Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in urgent need of reform

 Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in urgent need of reform

There is an urgent need to reform the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) and eliminate the agency’s strong tendency to prioritize industry needs over its primary mandate: protecting Canadians and the environment from radioactive hazards stemming from nuclear operations.

 

MPs tend to refer to the CNSC as a “world-class regulator,” just as Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan did in a recent keynote address that hyped the “SMR [Small Modular Nuclear Reactor] action plan for Canada.” MPs often respond to public concerns with assurances that the CNSC will look after things and base its decisions on science and

international best practices.

 

There is a jarring disconnect between such affirmative remarks by MPs and statements made in recent years about the CNSC by international peer reviewers, high-ranking Canadian officials and many others.

 

The International Atomic Energy Agency recently reviewed Canada’s nuclear safety framework. It identified numerous deficiencies including: not following IAEA guidance on nuclear reactor decommissioning, failure to justify practices involving radiation sources, inadequate management systems for transporting nuclear materials, and allowing pregnant nuclear workers four times higher radiation exposures than IAEA would permit.

 

In testimony before the House Standing Committee on Natural Resources, in November 2016, Canada’s Environment Commissioner said:

 

“the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission… was quite difficult to work with… I would say that the commission was aggressive with the auditors.”

 

In April 2017, the Expert Panel on reform of environmental assessment noted in its final report that it had heard many concerns about lack of independence at the CNSC:

 

“There were concerns that these Responsible Authorities (CNSC and NEB) promote the projects they are tasked with regulating…The term “regulatory capture” was often used when participants described their perceptions of these two entities.”

 

The nuclear industry publication, Nuclear Energy Insider, recently touted Canada’s “benign regulatory environment” as a reason for SMR developers to come to Canada to experiment with and promote “small”, “modular”, nuclear reactors.

 

A Globe and Mail article in November 2018, revealed that CNSC officials had engaged in backroom lobbying to exempt small modular nuclear reactors from environmental assessment. 

 

A June 2020 briefing session for MPs and media,“Sham regulation of radioactive waste in Canada,” by the Canadian Environmental Law Association and other NGOs, outlined several ways in which the CNSC was creating “pseudo regulations” to benefit the nuclear industry and enable substandard nuclear waste facilities to receive approval and licensing.

 

An email sent by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission on March 30, 2017, confirmed that the CNSC Commissioners had never refused to grant a license during the agency’s (then)17-year history.

 

A recent petition to the Auditor General entitled “Nuclear governance problems in Canada” noted that the CNSC has a mandate to protect health but lacks a health division.  A review of CNSC’s organizational chart reveals that the word health does not appear on it.

 

In November 2009, hundreds of workers at Ontario Power Generation’s Bruce nuclear plant breathed in plutonium dust (a by-product of nuclear-energy production) but the plutonium remained undetected for weeks. Many of the workers had not been given respirators. We believe it may have been the largest preventable exposure of workers to internal radioactive contamination in the history of the civilian nuclear industry. To our knowledge, no one was disciplined or held accountable for this incident.

 

In our opinion, based on many years of experience intervening at licensing hearings of the CNSC and its predecessor the Atomic Energy Control Board, the CNSC shows all the signs of being a captured regulator that prioritizes the needs of the nuclear industry over protecting Canadians and the environment.

 

Consider the background of CNSC’s current president, Rumina Velshi.  Before her appointment as CNSC president, she worked for Ontario Power Generation for eight years in senior management positions and led the OPG commercial team involved in a multi-billion dollar proposal to build new nuclear reactors. 

 

The International Atomic Energy Agency says that the regulatory body must be separate from “promoters of nuclear energy”. energy”. Placing an experienced promoter of nuclear business initiatives in charge of the CNSC seems to run contrary  to IAEA guidance.

 

During Ms. Velshi’s presidency, CNSC has expedited licensing processes for small modular nuclear reactors. It has also moved to allow entombment in concrete of the radioactive remains of old nuclear reactors, against the explicit advice of the International Atomic Energy Agency. 

 

IAEA guidance also suggests that the CNSC should not report to the Minister of Natural Resources, given that the minister also has a mandate to promote nuclear energy under the Nuclear Energy Act. Even more

importantly, the binding international convention on Nuclear Safety to which Canada is party, clearly states:

 

“2. Each Contracting Party shall take the appropriate steps to ensure an effective separation between the functions of the regulatory body and those of any other body or organization concerned with the promotion or utilization of nuclear energy.”

 

Existing enabling legislation allows Cabinet to change the Minister to which the CNSC reports with a simple Order-In-Council decision.

 

CNSC’s tendency to prioritize industry needs is a throwback to the days

when its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Control Board, had a legal mandate to promote the nuclear industry under the Atomic Energy Control Act.

 

Times have changed, radioactive hazards are mounting, and bad decisions are being made. 

 

We need a nuclear regulatory regime that is truly focused on protecting the environment and the health of Canadians. Having the CNSC report to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change would be an important first step in the needed reforms.

Statement courtesy Lynne Jones and Gordon Edwards.

 

Uranium Mining: Human and Environmental Health Effects

 Uranium is a common element in the earth’s crust, more abundant than gold, silver and mercury and found everywhere. Being chemically reactive, it is never found in its elemental form; most commonly it is bound as uranium oxide, U₃0₈. Mining can be cost effective wherever ore concentrations reach 0.02%. One of the highest concentrations was Saskatchewan’s mine at Key Lake at 15.9% U₃0₈. Saskatchewan also boasts the world’s largest mine at McArthur River (concentration of 9.6% U₃0₈₎.

From 1990 to 1996, I worked with Northern Medical Services in Saskatchewan. In 1991, our clinic diagnosed three miners with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, a disease rarely found in men and, at that time, unknown among the Dene. We were told by specialists that there was no connection between the disease and the exposure of these men to uranium. The dearth of research on environmental contamination from mining and the lack of baseline health information on Northerners left me with questions.

The Process of Mining, Milling and Refining:

Wherever mining occurs, the earth’s mantle is disrupted and mining waste (tailings) remain on the surface or placed back into the mines in its pulverized form. On the surface, to prevent wind erosion and spread of toxicity, they are usually covered with water creating tailings ponds. Placed back into the mines, the previously bound material is now loose aggregate.

What does the ore contain? Besides uranium, a host of common elements are found including arsenic, iron, magnesium, titanium, calcium, sodium, potassium, sulfur and silicon. The heavy metal and toxic content is the real concern; the tailings contain all the progeny of uranium’s radioactive decay - thorium, protactinium, radium, radon, polonium, bismuth, francium, astatine, thallium and lead. 85% of the radioactivity remains in the tailings and, over time, the waste actually becomes more radioactive as the elements with very long half-lives[1] decay[2] into the elements with shorter half-lives.

Of special concern is radon, a gas considered responsible for 20% of the lung cancers in Canada. It is heavier than air and can be spread over 1000 km by a stiff wind. Furthermore, as it decays in its 3.8 day half-life, it becomes polonium, a solid which eventually settles out of the air and may be taken up by plants and lichens. Polonium is the most toxic substance known to human kind. An alpha emitter and therefore undetectable by normal Geiger counters, the amount of polonium equivalent to the ink in a period in this sentence is 200 times a lethal dose for humans. (That amount was used to kill the double Russian spy, Litvinenko, in 2006 in the U.K.)

Milling occurs close to the mine sites. The ore is pulverized into a dust, the uranium oxide extracted using ammonia or sodium bicarbonate. The resulting “yellowcake” which is 70% uranium, is trucked to a refinery at Blind River in Ontario where it is further purified to uranium trioxide. Further processing occurs at a conversion plant in Port Hope which changes the trioxide into either a dioxide powder for CANDU-type reactors or to uranium hexafluoride. The uranium hexafluoride is transported to enrichment plants in the United States. Both refinement and conversion leave waste products with radioactive content.

Environmental Effects:

Uranium has been mined in Canada for over seventy years. Little research has been done on the direct effect of the mines and their tailings upon the environment. Mining, processing, and reclamation have the potential to affect soils, air quality, and biota through surface water quality and groundwater quality and quantity[3].

Any mine is physically disruptive to the environment, displacing plant and wild life kilometers away, separating animals from their food sources and affecting migration patterns. In Ontario, the mining act permits a company to clear-cut and surface-strip removing up to 1000 tonnes of rock without any restoration. Open Pit mines may occupy hectares of land surface, release radon and other elemental dust particles to the atmosphere; underground and leach mining continue the same releases during the milling process. The tailings from both mining and milling remain toxic for thousands of years.

The potential to affect surface and ground water quality is evident in Nero Lake, a small lake west of Uranium City used as a dump for tailings prior to the closure of the Lorado mine site in 1961. When assessed in 2013, 52 years later, Nero Lake had very little biological activity in its waters or rocky bed. “Even if the entire set of mine sites are cleaned-up around Uranium City, four watersheds will have levels of selenium and uranium in excess of Saskatchewan Surface Water Quality Objectives.”[4]

The potential to affect much wider areas was realized when the Church Rock Dam in New Mexico was breached by its tailing pond in 1979. The amount of radiation released to the water and the atmosphere was three times that of the Three Mile Island power plant disaster. A swath of land following the overflowed creek continues to be heavily contaminated, its water unsafe for cattle. Clean-up, 38 years later, continues to await resolution of federal/facility law suits.[5]

In summary, to date there have been little substantive research upon the exact impact to the environment of uranium mining. With the known toxicity of both the ore mined and the tailings remaining exposed or remediated, the potential for environmental contamination exists for millennia.  Tailings ponds (as at Elliot Lake) may dry up and the protected toxins lifted into the atmosphere by the wind; wastes buried in mine pits (as in Cluff Lake) can be absorbed by plants which in turn are ingested by animals.[6] Long term risks are poorly defined.

It is human hubris to assume that any attempt at restoration can stand the test of time for these wastes.

Human Health Effects:

Studies of workers at all of the mining and processing stages has established some of the human health effects of uranium. Uranium and its progeny are heavy metals and would be expected to have effects on human growth and development similar to the two most extensively studied heavy metals, mercury and lead. These include renal failure and brain damage, DNA damage and fertility problems, high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, muscle and joint pain without arthritic changes, behavioural and developmental challenges in children and hearing damage.

However, these potential risks have been very poorly researched. While the CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission) Synopsis report[7]concluded that “no adverse health effects have occurred or are likely to occur in Port Hope as a result of the operations of the nuclear industry in the town” they actually ignored some the research they quoted in the paper. The same organization claimed that the report was “peer-reviewed” when, in fact, a single Harvard researcher was paid to review the document. The document itself admits to statistically higher incidences of circulatory disease, and pneumonia; some of the research quoted as non-significant showed increases in incidence of the target health concern up to the end of the period of time allotted to the study which leads to the question of why that particular “cut-off” date or why the need for longer term research was not recommended? Other objections to the quality of research include: an increase in Down’s syndrome amongst the children of male workers at the refinement plant in spite of the short length of time and small population studied, mixing rare and relatively common cancers so that the effect of the common cancer (leukemia) is lost in the data, excusing the elevated incidences of circulatory disease and pneumonia on poorly matched mortality data – all suggestive of CNSC’s collusion with the industry itself. 

New data is arising as more and more researchers focus on uranium as a chemically reactive heavy metal. Besides its effect as a heavy metal, it mimics estrogen. Rat studies indicate fertility problems but while this conclusion requires human studies to confirm the effect on human populations, the estrogenic effects may be responsible for the increase in a female-dominated disease, Systemic Lupus Erythematosis.[8]

The radioactivity cannot be discounted; the increase in cancer deaths amongst Eldorado miners who worked unprotected from 1930’s to 1960 is never contested but attributed solely to radon exposure by the CNSC; the SENES study reviewed the health of miners from 1975 onwards and concluded that miners would experience 1:100 increase lung cancer over non-miners[9]. Because it is an alpha-particle producer, uranium has the potential to be extremely carcinogenic and genotoxic but it might take generations to document the effect in humans.

As Brugge and Buchner point out in their review paper of 2011, “As much damage is irreversible, and possibly cumulative, present efforts must be vigorous to limit environmental uranium contamination and exposure[10].”

Conclusion:

Uranium has two uses, nuclear bombs and nuclear power.

Nuclear Bombs are an indiscriminate weapon. The Non-Proliferation Treaty was established in 1967 to disarm the nuclear powers and prevent the spread of nuclear bombs to other countries. It has failed on both counts so a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty has been proposed by 122 countries. Clearly, the majority global citizenry want disarmament.

Nuclear power was developed initially in order to provide material for nuclear weapons. It has created enormous amounts of waste for which, after 70 years and billions of dollars, no long-term storage facility has been found. In addition to the failure to deal with its waste, the industry has priced itself out of the market. It cannot compete with solar, wind or other sustainable energy technology. Currently responsible for only 3% of the worlds energy, it is unlikely that there is a future for nuclear power.

Since there is no other purpose for uranium, a moratorium on the mining of uranium (as exists in the provinces of British Columbia and Quebec) should become global.

                                                                                   

---

[1] A “half-life is the length of time that a radioactive element takes to change one half of its atoms into another element. Half-lives of uranium-238 and uranium-235 are 4.5 billion and 703.8 million years while those of thallium-206 and polonium-210 (at the other end of the series of decaying elements) are 4.2 minutes and 138.3 days.

[2] “Decay” occurs when the element releases energy in the form of an alpha or beta particle and changes into the next element of its decay chain. This length of time required for a decay is specific to each element – it cannot be stopped.

[3] https://www.nap.edu/read/13266/chapter/9

[4] Ann Coxworth, PhD, The Environmental Resource, Saskatchewan Environmental Society, Jan-Feb 2014, p13.

[5] Dale Dewar & Florian Oelck, From Hiroshima to Fukushima You, Between the Lines, Toronto, 2014

[6] Local hunters claim that moose have already disturbed the overlaying protection in search of salt. (Personal communication).

[7] CNSC Synopsis Report, April, 2009. “Understanding Health Studies and Risk Assessments Conducted in the Port Hope Community from the 1950’s to the Present”

[8] Lu-Fritts, et al, “Systemi Lupus Erythematosus is Associationed with Uranium Exposure in a Community Living Near a Uranium Processing Plant: A Nested Case-Control Study”, Arthritis Rheummatol, 2014 Novemember, 66(11): 3105-3112

[9] Jointly reviewed by CNSC in this paper: http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/pdfs/health-studies/Opportunity-North-Vol13-Issue4-P21-The-Health-of-Uranium-Miners_e.pdf. It is interesting to compare the jump to conclusions reported here with the quandary where the entire nuclear industry tried to discount the findings of the KiKK study, a Germany study which concluded that there was a distance-related increase in leukemia in children living close to nuclear power plants.

[10] Brugge D, Buchner V, “Health Effects of uranium: new research findings”, Rev Environ Health. 2011;26(4):231-49

Being Responsible: The Sign at the End of My Lane

A sign at the end of my lane reads “No Nuclear Waste Dump Anywhere”. Since the sign was on my deck for the summer, I know what questions people ask. 

FYI background information: Nuclear waste is made up of radioactive elements. Radioactive elements decay and as they “decay” they give off both radioactive particles and energy as they become a different element. For example: radium changes into radon gas when it decays. The release of the particles (or energy) can affect cells. Special radioactive elements are used in controlled circumstances to treat cancer because it kills cells that are rapidly dividing preferentially to normal cells. However, it also kills normal cells and can cause cancer, inheritable defects and developmental abnormalities.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) proposes a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) which they claim to have the ability to monitor for a century - at which time they abandon it, so, in fact, NWMO is proposing a Deep Underground Dump (DUD). 

The questions: 

First: “Why not put the waste back in the ground where it came from?” Some time ago, that would have been my question too.

Bad idea.

First: it is not the same kind of thing. The waste is hundreds of times more radioactive than the ore that was taken out of Saskatchewan. It contains some 200 or more brand new radioactive elements, some more lethal than others. While computer models predict how each element will decay (and each decay chain is known), no one really knows how the combinations will chemically or physically inter-react as they change through time. At the one existing North American underground dump, the WIPP facility in Carlsbad, intended to last “thousands of years”, no one still knows why radioactivity was released because they cannot get close enough to examine it.

Second: Packaging the stuff doesn’t work. Radiation changes things over time – the iron and/or copper that makes up the containers is constantly barraged by nuclear particles that change the elements. If an iron atom is changed into an atom of a gas, salt or even different kind of metal, the container gradually “rots”. In fact, this is reason nuclear power plants “wear out” and need “refurbishment”. 

Third: The Cost. Federal government has already spent more than $700 million on the six year long Seaborn Panel that recommended against a Deep Geological Repository. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has spent millions and plans to spend millions more. And then there is the cost of building the dump site, creating the containers and shipping them across Canada – there exists already enough waste that it will take trucks driving continually a couple of hours apart for a couple of decades to get the current waste to Saskatchewan – is practically unfathomable. Virtually all of these eventually billions of dollars will come out of the public purse. Creighton is still under consideration for a DUD.

Second question: "What do you propose? Saskatchewan may as well make money from the waste?"

The Candian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and the US Environmental Protection Agency propose that the stuff remain in the containers in which it is currently stored where it can be monitored – after the six to ten years that it spends under water until it is “cool” enough to be stored. The containers regularly assessed and breaches repaired early. The waste would be readily accessible if a technology were developed that sustainably recycled them.

The EPA called it “Rolling Stewardship”. The beauty of the plan would be that when the nuclear power plants are decommissioned, they can virtually be decommissioned on the spot! There would be jobs into the future as far as humans exist. 

We’ve created the waste, for our children and our children's children, we need to manage it responsibly.