Fluoroscopies During Artificial Pneumothorax Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis”, Canad. Med. Ass.J., June 14, 1969, vol 100

xiiiMark J. Eisenberg, Johathan Afilalo, Patrick R. Lawler, Michal Abramhamowicz, Hugues Righard, and Louise Pilot, “Cancr Risk Related to Low-Dose Ionizing Radiation from Cardiac Imaging in Patients after Acute Myocardial Infarction”, Canad. Med. Ass. J, 183(March 8, 2011); 430-436.

xivChinna Babu Dracham, Abhash Shankar, and Renu Madan,”Radiation induced secondary malignancies: a review article” Radiat Oncol J. 2018 Jun; 36(2): 85–94. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6074073/

xv For example: age at radiation, dose and volume of irradiated area, type of irradiated organ and tissue,

radiation technique, individual and family history of cancer, chemotherapy, cigarette-smoking, diet and

external environment.

xviMilind Y. Desai, “Radiation Associated Cardiac Disease”, American College of Cardiology, June 21, 2017. https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2017/06/13/07/13/radiation-associated-cardiac-disease

xviihttps://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/05/03/regular-low-level-radiation-exposure-raises-high-blood-pressure-risk

xviiiBen Spycher, Judith Lupatsch, Marcel Zwahlen, Martin Roosli, Felix Niggli, Michael Grotzer, Johannes Rischewski, Matthias Egger, Claudia Kuehni, for the Swiss Pediatric Oncology Group and the Swiss national Cohort Study Group, “Background Ionizing Radiation and the Risk of Chilhood Cancer: A Census-Based Nationwide Cohort Study”, Environmental Health Perspectives, June 1, 2015. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.1408548

xixPersonal communication with Port Hope citizen