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PREFACE
AND INTRODUCTION
Among many
other things, this web site records and gives voice to the opinions and concerns
of the members of the Inverhuron community, the people who live and vacation
in the shadow of the world’s largest nuclear complex. The complex includes both production facilities and Canada’s largest nuclear waste disposal operation. It was this operation that had residents concerned that the ‘temporary’ storage of high level nuclear wastes, as approved by our nuclear regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, is neither safe nor temporary. Challenging this decision has left the community divided and bitter. Since the 1970's and to this day, nuclear power is being touted as the ‘saviour’ of Ontario’s energy requirements, this in spite of the near-bankruptcy of Ontario Hydro and OPG which it has created. One doubts whether this was what was meant when the industry touted nuclear power as “too cheap to metre”. Here in Inverhuron, we have our very own ‘Xavier’; Xavier McPinch is the nom de plume of a resident who wishes this work: “Murder at the Nuke” to be published anonymously. It is an extended essay that takes the form of a romance, the romance of the back-room boys who helped create the secretive industry known now as nuclear power. The essay was completed in 1999, and while much has changed since, the history it describes becomes ever more relevant. It is their closed-door decisions that have come to haunt us here in Inverhuron, as we try to cope with the consequences on almost a daily basis and for an almost unimaginable term (16,000 to 250,000 years is the toxic lifespan of nuclear waste, depending on your source). While it becomes obvious as you read this piece that the dragon has not been slain, some of its weaknesses have been exposed. I hope you enjoy reading this view as described by one member of our community. - Eugene Bourgeois President, Bruce Centre for Energy Research and Information |
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MURDER AT THE NUKE
The Untold Story of a Canadian Nuclear Crime
Part One - WHO KILLED THE GENIE?by Xavier MacPinch Who killed the Nuclear Genie? Or did he just fall flat on his face? Who pushed him? Did they mean to kill him? Is he dead? In the beginning the Genie was in the bottle. Or to put it another way, in the scientists' laboratories. How did he get in there in the first place? He was created or discovered in a long process at least a hundred years old. After Henri Becquerel identified uranium, a relative of radium, Marie and Pierre Curie explored radium's radioactive properties; radium, they found, is a chemical element which naturally fires off atomic particles, like a fizzing firecracker, one of those sparklers that ignite into a burst of miniature shooting stars, except that radium’s "shooting stars" are deadly. Uranium is a chemical element occurring naturally; it also shoots off "stars," particles which explode from the atom's nucleus when it is split or blown apart. Breaking up an atom is called fission. In the shooting-off process a great deal of heat is created. It took scientists long years of study and experimentation to figure out the nature and characteristics of radioactive ("star-bursting") chemical elements such as uranium. Those characteristics added up to the Genie in the bottle. The heat created by bursting atoms is what nuclear power is all about. Put that heat to use by having it create steam and we’re back to James Watt's steam engine, but not quite that simple. Watt's invention can be explained by pointing to the kettle steaming on the stove in anybody's kitchen, but if the nuclear Genie is to be let out of the bottle and set to work outside the lab, he becomes a gigantic force to be reckoned with. Who let him out, this potentially deadly shooter? Or as it was hoped, this potentially brilliant explosion of useful power? Businessman took the Genie out of the bottle in order to put him to work producing electricity. To make money. The heat he gave off was to be used to create steam which would drive a turbine which would be connected to a generator out of which electricity would flow. We're dealing with businessman now, not scientists. Businessmen are no-nonsense people who intend to make a profit on investment. The world needs these people in order to bring us the joys of the market place. But what happens when a star-burst shooting Rambo Genie is hauled into the market place and told that he is expected to behave? The sheriff is there to see that he does. In Canada the sheriff is the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB); in the United States he used to be the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) but he wasn't very good at his job so he was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).1 These sheriffs, the regulators, will be given closer examination in Part IV of this discussion. (Editor's Note: Since this essay was written, AECB has been replaced by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or CNSC) The earliest entry of the Nuclear Genie into the market place hereabouts began in the States in the early 1950s, when a group of businessmen formed the Power Reactor Development Company (PRDC) to build the Enrico Fermi Power Plant on Lake Erie not far from Detroit, Michigan. The event illustrates that from the very beginnings nobody quite knew what was going on. The Atomic Energy Commission, the sheriff, got a report June 6, 1956, from its Advisory Committee that the committee had no information available to show that such a plant was unsafe; there also wasn't enough evidence to show that it was safe.2 Does this mean that the Genie is not to be let loose? That's what the report says, isn't it? No. Well, yes, that's what the report says, but the Atomic Energy Commission buried the report and considered other factors such as the businessmen's (the Power Reactor Development Company) dazzling promise of cheap, very cheap electricity* The Nuclear Genie was made to look like a cool guy, his lethal characteristics were kept under wraps. The Sheriff said the people needn't worry. The people? You and me. And the rest of those in the market place. After all, the businessmen and the sheriff are not the only ones out there. Some of the people protested the plans to build the reactor, that mammoth sparkler, so close to their homes. The politicians stayed away. They didn't want to get involved. The issue was not a popular one. Better not to risk being on the losing side. People protested. Maybe they wanted to know more. Maybe they had an inkling of what was in that buried report. Anyhow, the sheriff, the Atomic Energy Commission, decided to allow the plant to be built. Built, you understand. This was understood to mean that the plant would not be allowed to operate until all unresolved issues were resolved, issues such as a Nuclear Genie run amok: explosions, health hazards from radioactive contamination (getting shot up by those star bursts of lethal particles), toxic waste from fission byproducts (more bursting particles), and ruination of property values: Who wants to live next to this thing? Or who's going to buy my house or farm or business if I decide to get out of here? Some people could picture the Genie blowing his top and running wild. Were they right? No. No, the Atomic Energy Commission decided. The chances of a nuclear disaster were practically nil. That's a relief, isn't it? Yes! Well, no. It's no relief because if this practically nil, very remotely possible accident did happen, the death, the disablement, the damage, and the deficits would be appalling, unprecedented. If the Genie did go crazy, the market place would all but be wiped out. Somehow this is the picture that stuck in the people's minds. The Genie had shown his stuff when the Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.3 Looks like that sheriff didn’t see things this way. The Atomic Energy Commission issued a permit for the plant to operate, to go critical, as they say. They were to allow the Genie a chance to show how really good he could be. Those people kept on objecting, they just did not trust the sheriff and those businessmen to handle the potential monster. But the United States Supreme Court did. Business was given the signal to go ahead. Somehow the issue of potential if distant catastrophe got lost. Instead the issue became one of muscle, of push, of influence. The Supreme Court was persuaded to express its faith in the Atomic Energy Commission, and the AEC expressed its faithin the businessmen, and the businessmen went about building and running their ingenious reactor. 1961. By 1966 the cost had gone from about $40 million to $120 million. When all was said and done, the cost for every $100 worth of electricity was $400. The plant was shut down in 1972. A very bad business. The genie apparently didn't like his businessmen keepers. He didn't exactly blow his top but he snookered ‘em good. No, you can't say that. The Genie doesn't snooker anybody. He's relatively harmless when handled properly. If you treat him bad he's gonna get out of hand. That’s not the point here. The point here is that the sheriff didn't seem to be doing his job. The government-appointed agency to oversee the nuclear industry, whether that agency be the Canadian Atomic Energy Control Board or the American Atomic Energy Commission, is, or has been, at the beck and call of the very people it is intended to regulate. And none of them sees the whole picture. The businessmen are seduced by the promise of electric “power too cheap to metre”. Science seemed to have suggested that possibility. The Atomic Energy Commission was seduced by the blandishments of the businessmen. How was the Supreme Court talked into it? Of course, they would never have seen the reports that were buried. They could only go on what was presented to them. The picture left on the screen is an uncertain jumble. Nobody knew, fully, what he was getting into. Nobody knew what dealing with the Nuclear Genie is all about or only some of it. What is unknown is crucial and what is unknown gives the Genie the last word. The regulatory agency, the sheriff, should have the last word, but apparently it sold its soul to the company store. It sold its soul and it may have killed the Genie. Its oversight or lack of oversight may have caused the death of the nuclear industry before it ever got really started. Part II - THE BEGINNINGS OF NUCLEAR POWER In the States the businessmen appeared to be in charge of the market place. "Who else?" they might ask. In Canada the Nuclear Genie has other masters. How was it in the beginning? In the beginning Canada had the National Research Council, a crown corporation (1924), meaning that it was funded by the government; the council had an advisory board of civilian notables, mostly scientists and engineers, but scientific research was not high on its agenda. The National Research Council existed mainly to serve industry and Canadian trade. So how did the Genie get into Canada? The British and the Americans put him there. During the Second World War, the Brits and the Americans agreed, off and on, to cooperate in research which would eventually produce the Atomic Bomb. The Brits decided that England was not a safe location for the research because of the German bombs and rockets falling all over the place. A spot in Canada would be much safer. The proposal was put to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who referred it to his minister of munitions and supplies, C. D. Howe. Munitions? Yes, because by 1942 atomic research was explosive. Literally. The war powers envisioned a great bomb fired by a cataclysmic burst of split atoms. It was a race to see who would get there first. What would happen if the enemy got it first? The National Research Council would take on the job. In 1944 the council was under the direction of C. J. Mackenzie, who would be there for the following thirteen years. Howe, the munitions man, was already in the picture. To get things going, the Brits sent over Hans von Halban, born in Germany of Austrian parents, a war refugee from France, where he had worked at the Radium Institute (Curie). Halban was under pressure to produce some kind of explosive device. The government, the politicians, waited almost breathlessly for word of progress. In this they were totally dependent on the scientists. What did the members of parliament know about fission? So the scientists slogged on into the as yet unknown. The unknown. Nobody knew. But it was exciting. It was a matter of life and death. It was either us or the Evil Empire of Adolph Hitler. Halban was interested in the many possibilities for a device that would split atoms, a reactor, as it was called. The politicians were interested in only one possibility, the one which would produce plutonium, a byproduct of fission and the principal Bomb ingredient. Halban was in charge of the National Research Council lab set up in Montreal to carry out the British effort. He was a top-notch research scientist but he was not a good administrator. To his staff he appeared arrogant. Besides, the Americans were already far ahead of him. They had built a large reactor, experimental, in Chicago. The Brits decided to stop funding the Montreal lab. John D. Cockcroft came, from England to replace Halban (who stayed in research) and to enjoy a pledge of American support and supplies. However, they did not want to share any of their secrets. So many names! Howe. Mackenzie, C. J. Halban. Cockcroft. There will be more. And there's a reason for naming them all: To show that the Genie had many masters. And to ask again and again: Who's in charge? It is now 1944, the war in Europe is all but over. Halban went on a mission to France to enlist the help of his former colleagues at the Radium Institute. They agreed to help only on the basis of an equal partnership with Britain. His mission failed. The Americans were infuriated that he had been allowed out of Canada. Think of the secrets the man knew! The Americans wanted him jailed as soon as he landed. Instead he was returned to Canada, denied access to the Montreal lab, and forbidden to leave the country. Who's in charge? The Americans? After the war Halban became a professor at Oxford, did successful research, published scientific papers, and eventually went back to his home base in France, the Radium Institute. J. D. Cockcroft, the Brit, was now in charge. He was aided by the American General Leslie Groves. Who's in charge? A Brit and an American. The decision was made to build a reactor at Chalk River, in a remote corner about two hours drive north of Ottawa on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River. 1944. To prepare for the main attraction, the National Research X-perimental reactor (NRX), a secondary attraction was deemed necessary, the ZEEP (Zero Energy Experimental Pile, pile being another word for reactor). For this Lew Kowarski was brought from England, a Russian who landed in England via Poland and France. The ZEEP was small, about nine feet high, but it was to be useful in the production of fission materials for more experiments such as the NRX under construction and useful also in providing design and construction ideas. After all, all of this was new territory. In 1945 it was the first working nuclear reactor outside of the States, a coup of sorts. Meanwhile construction of the National Research X-perimental reactor (NRX) went ahead. Cockcroft, the man in charge, took a trip to England on professional and family matters. The Americans were antsy. They wanted quick progress: We need the Bomb in order to end the war. It was still going on in the Pacific Theatre of operations. Cockcroft, they felt, should be at Chalk River attending to business. A Canadian Bomb did not materialize. The Americans got there first. The Canadians were just as pleased. They never wanted the Bomb. Or so they said. The horrendously destructive side of the Nuclear Genie had been demonstrated. Where do we go from here? Howe, the munitions minister, soon to become Minister of Trade, the government’s man overseeing the nuclear effort and ever the persuasive politician, convinced the small group privy to the hush-hush nuclear doings that what lay in the near future was a nuclear driven power plant producing vast amounts of very, very cheap electricity. Besides, Canada must not be left out of the Plutonium Club: It must be among the nations, the great powers, who would possess the Bomb. The ambivalent attitude toward the Bomb was almost schizophrenic. We don't want it, we won't have, but we’ve got to have it. After the war the British pulled their nuclear operation out of Canada to establish it back in England. Abandoned by the British money, Canada decided to go it alone, cost what it might. They did. And it cost. The Atomic Energy Control Board. (AECB) was created in 1946. No bombs were to be allowed, Canadians were interested in atoms for peace only. They had seen the horror of the Bomb in action and were determined to distance themselves from military use of nuclear power. The Genie was going to behave like a Good Guy in Canada, his ugly potential kept permanently in check. The Atomic Energy Control Board was supposed to be the sheriff watching over the Genie, but apparently the AECB was largely a facade behind which various men carried out the various activities of the nuclear endeavour. In short order Jack Mackenzie was president of both the National Research Council (industrial research and promotion) and of the AECB (nuclear development). He reported to Howe, Minister of Trade. Jack's our man! Looks like the Genie was out there in the market place, but in Canada he was not directly under the businessman's whip, he was under the thumb of the Federal Government. He had been politicized. Jack Mackenzie, a former dean of engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, came into government when he replaced General A. G. L. McNaughton as head of the National Research Council when the general went off to lead the Canadian forces in the Second World War. Chalk River and its experimental nuke (NRX) were Mackenzie's to promote and control. With Howe's consent, of course. Mackenzie hired W. B. Lewis, a British physicist, and put him in charge of Chalk River. A caricature of Lewis might portray him as the Mad Scientist devoted to his weird experiments. He was not mad, he was enthusiastic: an enthusiastic churchgoer, a bachelor dedicated to the Goddess of Science, and an almost fanatical regulator of his departmental personnel, complete with time clocks and prescribed hours of work. His contribution to the Chalk River community was the establishment of a library. In 1947 the National Research X-perimental reactor was ready to start up. It proved reliable although it was in need of constant adjustments and repairs. And why not? It was, after all, experimental. The NRX chugged on, its problems mounting. In October of 1947 a valve malfunctioned and a million dollars' worth of heavy water escaped, most of it recaptured*. A second accident in 1950 and a third in 1952 alerted the Genie's handlers that he was not easily tamed. (*Heavy water is deuterium oxide (D20) and
is heavier than ordinary water. It is used to cool the reactor and to control
the rate of fission.)
The 1947 accident happened on Lewis's watch. He was a physicist, not an administrator and not an operations man. To bolster the practical side of running a reactor, Mackenzie hired Lorne Gray as vice-president in charge of operations. Lewis was designated vice-president in charge of research. Lorne Gray was not a scientist, he was an engineer. He was a golfer and his contribution to the Chalk River community was a golf course, a joint endeavour with his colleagues. His hobby was stone masonry. He used his engineering skills to structure his administration of the Chalk River project. He was the man to make real the scientists’ dreams. In forging ahead with this dream, he pulled the National Research X-perimental reactor through the 1950 and 1952 accidents with ultimate success. Again the names. Howe. Mackenzie. Lewis. Gray. In Ottawa Howe had the ultimate say-so, but he can proceed only on what Mackenzie reports to him, and Mackenzie must rely on Gray, the engineer, for information from Chalk River, where the real action is. Lewis has been consigned to the laboratory. Lorne Gray has become the man of the hour. Gray is the Genie's handler. He proved, more or less, that it could be done. Any accidents were certainly not his doing. More of that in Part III. With the National Research X-perimental reactor limping along, Lewis was given the job of finding a better design. He considered various possibilities. The design decided upon was a natural uranium and heavy water reactor to be known as the National Research Universal (NRU), fueled by unrefined uranium and moderated and cooled by heavy water.* The NRU was to pay for itself in the products it generated, isotopes or radioactive elements for use in medical research and treatment, specifically in therapy units using radiation. The NRU would also produce plutonium, and since plutonium was a bad word after the Bomb’s devastation, it was not publicly acknowledged. A policy of secrecy characterized the Canadian nuclear effort, a continuation of the wartime necessity. In peace time it proved not to be helpful, even destructive. The planning stage for the NRU was long. It finally became a reality in 1957, the first Canadian designed nuclear reactor, truly a milestone. And it worked. The NRU was still essentially experimental, it did experience problems and delays, but it opened the door to the future. (* Here to moderate means to control the rate of fission. ) In 1952 a new entity was created, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a crown company responsible for both aspects of Chalk River, the research and the operations (the scientific and the engineering). In effect it was a government owned business whose purpose was to bring Canada into the age of nuke-produced electricity. Jack Mackenzie was on the AECL board. He was also president of the Atomic Energy Control Board and president of the National Research Council. Jack's our man in Ottawa. Lorne Gray's our man at Chalk River. Soon there was to be a new boy on the block. Howe, Minister of Trade, was still the authority of last resort. His reign extended from 1935 to 1957. One of his proteges along the way was W. J. Bennett, a Canadian, with a university degree in history, philosophy, and English. He had served a stint as Howe's secretary and for five years served on the Atomic Energy Control Board under Mackenzie. He had served also as president of Eldorado Mining, source of Canada's uranium, a business nationalized (1944) as an essential wartime resource. He joined the AECL board in 1952, where Mackenzie was president. In 1953 Mackenzie turned sixty-five, retired, but stayed on as chairman of the Atomic Energy Control Board and acted as a consultant to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Howe. Mackenzie. Lewis. Gray. Bennett. The Nuclear Club. Bill Bennett was in charge of the all but phantom-like Atomic Energy Control Board, whose nodding advisory function was ritualistic rather than ruling. Bennett ran the AECL, the crown company, from his Eldorado office. He opposed an Eldorado-AECL merger, but he lost. He was the one who reorganized Chalk River, putting Lorne Gray in charge of operations. He pushed for an expansion of the nuclear energy program, at first failing to persuade Ontario Hydro chairman Robert Saunders that it would be a good thing for Ontario. He was about to sign an agreement with Nova Scotia Light and Power, but Saunders saw the light and agreed to come back on board; thus the great alliance between Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), the federally-owned business enterprise, and the provincially-owned Ontario Hydro was born. Plans were made for a 100 megawatt reactor, the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) and for larger reactors to be built in the near future. Bennett went looking for information about reactor design. The British suggested a reactor fired by enriched uranium, a refined version of natural uranium. They recommended that an enriched uranium production facility be built in Canada to be paid for eventually by sales of the product to Britain. But the project would have been too costly and Bennett said no. He then negotiated with the Americans for an exchange of information. Lewis, pegging away in his lab at Chalk River, seemed to sense a threat to his empire in this American deluge of data. He immediately rose up to defend the need for continued Canadian research. He proposed an enlarged reactor program, even larger than Bennett's. The NRX, NRU, and the NPD had given them the know-how, it was time to get on with it, "it" being a Five-year Program for reactor construction. Bennett looked at the MRX, NRU, and NPD, concluded that these demonstration models had not furnished definitive data for cost, design, and operation, so the program needed to go further, to go ahead and build the real thing, a truly large, electric power producing reactor. Not enough is known about the Genie, but we'll go ahead and give him full reign anyhow. Or was it free rein? In any case Bennett put the proposition to the politicians in the House of Commons. They were hesitant. The physics of the project was not accepted on faith. Who among them was qualified to judge it? The engineering they could feel comfortable with; Canadian engineers had done great things, the St. Laurence Seaway, for example. But the costs? Who could guarantee the costs? Who knew what they might be? Nobody knew. Not Bennett. Not Howe. Not Gray. And certainly not Lewis although he was willing to tell everyone that nuclear produced electricity was feasible. A Howe man, Jack Davis, with a degree in economics, was given the job of figuring out reactor costs. Davis reported that these costs could not be justified unless subsidized by a sale of plutonium to the military. Plutonium?!! Military?! Talk about waving a red flag! But as the Davis report continued, it became increasingly optimistic, with a variety of ifs, ands, and buts. It gave support to Lewis's Five-year Plan. But. The National Research Universal (NRU) costs had gone from $26 million to $51 million, plus $9 million a year in operating expenses. The Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) had got up to $24 million and the bills were still coming in. But. But Bennett's job was to sell the program to politicians who were paralyzed by the costs. He stirred them with estimates of Canada's electricity needs in the not too distant future. If Canada did not move ahead, the Americans would move in and capture the nuke market, threatening Canadian independence. The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming! Forget the Davis report. Forget the costs. Man the barricades! Bennett created the Nuclear Power Plant Division (NPPD) to design and build nukes. Until now such work had been farmed out to various suppliers, mainly Canadian General Electric (CGE). The nuke was now a full-fledged federal enterprise. The Genie became a civil servant. Or did he? And how civil? In 1958 Howe was out of office. Gordon Churchill took his place as Minister of Trade. Bennett went into private industry, and Lorne Gray became the top man in nukes, responsible to the new Minister of Trade. Or responsible to Ontario Hydro? Or to Canada General Electric? CGE was still getting the lion’s share of the nuke business. However, Gray, busy all this time (since 1947) at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and working at Chalk River, decided that CGE was not going to get any more cost-plus contracts. Perhaps CGE's corporate secrecy was a factor here; nobody outside, including Gray, knew what exactly was going on. Cost-plus appeared to be a bottomless hole. From now on the Nuclear Power Plant Division (NPPD), the federal government corporation, would do the work, and it came up with the CANDU, Canada's own commercial nuke. The new Minister of Trade wanted to know why Ontario was allowed to dig so deeply into the national treasury when government policy called for spreading such largesse among all the provinces. Well, Mr. Minister, if we don't have our own nukes, not only will the Americans be selling us their nukes which if we don't buy, we'll have to pay for coal bought from them to fire our own by then outdated coal-fired electric power plant dinosaurs. Minister of Trade Churchill agreed, finally, that nukes were the nationally responsible way to go. After yet another experimental facility was built (in Manitoba) and up and running in 1965, it was deemed time to get on with the CANDU. The first CANDU was built at Douglas Point on the site of fishing grounds in the hinterland of Ontario on Lake Huron, a stone's throw from the community of Inverhuron. Proceed with caution. The NRX had still to prove itself when the NRU was approved. The NRU was still unproven when the NPD was given the go-ahead. The NPD was still ironing out glitches when the CANDU was approved for Douglas Point. Soon the CANDU for Pickering Township was approved before Douglas Point was up and running. The nukes at Darlington came last, circa 1990. Haste makes waste. And so it did. Part III - THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR POWER IN CANADA Watch what you're doing. Don't fence me in. Don't push me around. The Genie in Canada was not exactly out in the market place where he was easily got at. He had been inducted into the federal government to serve the will of the people. The will of the people? Oh. Whatever. Did being a preeminent public servant make him any happier? It seems not. Somebody or somebody else kept pushing him around and he didn't like it. Who done it? Who caused the Genie to lose his cool? By 1958, when the CANDU was approved but not yet built, a pile of evidence had accumulated to show that the Genie was getting hustled. Would the Genie's keepers learn from Early Errors (EE)? At Chalk River, in 1947, the National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor experienced a leaky valve and lost a million dollars' worth of heavy water. Much of it was recovered, repairs were made, and the reactor came back on line in a matter of weeks. Leakages occurred again in 1948 and 1949, but the unit was, overall, working at almost one hundred per cent capacity. Leaky valves? Valves do leak, don't they? And you can replace a leaky valve with one that doesn't leak. Still, when you're dealing with the Genie, you don't mess around. You don't have valves that don't work because of faulty design, faulty materials, faulty manufacture, faulty installation, or faulty maintenance. You just don't. Look, the NRX was experimental. So they experiment and they learn. Do they? In 1950 a chemical, not nuclear, explosion rocked the NRX. A system was put into operation for treating certain waste products which would then be flushed out into the Ottawa River. The effluent contained a mix which included carbon and ammonium nitrate, an explosive mixture. It exploded. One man was killed, four others were sent to the hospital. Clearly this was not a nuclear problem. Such was the official announcement. However, something or somebody must have gone wrong. You would think the danger would have been anticipated. You might even ask yourself if the same sort of something or somebody wasn't walking around doing other things at the NRX. Human error (HE)? One such somebody was on duty in 1952, when a test was to be run on the NRX. An operator manipulated the wrong valves causing the system to over-heat. The supervisor in the control room, alerted by warning lights, phoned down to the operator to stop. He then went down into the basement to correct the error. He was successful enough to avert danger, but to make certain he phoned up to the control room to tell an assistant to push two buttons. Almost as soon as he had spoken, the supervisor realized that he had given the wrong button numbers. Too late. The assistant had put down the phone and gone to do the button pushing as directed. Shut-off rods rose, the heat soared, a complete meltdown was narrowly avoided as escape valves for the heavy water were opened. Was the cause of the error indifference, ignorance, carelessness, an oversight, poor thinking, poor training, or just a mistake? Just a mistake. But the Genie does not suffer fools gladly. There is no such thing as a mistake. There is always a cause. What is amazing here is the absence of names. Those names are undoubtedly written down in some internal report, but no one mentions Howe or Lewis or Gray or Bennett or any of the big names. They cannot be blamed. We have only the anonymous operator, the anonymous supervisor, the anonymous assistant. The public was told that an accident had occurred and that the situation had been brought under control. No need to worry. The public was reassured. They did not worry. Maybe they should have. Maybe they should have looked closer. In the clean-up, hundreds of gallons of highly contaminated (radioactive) heavy water were dumped in a sandy valley somewhere away from the Ottawa River. Has anyone checked that location lately? The clean-up. Here we do find Gray's name. He led the clean-up. Besides dumping the contaminated water, the clean-up included getting rid of the reactor's container, the huge pot or calandria where the heat is generated. It was put in a hole and covered with sand. Has anyone checked on that location lately? All was not lost. Most of the reactor could be salvaged. Fourteen months after the accident, it was back in service. The NRX accidents demonstrated the need for closer attention to safety measures. The experimental nature of Chalk River was yielding results. As the Early Errors learning process continues, attention here shifts back to the shores of Lake Erie, on the American side not far from Detroit. Already mentioned in Part I, in the 1950's a group of businessmen out in the market place rounded up the Genie and his promise of cheap electricity and formed the Power Reactor Development Company (PRDC) to build the Enrico Fermi PowerPlant, the first commercial breeder reactor.4 Work was begun in 1957 and the plant went critical (started up) in August of 1963, functioning at low capacity while initial "wrinkles" were ironed out over a five month period, on into 1964 and, because of increasing demands for greater safety, on into 1966, when, at last, the plant was deemed ready to fire up to capacity and produce electricity. 1957 to 1966. These were the mighty Americans that Bennett invoked to scare Canadian politicians into going nuclear in Canada. How powerful were they? After all, the American free enterprise system must be better than the Canadian federalized CANDU. Hmm? The Fermi began producing electricity in August of 1966. The wrinkles persisted. First a steam generator valve malfunctioned. Next a water pump registered a problem. Then unusual fluctuations in neutron activity (the Genie’s sparkler effect) were manifest. Then instruments registered a heat surge, alarms went off, the Fermi was in melt down, radiation was leaking. What, exactly, had happened? Nobody knew. The possible explanations were legion. So much could go wrong in such an intricately structured system. The reactor was shut down. The super-heated fuel continued to cause more melting, a kind of contagion, a recipe for tragedy. But nobody alerted the outside world. Not until the next day did a news release appear. It downplayed the perilous situation, making no mention of a meltdown. The safety of millions of people was jeopardized by a subjective decision: It's better if we don't tell the public, it's better for them if they don’t know. Nobody knew. At the plant, nobody knew where the accident was headed. Management would sit on the powder keg and hope it wouldn't explode. Besides, who wanted to contemplate the chaos of a mass exodus of Detroit's two million people? Unthinkable. Also, the process of containing the accident, of restricting it to damage already done, was unmapped territory. Nobody knew. Nobody knew precisely what to do. Four months would pass before it was decided what to do, how to approach the now sealed off critical area. It took another five months to get at the trouble spot and to clean up the mess. Three years later, in May of 1970, the Fermi people were ready to try once more. By July tests were again underway. By October the plant was ready to go on line. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the sheriff way over there in Washington, D.C., extended the Fermi license for one year. As of January 1972 the plant had been operating at capacity for a total of less than four hundred hours and had not produced any significant amount of electricity. The license was revoked, the plant was closed forever. The Canadian experimental reactors had produced reams of data concerning nuclear fission, its byproducts, and its foibles. The Fermie plant was illustrative of what could occur if a project was rushed into being before enough was known to make it viable. Canada's entry into the large scale production of electricity via nuclear fission was the CANDU at Douglas Point. It would prove to be far ahead of the Fermi but still problem plagued. The Genie was momentarily happier with his Canadian keepers. Up to a point. Would his keepers learn from Early Errors (EE)? Would the headlong rush to get nukes on line slow down? Would things go as planned? Part IV - MAKING A MESS Early on, nuclear power was rightly viewed with caution. If reactors were to be built, they should be located far from populated areas. Chalk River's National Research X-perimental (NRX) was built off in the back country far enough from Ottawa and Montreal to satisfy the requirement. The site chosen for the first CANDU was off in the bush of Bruce County at Douglas Point, far from any large centre of population, a couple of kilometres or so from the small community of Inverhuron. As already mentioned, the NRX was still unproven when the National Research Universal (NRU) was agreed to; and the NRU was still dealing with its problems when the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) was okayed. The same rush ahead momentum was at work in the construction of the nukes for Pickering, then for Bruce (adjacent to Douglas Point), then for Darlington. Scientists and engineers and politicians appeared to be jumping ahead from one seemingly good idea to the next in a hurry to meet Canada's - more specifically Ontario's - needs for more and more power to feed a burgeoning post-war economy. The Genie was being hustled along, perhaps faster than his legs could carry him. The Canadian experimental reactors formed a basis for expansion in the field of nuclear fission. But the problems encountered there were also a basis for caution. The American Fermi plant was illustrative of what could go wrong if a project was rushed into construction before enough was known to make it viable. Canada’s entry into the nuclear power competition was the CANDU at Douglas Point. It would prove to be far ahead of the Fermi but still problematic. Work on the Douglas Point reactor began in February of 1960. No one was more surprised than the local residents. The federal government and Ontario Hydro had kept their plans under wraps and moved into the area in secrecy until the first signs of construction alerted people to what was afoot. Not only was the land along Lake Huron cleared and bulldozed but the entire appearance of the landscape changed as money poured from Ontario Hydro into the local economy to fund road construction, schools, and municipal buildings. Workers flooded into the area occupying any rental property available, filling trailer sites, giving a new lease on life to empty and abandoned farm houses; they built modular-type houses on newly cleared lots, houses which Ontario Hydro had pledged to purchase once the job at the plant was done, purchase and tear down, to be entered on the books as a cost of doing business, a somewhat offensive policy in the eyes of many longtime residents who had a strong tradition of Scottish thrift. But generally the surrounding communities were dazzled by Hydro's money. A new prosperity had come into the region. Wages soared. Nearly everyone appeared to prosper. Hired farm hands and daily girls were a thing of the past. Less labour intensive farming was called for, raising livestock replaced much of what was once a mixed operation. The village of Tiverton and the nearby towns of Kincardine and Port Elgin thrived as never before. Money was everywhere, people had jobs at wages once thought of as possible only in Toronto. Even as the Douglas Point site was being cleared, design for the CANDU was on-going in Toronto. This was to be a monumental achievement. The engineers tinkered and refined ceaselessly. What was yet unprovided for was the necessary heavy water. Canada had no supply facilities of its own, so in spite of the wish to avoid any dependency on the States, the States had the heavy water which the CANDU had to have. At $26 a pound the stuff was expensive. Thousands of gallons were needed. It came from a facility in Savannah River, South Carolina. Hundreds more manufacturers and suppliers contracted for the plant's construction. Many had little or no experience in the nuclear field where tolerances were critical. What arrived on site sometimes had to be sent back as unsatisfactory, to be reworked. Time and money were lost. The actual construction process might have given the Genie pause: " ...design sometimes took place on the spot. Components were matched and fitted. 'As-built' drawings were sent to the designer "and he’d better like it." One unintended consequence was that design proceeded system by system, with insufficient regard for the functioning of the reactor as a whole." 5 What finally resulted was a construct so refined that it was impractical. When adjustments or repairs were needed some areas proved to be so difficult to access that costs were unreasonable. True, the computer had taken over much of the task of monitoring details of operation, but the hands on work called more for a repairman of fine watches with a loupe and tweezers than for a mechanic with a wrench and a blowtorch. Douglas Point turned out to be another experiment although as the first full-fledged nuclear reactor in Canada it had been meant to produce electricity for general consumption. It didn't. And yet it did. It produced electricity but not at a competitive price, and yet it was sold at a competitive price. At a loss. Not a place where the Genie could thrive. The Douglas Point project was hardly begun when the powers that be decided to build a CANDU in Pickering Township even before the last word on Douglas plant, and that word must be FAILURE. It was non-operational much of the time because of adjustments, replacements, and repairs. Rumour has suggested that at one point it came close to a meltdown. In 1972 it was closed because, they say, its heavy water supply was needed to start up Pickering. The actual cost of the electricity produced by Douglas Point is unknown. The books were not given public scrutiny, assuming that the books would show the real costs. The final shut-down occurred in 1986. The plant remains standing by the lake, a domed temple of dreams only somewhat realized. Notably, no major accident occurred, none that was publicized. Pickering. Whereas here-to-fore nuclear reactors had been built out in the wilderness, far from dense population centres, the Pickering CANDU reactors, four of them to begin with, were sited in Pickering Township, at the eastern reaches of an expanding Toronto. The Genie was brought to hunker down near a large metropolis. Why? Because transmission of electricity over long distances is expensive to initiate and wasteful in the long run since a certain amount of power is lost along the way. Building a plant close to the consumer makes sense economically. Safety is another issue for later consideration. Approval to go ahead with the plant was given in 1964. Unsolved still was where to get the heavy water. Take it from Douglas Point. That place isn't shaping up, so we can put the heavy water to better use at Pickering because here we're not going to make the sort of mistakes they made out there in Bruce County on the distant shores of Lake Huron. However, to make sure of a future supply of Canadian produced heavy water, the federal government decided to have a government-owned plant to manufacture it. 1964. The suggested site was on Cape Breton Island near Glace Bay. Lorne Gray objected. He argued that the plant would prove uneconomical and that he could obtain heavy water from the Americans for a good price by ordering a large amount. Jack Davis, the economics man, now a member of Parliament, had had questions about the plans to build the Douglas Point reactor and now added his voice to Gray's to oppose the Cape Breton plan. But the Minister of Industry, C. M. Drury, opted for the Glace Bay location. The choice proved disastrous. After millions of dollars invested, about $30 million, salt water corroded the pipes. That was the end of it. Eventually a heavy water plant was built at the Douglas Point site, where a vast complex would be built to house the Bruce Nuclear Power Development (BNPD). Back to Pickering. A new factor appeared on the scene. The Genie came face to face with a creep. The creep was out to destroy him. Who needs a creep? A nuclear reactor most assuredly not. At Pickering the creep materialized as a slow expansion of metal under stress at high temperatures, a stretching increased by radiation. Repair of damage done by creep took two years, all down-time and expensive. Because of creep, pipes would last fifteen years, not the anticipated thirty-year life span of the plant. Pickering One started up in February of 1971. Plans were projected for Pickering Two and Three and Four. The reactors operated at close to 90% capacity over their life span. All was fine at the Okay-Nuke Corral. The Genie was doing his stuff. What about those other guys? Far away in Ottawa, the dudes who were supposed to ride herd over the nuclear ranch must have been holed up in a poker game. They got great reports from the Big Guns on the job sites, and they must have accepted them at face value. They shouldn't have. As the years rolled on, rumblings of discontent could be heard, faintly, then, at long last, a stampede shook the land. Maurice Strong took charge of Ontario Hydro, 1992-95, and must have found it in such a mess that he recommended it be split up into more manageable units. Allan Kupcis held the leadership of Ontario Hydro until he resigned in 1997, having exposed much of the mess to public eyes. He caused a report to be made examining what was going on back at the ranch. At Pickering the report found management lax and workers inadequately trained. Some engineers were not schooled in the basics and none had the very high level of expertise expected. on nuclear sites. Some were not trained at all. None of the 500 employees had proper training in the handling of hazardous materials. Management failed to keep adequate records of changes in policies regarding procedures and emergency guidelines. Certain changes in plant design, some made on the spot during construction, were not included in the station's documents. No one seemed to regard such omissions as important. Let the next poor guy figure it out. If he can. Alarms in the control rooms were going off about one a minute, so often that crews did not regard them as alarming. One was like another, and important alarms were, on occasion, overlooked. Storage of radioactive waste was haphazard so that contamination was allowed to spread. Dangerous chemicals were stacked in metal drums that showed signs of deterioration. The man in charge was not trained in handling such waste. For eight months the facility had had no radiation drills because there was no drill co-ordinator on site. Maintenance was poor. Equipment was inadequately labeled, some tags had been painted over, others were corroded or missing. Water and oil leaks went undetected, broken gauges and safety valves had not been repaired, rusted pipes had been painted over. The situation at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development was about the same. Both management and workers were criticized. For example, the system for reporting equipment problems was deficient. A test to check out a contamination airlock was shown to be useless since it was shown to be physically impossible to perform the test, leaving everyone, plant personnel and the public, at risk of radioactive contamination. Hey, it looked good on paper! And if the test had been possible, it might not have helped much; a stack of equipment reports were found shoved under an engineer's desk, some as much as four years old. Equipment was reported as okay although certain gauges could not be read. In general, protocols for evaluating plant equipment were out of date. Who’s got time for keeping up with all that stuff anyway? Regulations to protect workers had been found to be improperly written and efforts to change them in order to increase safety were rejected. So while managers fiddled, the workers were not only put at risk but workers as well as managers appeared to be inadequately trained so that even more safety concerns were raised. Valves which should have been shut were left open. There seemed to be a general failure to take the risks of radioactive contamination seriously. Some workers were physically unfit to do the job assigned to them. Training for control room workers was poor. All in all, the report found a culture of not so benign neglect at Bruce. Not so benign? It was shameful, that's what it was. Maybe they could jolly themselves along into feeling all was quiet on the nuclear front But for how long? Darlington fared little better in the report. Managers were found to make decisions based on short-term production demands without considering the long-term impact. Even so, they thought they were doing a good job and were put off by probing questions they found difficult to answer, questions which ultimately revealed to them the extent of their poor performance. They failed, among other things, to see that workers were trained to respond to radiation emergencies. Operators left control panels unattended; unqualified men were put in charge. Engineers had failed to go through core training programs. Some men spent hours a day doing nothing. In maintenance a worker might spend only 25 per cent of his time actually working. Productivity was low. Storage of flammable and corrosive chemicals was deplorable. The employee in charge of the storage area said he did not know what he should do with the stuff. From the Big Guns to the little guys, with certain exceptions, the Genie was in very poor company. Whatever else can be said about all of the reactors in Ontario, not one of them produced a disaster anywhere near the failure of the Fermi plant across the border in the States. From Douglas Point to Darlington, they appeared to be safe. Not so in other places. Part V - HEALTH ISSUES In the presence of the nuclear Genie extreme care is advisable, and expertise is essential. Inattention, carelessness, or ignorance leading to the slightest miscalculation can, in a matter of seconds, set a reactor on the way to a catastrophe. By the early 1970s, almost a generation had passed since the Bomb was dropped over Japan. The event no longer loomed so large in the public mind although the world continued to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Some people saw nuclear fission as an unmitigated evil, but the majority seemed to react with indifference. Surely the scientists knew what they were doing. Surely the government would not allow fission if it wasn't safe. Canada had sold a CANDU reactor to India with the understanding that it would be used for peaceful purposes only. In 1975 India exploded a nuclear bomb using the plutonium generated by the CANDU. Canada felt betrayed and severed diplomatic relations with India. The Indian Bomb incident renewed public distrust of the Genie. You never knew what might happen next. What happened next, in March of 1979, was an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. During a maintenance procedure, a pipe feeding coolant to the reactor was blocked. The system shut down automatically. However, residual heat continued to heat up the trapped water and the pressure build-up blew open a relief valve. Auxiliary pumps were automatically started but two valves on this emergency system were closed, left closed by error during routine testing earlier. Still, the pumping system did have valves which were not closed and should have been able to meet the increased demand for coolant. But the blown valve remained stuck open unbeknown to the control room, so water was pouring in and right out without acting as a coolant. The control room figured that the reactor must be getting too much water. A too rapid cool-down could be dangerous. So they shut down the emergency supply. The resulting over-heating caused one fail-safe system after another to malfunction. Eventually a partial meltdown occurred. The first announcement from the plant stated that there had been no accident. When the real world kicked in, 140,000 people were evacuated. Or was it the real world? No explosion occurred. No one was killed. No one was injured. But radioactive gas had built up in a tank which was part of the coolant system. The pressure in the tank had to be relieved to avoid an explosion. In the release process, radioactive gas escaped into the open air, high readings were recorded - which very soon fell to manageable - but it seems panic had set in and the evacuation was ordered. The Genie had gotten a very black eye. His keepers had stirred him to a ferocious response through no fault of his own. The keepers' controls hadn't worked. The public was understandably upset. The near-worst scenario had come to pass. They would not forget. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was moved to require new safety measures throughout the industry at a cost of millions of dollars per plant. But human error was still at large, like a virus that can strike through the most rigid control systems. Canada could look on with some detachment. The failed Three Mile Island nuke was one of those light water reactors, not like our CANDU with its heavy water moderator and coolant. Complacency, if there was any, received a severe awakening when a Russian nuke went haywire, a full-fledged catastrophe which appalled the whole world. The Chernobyl plant, what remains of it, is located fifty some miles north of Kiev, in the Ukraine. In April of 1986 electrical workers decided to run an experiment of some sort. They manipulated the reactor’s control mechanisms in such a way that it became unstable. The operation level had been reduced to a dangerous level. A supervisor attempted to correct the situation by ordering a sharp increase in the reactor's power output. One miscalculation, mistake, led to another. But the experiment must go forward! All important safety systems were either bypassed or disconnected so that the experiment would not be tainted. The engineers went so far as to shut down the turbine generator thus slowing down the water pumps, reducing the flow of coolant to the reactor, and causing the water trapped there to boil. The Fermi all over again? Worse. An attempt to reduce the heat build-up by introducing control mechanisms (control rods) into the seething caldron proved lethal; an unknown and unanticipated reaction took place (the graphite tips on the control rods increased fission) and the reactor exploded, a chemical explosion albeit - two of them - but three-foot thick walls were blown apart, all systems were knocked out, the reactor became a nuclear volcano spewing up its radioactive gases. Thirty people were killed as a direct result of the accident. Thousands and thousands more were poisoned by radiation. Areas as far away as 200 kilometres were heavily contaminated. Within 50 kilometres plutonium and strontium pollution wasted vast areas of land, made it useless, and forced as many as a million and a half people to evacuate. More than a million and a half children received abnormal doses of radiation. As time went on, animals were born with grotesque mutations. Children were born horribly deformed. Officials claimed that such deformities were within the normal range or that people lied about them. The effects of the accident were global. Radioactive clouds reached Finland, where reindeer herds had to be slaughtered when they became contaminated from eating contaminated grass. Children in Switzerland were not let outside to play. A rise in radiation was measured as far away as Brazil and Japan. Where rain fell in the States, a rise in radioactive content was measured; in the south Atlantic area, the infant death rate rose by 28 per cent in 1986 compared to the year previous. The rise in other areas was not so great, but it was significant. In Ontario radioactive pollution is or is not an issue depending upon what standard you use and what source of information you consult. There seems to be no data on the effects in Canada of the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl radioactive releases. From reporter Jim Algie writing in the Owen Sound Sun-Times: "Radioactive pollution from Ontario Hydro's three major nuclear power stations at Bruce, Pickering and Darlington finds its way to plants and animals living nearby and into drinking water of area residents." 6 Any danger here? The chief source of such pollution is tritium, a radioactive substance (isotope) which appears in heavy water as an unintended byproduct of CANDU operation. A radioactive dose is measured in a unit called a becquerel. In 1993 the allowable level was set in Ontario at 7000 units (becquerels) per litre of drinking water. In 1994 a report of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Standards (ACES), a government appointed group, called for a reduction to 100 units to be further reduced to 20 units in the next five years. From 7000 down to 20!! The Harris government scrapped the ACES report and said it would establish its own standards. Radioactive spills of heavy water containing tritium, spills detected or undetected (admitted to or kept secret), have polluted both Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. In 1995 more than 60,000 kilograms of coolant containing tritium poured into Lake Huron from the Bruce plant. In early 1998 400 kilograms of the coolant were released from Darlington. In the Bruce area tritium levels above the average dosage have been found in farm produce (apples). Do low doses of radiation put the public at risk? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that no dose is too low.7 The Bruce, Grey Owen Sound Medical Officer of Health is quoted as saying: "As far as I’m aware there is no measurable level of tritium around the plant either in the water or in the soil that comes anywhere near to exceeding the standards for Ontario." 8 7000 units or 20 units? What is the "standard" and who sets it? And when? And why? The Harris Progressive Conservative government threw out the New Democratic Party program of standards. Why? The Medical Officer adds: Below a given amount of radiation, we just don't have any good data at all to say that there's a risk.9 No data = No risk? The Ontario Hydro people have always scoffed at radioactive pollution concerns, claiming any dosage around nuclear plants is below what you get every day from normal atmospheric (background) radiation. What this attitude fails to address is the problem of accumulation. Just how high is the exposure to radiation from all sources combined? Atmospheric, background, medical (X-rays, radiation treatment, scans, medicines), industrial, nuclear, radon and other gases, food? In fact, background radiation alone has been identified as causing four to five per cent of cancer deaths in Britain.10 Publication 60 of the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP), a voluntary group that makes radiation dosage recommendations, called for limits below background levels.11 France agreed to abide by these limits. In the States the debate continues. In Canada such reports are ignored. Meanwhile the exploded Chernobyl reactor remains a threat. For now it is encased in a steel and concrete casing, a sort of sarcophagus. The casing is crumbling and will have to be replaced because what is inside will continue to emit deadly radiation for generations and generations to come. The Chernobyl disaster demonstrated to the world that nuclear power can be unsafe. Or so one hears. Or so one reads in books and newspapers and magazines. Television brings the awful truth into our homes. We are left dreading the truth. Or for what passes as the truth. What is the truth? The Fermi fiasco was the result of human error from the outset - the rush to get a money-making business started - to the end, compounded by a lack of knowledge about how to deal with design, construction, or operational mistakes. Theoretically nukes can be made safe. Experience has demonstrated that the vast majority have been safe. So why do some people still claim that nukes are unsafe? You'll find hysterical crazies everywhere. Possibly. But you're not likely to find them inside a nuclear plant. What you will find, for the most part, are ordinary human beings, some better trained than others. Unfortunately, human beings are subject to human error. At his or her most alert, a well-trained person is not perfect, and in a technology where tolerances are measured in milliseconds the risk is enormous. It is especially enormous for workers who put in the now standard twelve-hour shift, for example, at Ontario Hydro's Bruce Nuclear Power Development (BNPD). Twelve hours? After eight hours at work most people are tired and ready to go home. BNPD workers do not go home after eight hours. They stay on the job for four more hours, four more tiring hours where demand does not slacken but the human mind and body do. It was not always so. The Bruce plant workers used to work an eight-hour shift. The twelve-hour shift was put into practice because the workers demanded it; it seems they were willing to put in four additional hours of boredom for three or four days in order to have three or four days off. The twelve-hour day was not put into practice as a safety measure but to appease workers who wanted a larger chunk of leisure time. Early on in the days and nights of the twelve-hour shift, some of the workers brought in television sets to relieve the tedium and cots to nap on when the tedium wiped them out. The television-and-cot period did not last long. There may even be a memo (secret, probably) which banned the practice. But the twelve-hour shift continued. Now you might find red-eyed, bleary-eyed workers sprawled on canteen chairs, peering sullenly at nothing. Who would trust his life to a worker who has been on the job for eleven hours and forty-five minutes to make an emergency, life and death decision in a matter of milliseconds? And it's not one or two lives at stake. Thousands, maybe millions of lives can be erased in the seconds it takes for an exhausted worker to gather his wits. For heaven's sake! Don't worry. The plant will shut down automatically if anything goes wrong. Unhappily, this has not been true in the past. Instruments at Three Mile Island failed. A valve which should have blocked steam and relieve pressure on the cooling system remained open. The cooling system super-heated, turned to steam, and pressure reached pipe-bursting levels. Then the valves which controlled the pumps which were designed to bring in extra coolant in such an emergency were turned off. They had been turned off two days before during a safety test and somebody forgot to turn them on again. Human error. At the end of a twelve-hour shift at BNPD a worker might be just too fagged to think about turning this valve or that valve on or off. When the BNPD was put under the loupe in 1997, the place received bad grades. Management blamed the workers. They were admonished for doing an unsatisfactory job. What would you expect from an over-worked twelve-hour shift? Accusations flew back and forth, a couple of management positions were shuffled about, it seemed the workers were not all to blame. In fact, at one point it was thought that possibly management was actually hostage to the workers, that it would be dangerous to rouse their animosity. Who knew what might happen then? During a slow-down action in the 1980s, it was rumored that labels on some valves had been removed or switched so that management could not take over operations. Some of the same workers who were blamed for the bad report in 1997 were given a raise in 1998. How do you square them bananas? A disgruntled worker in a meat packing plant might throw some sawdust in the sausage. A disgruntled BNPD worker can do worse. In 1997 a worker taped open a valve, letting tons of radioactive waste flush directly into Lake Huron. He also stuck a metal tag into the works in order to make the safety system record a closed valve. Was it sabotage? Probably not. Probably someone was trying to make a job easier or was too exhausted to realize what he was doing.* Human error. The Genie, of course, does what ha's told to do. If a groggy man fiddles with a valve or pushes the wrong button, the Genie cannot stop him. And the Genie is not to blame for what happens. The Genie is not to blame for Fermi. The Genie is not to blame for Three Mile Island. The Genie is not to blame for Chernobyl. The Genie Is not to blame for radioactive pollution. * In 1985 when the workers went on strike at Bruce (BNPD) demanding the 12-hour shift (in order to got a nice block of time off) management said the idea was unsafe. Management nevertheless caved in to the strikers, but before the strike was settled, management had tried to run the plant all on it’s own, with shifts as long as 36 hours. Here an accident occurred: lethal doses of hydrogen sulfide were released, killing 200 sheep and endangering the health of a farmer. The Atomic Energy Control Board, it appears, decided that the accident never happened, no one was harmed, nor were any sheep killed. Were there 200 dead sheep? Yes. Part VI - NUCLEAR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT The Genie's keepers can turn him into a killer. That is a proven fact. Would it be better then to just leave him alone? Put him back in the bottle? What is the alternative? To put it another way: Why look at alternatives since the Genie works safely most of the time, probably close to 95 per cent of the time. Maybe 99 per cent. First of all, the Genie is going to leave town on his own one of these days; nuclear power is a finite resource because uranium supplies are not limitless. Uranium deposits are as exhaustible as coal, oil, or gas. All of the above pollute our world. Coal gives us acid rain and cancer causing particulate fallout. Oil contaminates any place it is dumped. When used to heat our houses, it pours carbon dioxide into the air. Gasoline (refined oil) when burned in our cars produces even more deadly carbon monoxide fumes. Natural gas burns much cleaner. Uranium is more radioactive as a waste product than it is as a fuel. No one can come up with a really safe disposal plan for nuclear waste. More about this later. So what are the alternatives sources of energy? Solar power. Energy from the sun 12 Haven't they been trying for years to harness solar power? Years and years? And still we don't have an economically feasible product. And yet if a fraction of the money and effort spent on research and development of nuclear power had been spent on solar power research and development, we might well have a viable product by now. Think of what went into research and development for the Bomb. Put that same effort into solar power. See what you get. Wanna bet? Yes. We’ve got an emergency on our hands, certainly as serious as the war-time nuclear threat. Then the cry was: We’ve got to get the Bomb before they do. Today's threat, besides continuous and mounting pollution of air, earth, and water, is the threat of being stranded without power sources as the non-renewable sources begin to become scarce and prices skyrocket. What do you expect to pay for gasoline in twenty years? What is the coal that heats your home or runs your power station going to cost per ton? And when the uranium supply runs out in the foreseeable future, what will all those nuclear power stations be worth? The sun will be shining on through the millennia. All we need is the technology to turn it into the sort of energy we need to propel our cars, heat our homes, drive our factories, and to produce electricity for all the many needs we have. What we need is a concerted research and development effort. Anybody in Ottawa listening? In Washington? Anywhere? Britain. The United Kingdom. What are they going to do for sun? No sun. It rains all the time there, doesn't it? No. The sun does shine in Britain and solar power works there. It's expensive. So far. But it works. Water power. Winds blow and breezes stir every place on the earth. Windmills turn generators to produce electricity. It has been done. It works. Biomas? Come again? Biomas. Plants. Stuff you can grow. You process the crop and turn it into alcohol, oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, hydrogen. Best of all, ethanol, which is used to power automobiles and burns clean. Aren't you back where you started? Aren't you going to get pollution all over again? Some. But not nearly as much. We won't get all that sulphur dioxide that now gives us acid rain. Ask anyone in Ontario about the acid rain that comes their way from neighbors across the border. And from places like Hamilton. Are the products from biomas competitive in price with what we've already got? Not yet. Will they ever be? As a substitute for gasoline, ethanol is predicted to become a cheap replacement. Hopes are high for power plants fired by the burning of biomas or by biomas produced gases. Hopes are high, results are only somewhat encouraging. But when the non-renewable resources begin to run out - coal, oil, gas, uranium - when they become increasingly costly, biomas will come into its own. The research and development is on-going. A like fate - or future - awaits the energy source which lies within the earth, beginning at its molten core and radiating everywhere beneath the earth's crust, in subterranean steam and hot water "lakes," and on the earth's surface in the form of hot springs and geysers. Much of this geothermal resource is non-renewable in that the heat from geyser or pool can be depleted (extracted) to the point where the resource can no longer keep up with the demand and simply stops being hot. Geothermal extraction also produces environmentally unfriendly by-products such as hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide, and silicate and carbonate solids. These pollutants can be disposed of by injecting them back into the geothermal source. Eventually though, the sources themselves would suffer stoppage. The ultimate source of more energy is the reclamation of wasted power. Conservation. Just don't use it. Insulate your home. Buy a fuel efficient car. In cold weather, put on an extra sweater and turn down the heat. Turn down the air conditioner in summer. That extra chill in the air is unnecessary. Have you had the experience of going into a restaurant where you wish you’d worn a jacket and where your food is cold on the plate within two minutes? Just how efficient are all those gadgets we use? The lights left burning? The non-stop TV whether anyone is watching it or not. A night flight over the land shows the cities ablaze with light all night long, the smaller towns winking in the dark, lights burning everywhere, on and on and on. Industry hires efficiency experts to control energy costs. Mom and Pop can't afford an expert but they can - and many do - keep an eye out for ways to reduce energy costs. Maybe you do too. All this sounds commendable, but as long as we build new factories and office buildings which need to be electrified, heated, and cooled - extremely so because the display of conspicuous consumption is meant to impress - and as long as we go on spreading suburbias of new houses out over the land, as long as population grows and grows, savings through efficiency are canceled out. Demand for more and more power hastens the time when non-renewable sources are exhausted after having reached exorbitant costs - the alternative sources of energy will necessarily come into play. Wait a minute! Where does that leave our Nuclear Genie? Gone. Gone the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo bird. Extinct. And yet the proponents of nuclear power talk as if it will go on forever. It can't. Because uranium is a non-renewable resource. Like oil, coal, and natural gas, it is finite. Only so much and no more. Does this mean that we have to scrap nuclear reactors? No . It means we recognize the limitations - no more natural uranium, no more reclaimed nuclear fuel - and look beyond: Can nukes be made to run on something else? Yes. What is now a nuke could become a gas-driven, biomas gas driven, power plant by taking out the uranium-fueled "furnace" and putting a biomas -fired furnace in its place. Everything else can remain, the pipes, the turbines, the generators, the power lines. What would be needed as an "extra" would be a biomas gas generating plant. Somebody has to study the possibility to determine if burning the biomas directly in the decommissioned plant will work or if that "extra" is needed. That "extra" might be cheaper by a long shot than trying to rework or re-tool the nuclear systems presently shut down. The Genie may be allowed to expire as his source of sparks (uranium) runs out. Or he may be quietly retired now, the clean-up of his legacy solved now, at last and forever. Part VII — THE DOLLAR VALUE The Nuclear Genie came into the market place heralded as some sort of Miracle Man. He had great P. R. Theoretically, according to the scientists, he would provide us all with electricity so cheap we could have it at almost no cost at all. Theoretically. Theoretically the Genie would work for next to nothing. Just get him started, then sit back and light up. For free. Or thereabouts. Getting him started proved to be a bit of a problem. This part wasn't cheap. It wasn't cheap and it kept getting more expensive. Granted, money poured into Chalk River and then into the Nuclear Power Demonstration; it could be justified as necessary research and development. Cost overruns were the norm. The Genie's keepers got used to cost overruns, at first in the name of the Bomb: Canada and its allies would spare no cost in this vital war effort. And then the need to create a nuclear power industry before the Americans got going and swamped Canada out of the running. Money flowed like beer from a barrel that was connected by direct pipeline to the brewery. The brewery on the nuclear pipeline was the public purse. How easy it is to spend somebody else's money! Taxpayers’ money. You see, the Nuclear Club had an Urgent Agenda. What agenda? First, the Nuclear Club. Remember all those names mentioned earlier? You don't? Few people do. Or did. even then, long ago. Just a handful of names, but they were the Club, the Nuke Dudes, the guys who called the shots. Just those few. Just a handful. C. D. Howe, at first Minister of Munitions and Supplies during the Bomb times, then later Minister of Trade, he's the key figure. It was under his long tenure in ministerial politics that the Club held sway over the minds - votes - of the politicians and so over the public purse. Howe's job was to get Chalk River up and working on the Bomb. Easy to persuade the politicians to fund his efforts. Couldn't let Hitler get there first. After the war, his job was to convince them of the urgent need to create a Canadian nuclear industry. Very urgent. You can't say no. If the Americans get there first we'll be under their thumb forever after. Howe was titular head of the Club, the front man. Jack Mackenzie, W. B. Lewis, Lorne Gray, and W. J. Bennett made up the membership. The Nuke Dudes spoke and the politicians nodded, that is, they nodded agreement. It had to be done. Out of it all would come "energy too cheap to metre.” How could anyone resist? They didn't. They didn't really understand what it was all about. The Nuke Dudes seemed to know, so we follow them. Loyal followers we. The money flowed. The nukes were built. Huge cost overruns were the norm. Darlington led the pack, begun at a cost estimate of $2.7 billion it rang in at $14 billion before it was finished. You're kidding! No. Anyhow, this is all history, you say. Yes, but it illustrates how easily the Nuke Dudes and the politicians spend other people's money under dubious pressures: We've got to get a nuclear industry going before the U. S. invades us with theirs. No one seemed to consider the idea that Canada could sit back, buy cheap nuclear power from the States, and let them take the risks and foot the bills. But no. The Nuke Dudes were on a roll and nothing was going to stop them from realizing their ambitions. What's past is past. What's done is done. How about now? What does it cost me now? Now? Nobody knows. Nobody knows for sure, that is. The nuclear advocate Gordon Sims, using 1983 figures in his 1990 book, says the average Ontarian paid about 4¢ per kilowatt hour.13 David Wills, General Manager of North Bay Hydro, writing in 1997 and using 1996 figures states that Ontario Hydro's customers fall into different classes: municipal utilities (your local utility which buys power from Ontario Hydro) pay 6.2¢; rural retail customers pay 4¢; large Industrial customers pay 4.9¢; and sales to U. S. utilities are pegged at 2.8¢.14 There is irony in that last figure. The dreaded U. S. gets power from us at bargain rates. Seasonal customers in Ontario, cottagers, have been charged as much as 17¢ per kilowatt hour plus service charges. If Sims is right with his 4¢ per kilowatt hour (in 1983) then times have certainly changed or somebody has given the books a closer look because the generally accepted cost per kilowatt hour to the customer should be about 5¢ from an efficiently run power source. Production costs vary. Electricity from a hydroelectric (water-driven) source costs from 2¢ to 8¢. Gas from. 3¢ to 5¢. Coal from 5¢ to 6¢. Oil 6¢ to 8¢. Nuclear 10¢ to 12¢. If you are paying 8¢ (plus charges) it would seem you are getting a bargain IF your power source is nuclear only, which accounts for 60% of Ontario Hydro's output.15 What do you pay? Do you count the service charges and the GST in your arithmetic? That's all part of the cost, isn't it? What Ontario Hydro does with arithmetic is a caution. Would you like to know exactly? When the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund made a freedom of information request to Ontario Hydro, they were told, sure, but it will cost you $196,694 in order for us to get the paperwork together.16 In other words, if you want to know, pay up; otherwise we will continue to say what we continue to say. If, in 1999, you pay about 8¢ per kilowatt hour, plus service charges, then you may be the 1999 version of that "average Ontarian" Sims cited in 1983; his 4¢ is now 8¢. Did inflation make the difference? Wouldn't you rather get your electricity at 2.8¢, Ontario Hydro's price to the U. S. utilities? How come you don't get it at 2.8¢? How come Ontario Hydro gives such bargain rates to its southern neighbors? It's because of the energy glut. Glut. Overproduction. A glut of power is why Ontario Hydro sells power cheap to the U. S., If the price is low enough, U. S. utilities will buy from Ontario Hydro and so save on fuel costs: they can buy power cheaper from Canada than it would cost them to produce it themselves. The Canadian retail customers pay the difference. You and I pay something like 8¢ or more so that Ontario Hydro can keep on producing a glut and keep its workers on the payroll. Is this some kind of joke? Ask Ontario Hydro, but be sure you have $196,694 to pay for the information. We do get all sorts of information from Ontario Hydro, but that's not quite what you want. You want to look at the books, the real books. Those books, even if you could see them, would very probably tell only part of the story because there are costs that the books do not reveal. What does it cost to insure a reactor? Insure a reactor? Against what? Accident. In case of a nuclear accident, is Ontario Hydro insured? For how much? The Nuclear Liability Act appears to take care of what damages a nuclear accident might cause. But it only appears to. What would it cost if the population of Toronto were wiped out and the city abandoned for thirty or forty or fifty years? Could anyone put a price tag on that? And what if areas of the nearby U. S. were affected? Who pays? Private insurers, the Nuclear Insurance Association of Canada, covers the nuclear industry for damages up to $75 million. Million? Don't you mean billion? With a B? Million. With an M. That's no kind of money at all. There's more. If the bill, the cost of an accident goes over $75 million you can turn to the government and its Consolidated Revenue Fund for compensation. Taxpayers' money. But the bill could well be enough to bankrupt a provincial government or cripple the national treasury. The bill could be astronomical, billions and billions, even trillions. What would it cost to abandon Toronto if Pickering blew, had a meltdown with its accompanying release of radioactive fallout? And the tens of thousands of contaminated people? What’s the going price there? Lawsuits? Who will you sue? The taxpayers? Yourself? If Pickering blew, all of Canada would stagger under the bill, a "cost" that is virtually unpayable. A Chernobyl 20 kilometres from Toronto. Gordon Sims claims that a Chernobyl can't happen here because the CANDU is radically different from the Russian nuke.17 He acknowledges that human error caused the Chernobyl meltdown.18 The design was not the cause. True, the CANDU design is not the same as the Russian, but it has a like potential for disaster in spite of what Sims holds the facts to be. Human error. No adequate insurance. Add disaster costs to your utility bill and imagine what it might be. You are already paying a surcharge to cover the cost of the mothballing or decommissioning or whatever must be done one day when the nukes finally give up the ghost. Where is that money? Anybody know? Not In any Decommissioning Fund. It's just not there. Ontario Hydro is at least $30 billion - with a B - in debt, or as much as $47 billion.19 Somewhere in that debt is the money you paid toward a decommissioning fund. Gone. Swallowed up. Ontario Hydro goes on spending and spending and spending. They take what they can get out of the public purse and what they can't get there, they chalk up to debt which will eventually have to be paid, you guessed it, out of the public purse, out of your tax money. This debt is a hidden cost. You pay your utility bill and think maybe it could be worse. If all the costs of bringing you those kilowatt hours of electricity were taken into account, the utility bill you get would knock your socks off. Agreed, you’ll have to pay off the Ontario Hydro debt. $30 billion? $47 billion? Nobody knows. You'll have to pay off the costs of decommissioning the nuclear plants. Maybe another $15 billion per plant. You'll have to pay the cost of permanent storage for nuclear waste, the dollar amount as yet unknown. It will be more billions. Nobody knows. What is known is that the taxpayer is being taken for a ride. Who is behind all this financial shell game? Somebody is. Is it a conspiracy? If you like to call it a conspiracy, you can. Or collusion. Or complicity. Or deceit. Ask yourself; Who stands to gain most from "things as they are"? Industry. Industry pays, as seen above, 4.9¢ per kilowatt hour. Your government works hand in hand with Industry to guarantee jobs and a handsome gross national product. What's wrong with that? And if you don't agree, you must be some kind of communist. Or a kook. Or perhaps you are a believer in democracy and free enterprise as long as free enterprise doesn't exploit the people, resources, and the environment for its own interests and profits. But your government is full of politicians who do not seek to protect the people, resources, and the environment. Rather, they protect industry, give industry money from the public purse to go about the business of business, its pockets a-jingle with tax dollars. Yes, some endeavours do merit the support of tax dollars, but when those tax dollars go into the bank accounts of shareholders, you've got a modern-day form of highway robbery. Only there ain't no Robin Hood. He took from the rich and gave to the poor. Subsidized industry, in collusion with politicians, takes money in the form of "tax breaks" or bargain basement prices on "industrial parks" and whatever else and subsidized cheap electricity, takes all this from the public purse, from the "poor" taxpayer and gives it to the "rich" shareholders. Okay, shareholders, investors, should be able to make a profit, that’s free enterprise, but their profit should not come from tax dollars. As David Wills, General Manager of North Bay Hydro, wrote in regard to Ontario Hydro's distorted view of competitive pricing, "You need a secure base of mugs back home who are captive customers of the monopoly.”20 You and I are the mugs who sit by while politicians, dazzled by the heavyweights of industry, shovel tax dollars into shareholders' pockets. If you are a shareholder, you like that. If you are a wealthy shareholder, you like it very much. If you are, like most Ontarians, not a shareholder in the business world, you may think things ought to be different. But where can you find a politician who will campaign on a platform of NO MORE TAX DOLLARS TO SUBSIDIZE INDUSTRY and industry's shareholders? Free enterprise is not free on Ontario Hydro's books. Ontario Hydro relies on the mugs to pay its way. With high salaries for the top guys and enviable wages for the hired help. Of course, Ontario Hydro is not free enterprise. It is a crown corporation, a creature of government, a provincial monopoly. Does it seem as if it doles out its favours to industry, which in turn buys the politicians with campaign "donations" and free trips to almost anywhere? All helping each other? Sounds like cronyism. Sounds like a betrayal of taxpayers. Sounds like a shameful sham. A con job. What does it cost you to keep the Big Guns, the keepers who run Ontario Hydro. What do you pay the men who have piled up a $30 billion or $47 billion. You can't find out. Nobody knows. Nobody knows because Ontario Hydro has refused to tell.21 You’ll need to get that $196,694 together if you want to know. Not worth it? So you go on paying your Hydro bill. Will the bill go down when Ontario Hydro is sold off to private investors? Yes, that's what the government wants to do, sell off the debt-ridden white elephant. They see it as a way out of the mess. Dump it somewhere else. Anywhere. They know you will pay whatever it costs. Certainly you'll pay those billions of debt. The debt can't be sold. You'll pay. Your children will pay. The cost of doing business with Ontario Hydro never ends, and it is always more costly, much more costly than advertised. The Nuclear Genie is caught up in the fiasco. He didn't cause it. He was betrayed by mismanagement and political incompetence. He is paying the price. You are too. Part VIII - NUCLEAR WASTE The Nuclear Genie has gotten a bad press. One explanation is that secrecy at Ontario Hydro has made the press and its reporters the chief source of information to the public. If that information is more than embarrassing to Ontario Hydro, who is to blame? If you are pro-nuclear, you blame those nosey newspaper people who have no business prying about in other people's business. If you are anti-nuclear, you shake your head in dismay at what the headlines proclaim and you call for a nuclear ban. If you are open-minded, you may wonder why Ontario Hydro puts up with these assaults on its Integrity. Why haven't these press people been challenged in court, accused of libel? Sample headlines: ONTARIO HYDRO: BIG PLANS, BIG DEBTS, BIG PROBLEMS
22
HYDRO FIASCO TO COST BILLIONS 23 A MONOPOLY ON POOR MANAGEMENT 24 Ontario Hydro has never been able to refute such charges. The Nuclear Genie has done a lot of good work. He has shown his keepers that, treated right, he can produce almost endless amounts of clean power, "clean" meaning the air is not polluted like it is polluted when coal is used to fire up power plants. So why does he get such a poor press? NUCLEAR WASTE FLUSHED INTO LAKE 25
The Genie didn't do that. His keepers did. BNPD VALVE MALFUNCTION WAS DELIBERATE 26
You can’t blame the Genie for that. And you can't blame the Genie for the tons of nuclear garbage, the radioactive waste that results as part of his job. Again, his keepers are responsible for getting rid of the stuff. TROUBLE AT ONTARIO HYDRO - MANAGERIAL LEADERSHIP:
'NO SENSE OF URGENCY EXISTS’ 27 Doesn't somebody have to get rid of it? How would you handle nuclear waste? First of all, you cannot actually handle it, hands on, because you’d be dead in no time. Second, you, of course, are certainly not going to get rid of nuclear waste, no matter how it is done. The Genie's keepers and the politicians can't get together on a place for the permanent disposal, so they want to create what is called a dry storage facility. Until now this highly radioactive stuff - it can kill you - has been stored in large pools of water. After a while, maybe twenty years, the waste loses some of its heat and radioactivity. No one says where that radioactivity is lost to. They say the water is not radioactive although it absorbs "almost all the radiation from the pool.”28 Sounds like double talk. If the radiation is not in the pool, where is it? In the concrete walls of the pool? In the surrounding soil? In the air? Light clouds of radioactivity floating on the summer breezes? They will probably tell you it is "dispersed" into the atmosphere. Hey! That's my atmosphere. There's enough radioactivity out there already. Too much. And you're adding still more? Is there a limit? Some say no dose is too low. Any amount is a potential threat. Others say it isn't so. Who knows? Nobody knows. And if the waste is doing all right in the pools, why take it out of the water and put it into above-ground dry storage containers? Rumour says the concrete tanks or pools are deteriorating. Rumour? You rely on rumour? Yes. It is the only way to know what is going on at Ontario Hydro, the only way unless you have the $196,694 to get a look at Ontario Hydro's records, and even then you couldn't be sure you were getting all the facts. Assume that the concrete pools are deteriorating. Otherwise, why not leave the radioactive waste where it is? Is moving it out of the pools and into dry storage simply a make-work job for under-employed plant employees? No. We will assume there is a need to move it because it is no longer safe where it is. An Ontario Hydro Newsletter #1, June 1996, describes the proposal for dry storage of nuclear waste in containers made of reinforced concrete and carbon steel similar to the containers now in use at Pickering - as somehow any aspect of the trouble plagued Pickering was a recommendation. How long have such containers been in use at Pickering? Long enough to assure anyone that such containers are safe? Would two or three years be long enough? Hardly. Twenty years after the nukes began to operate, unanticipated glitches are still showing up. TROUBLE PLAGUES NUCLEAR PLANT:
PICKERING FAILS TO OVERCOME SAFETY HAZARDS 29 The inner casing of the container is a sheathing of carbon steel. The outer casing is made of reinforced concrete. We trust that the concrete used will be heavy concrete and not normal-weight concrete. Trust? Trust whom? Who at Ontario Hydro can be trusted? To get even the least bit of trust you need $196,694. The carbon steel and concrete are meant to shield workers from nuclear particles emitted from the stored radioactive waste fuel bundles. However, temperature changes, wide-ranging in the Bruce area, and relative dryness or moisture will affect the shielding properties of concrete. How will extended radioactive bombardment affect the concrete? The Chernobyl concrete casing is crumbling. And there's that creep again. Creep, the term used to describe the slow expansion of metal under stress at high temperatures, a stretching increased by radiation. Is creep going to affect the carbon steel of the containers? Who knows? Who knows what other elements may come to bear on the dry storage containers which may render them less effective or altogether ineffective? For example, the Bruce Nuclear Power Development has had to shut down at least half of its reactors because of an unforeseen phenomenon: Fuel bundles cause grooves or "frets" to be chiseled into the sides of the tubes that encase them. Nobody knew this would happen. The cost to do the retubing is for the time being prohibitive, more than the politicians want to dig out of the public purse, $5 to $8 billion. With a B. Nobody knew creep would happen. Nobody knew crippling corrosion of pipes would happen. Nobody knew frets would happen. Nobody knew that these phenomena would develop and would cause nuclear reactors to be shut down. What unforeseen items are going to turn up relative to the dry storage containers which may render them less effective or altogether ineffective, dangerous? Nobody knows. Nuclear waste has to be stored somewhere. Why not in canisters and we'll gamble on what's going to happen. It's like more of the nuclear "bonanza" - unbelievably cheap electricity - and the rush to get on with the "bonanza”, tends to carry the Genie’s keepers into unknown territory. Dry storage containers are relatively unknown territory. Beware. Speaking of unknown territory, why can't the keepers solve the hazardous nuclear waste problem once and for all? Won't the canisters do that? No. The canisters are a temporary facility. Temporary in this case could mean 25 or 50 or 100 years. Who knows? Nobody knows. PLAGUE-RIDDEN BRUCE REACTOR SHUTTING DOWN
AFTER HALF-LIFE 30 A half-life for dry storage canisters? Will these also turn out to be plague-ridden after a half-life? About that permanent disposal site? One idea is to bury nuclear waste in northern Ontario deep down in the rock of the Canadian Shield. This "idea" has been tossed around since before 1978, and in twenty years the AECL (Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.) and the AECB (Atomic Energy Control Board) - those people who are imagined to be in charge - have not been able to come up with a permanent disposal site. A federal panel studying the AECL plan decided that although the deep-rock storage plan is technologically safe, it is not okay from the social point of view. Nobody wants nuclear waste anywhere near their homes and families. Foolish people? The Bulletin of the Canadian Nuclear Society thinks they are. The federal panel should stick to facts and leave emotion out of it: The effect on human and environmental health, now and into the future, is a matter of scientific determination.31 This is the scientific mind at its worst: We know best and anyone who thinks differently is an emotional noodle. Scientific facts here or there, the FACT is that nobody wants nuclear waste parked around their place. NIMBY 32
So who gets it? Toronto - Pickering, that is - gets a small part of it. The greater part will land next to a very small community, Inverhuron, which has little, very little, clout, almost none. Who is going to listen to them? Nobody. If this dry storage installation were going up outside of Toronto, you'd hear lots of noise. Protest. No canisters here. NIMBY. A permanent burial site - not for the people of Inverhuron but for all that radioactive garbage we’ve been talking about - a permanent burial site will cost about $10 billion, and again, there is no precedent for such a plan. It is unknown territory. Unknown is the time frame involved - this garbage goes on being dangerous for tens of thousands of years - and unknown the mass of geological information needed before such a plan can be realized. Still, the States have been able to establish a permanent burial site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which has begun receiving shipments of nuclear waste albeit under protest from those opposed to having shipments of dangerous materials transported across country. But Ontario Hydro doesn't have the money, the politicians aren't going to make themselves unpopular by shelling it out. From the public purse. ONTARIO HYDRO CEO QUITS
33
Allan Kupcis resigned over the poor performance of Ontario Hydro's nuclear division. Can anyone make it work? Will the dry storage canisters work? STOP HYDRO BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE 34
Terence Corcoran writes that nobody in management at Ontario Hydro or the AECB appears capable of running the show. Has anything changed? Is Ontario Hydro suddenly up to snuff? And ready to launch a dry storage facility for radioactive waste? Is the dry storage facility simply a dodge, a poor substitute for the permanent storage site that the government refuses to commit itself to? Why are they stalling? Are they stalling because they want somebody else to solve their problem? Apparently. They want to put off solving the problem during their tenure, on their watch. Stall long enough and they'll be drawing pensions, no longer accountable. In the States, where the nuclear plants are run by businessmen as businesses, the businessmen sued the government for not providing a permanent nuclear waste disposal site, and the government was forced to act. Result, Yucca Mountain. Ontario Hydro can't sue the Ontario Government because it is part of that government. The result is that no one is obliged to act decisively. Still. Put it off. Settle for half measures, settle for dry storage containers. Remember Chernobyl? The nuke that blew there was encased in concrete after the accident. The concrete is deteriorating. It will have to be replaced . People like Gordon Sims would lull us into believing all is well; he points to computerized models as able to give the answers needed to evaluate storage.35 Anyone who knows computers knows that the computer "diagnosis" is only as good as the information put at its disposal. For example, the frets or grooves dug into tubes by fuel bundles were not part of the know-how when the CANDU was designed; the grooves turned up about twenty years afterwards and shut the place down. Other factors are not a part of any design or computerized model. For example, very significant geological faults have been located in the vicinity of Pickering. Faults, fractures in the earth's crust, cause earthquakes. On September 25, 1998, a quake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, crossed Lake Erie and rumbled through southwestern Ontario.36 Tremours reached the Pickering nuclear installation. No significant damage was done. Not this time. The point to be made here is that earthquakes are not a factor considered by analysts when they declare a nuclear plant safe, not earthquakes that may result from faults unknown at the time of the analysts. In southern California a completed nuke was never allowed to go on line because it was determined, after the fact, that the plant was straddling a fault. Pickering appears to be in a similar situation. Bruce is, in geological terms, not that far away. And ditto Darlington. Put earthquakes into the computer data and see what comes out. Anybody taking bets? Or put "microburst" into the computer and see what comes out. A microburst is like a mini-tornado. It drops out of a stormy sky and destroys what it hits on the ground beneath. What would a microburst do to one of those silo-like dry storage canisters sitting there open to the skies? Or make that a full-fledged tornado. Oops! If your imagination isn't numbed by that prospect, consider an option that would cancel the plan for canisters anchored to a concrete base; instead the canisters would be freestanding, makes ‘em easier to transport if - a hundred years from now? - a permanent disposal site is decided upon. Free standing? A tornado? Like a hail storm out of Hades. Even a microburst would send ‘em rolling around somebody's back yard. Toronto had a microburst on June 7, 1999. 37 David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environmental Canada, says more such freak weather can be expected. Is "freak weather" in the computer? Are tornadoes in the computer? Is "human error" in the computer? It well should be, but you can't calculate it, it is too random a factor. Anyone and everyone can be responsible for human error. Close to 99% of nuclear accidents, large and small, and there have been hundreds of them, have been due to human error. Ah, but once these dry storage canisters are in place, human error is nil, isn't it? DRUG TESTS MAY BE MANDATORY FOR ONTARIO
NUCLEAR PLANT STAFF 38 Evidence of drinking and drug use at a nuke makes you wonder, doesn't it? Human error occurs not only on the job but in the designing of a nuke, in its construction, in the computer models, in the operation. In operations. HYDRO WORKERS GOING BACK TO CLASSROOM:
CONSULTANTS' REPORT DISCOVERED SERIES
OF PROBLEMS WITH TRAINING AT ALL THREE ONTARIO NUCLEAR PLANTS 39 Surely they’re out of the classroom by now, all trained and up to snuff. What you wanna bet? Did they take a course in the elimination of human error? Another headline about Ontario Hydro's nukes: NON-PERFORMANCE IS ACCEPTED OR EVEN EXPECTED
40
Hardly reassuring. Or this: DOCUMENTS
ITEMIZE HOW PLANTS EARNED LOW RATING: CONTROL PANELS
LEFT IN THE HANDS OF UNQUALIFIED WORKERS, MODIFICATIONS MADE WITHOUT APPROVAL, EQUIPMENT EVALUATION PROGRAMS OBSOLETE 41 Are things run this way where you work? Another reason why dry storage canisters are a bad idea is way off there in the blue sky. Off in the wide blue sky. Literally. Nearly every day aircraft "violate" nuclear plant air space or easily could if they wanted too. For a crackpot or for a terrorist, for someone with a grudge against Big Government, against Ontario Hydro or against Canada, as a NATO member, for example, for any number of fringe people, the skies above the nuclear plants are wide open. A couple of pilfered or black-market or home-made bombs would cause a major disaster. The computer model probably discounts such an event. Is that wise in this day and age? Are fringe people hanging out around the nukes? HYDRO’S LABOUR HISTORY TAINTED 42
All has not been well between management and labour. Is there a loose cannon in the crowd? BNPD VALVE MALFUNCTION WAS DELIBERATE 43 The oddball can come from anywhere. When they designed and built the World Trade Center in New York City, which was bombed a few years ago by Arab extremists, was sabotage or terrorism figured in? What else has not been figured in? What else besides the grooves in the tubes? Pipe corrosion? Creep? Earthquakes? Freak weather, microblasts? Or just ordinary tornadoes? Freak humans? Or just ordinary human error? Terrorists? WRONG PEOPLE ARE ASSIGNED TO THE WRONG JOBS
44
All industrial installations are at the mercy of these elements. But when it comes to the nukes, the risk is beyond measure. Most people agree it is not worth the risk. What “most people"? All right, maybe not most people because most people have got enough to worry about. But most people living near a nuke or near a dry storage facility are the people most at risk. Those who are not at risk or those who see nukes mainly in terms of jobs do not agree that nuclear reactors can be dangerous. No question about it. Gordon Sims, nuclear advocate, claims that in case of a CANDU meltdown casualties would be unlikely. 45 And yet he states that what might result from a meltdown is "subject to conjecture”.46 He looks to favourable meteorological conditions to disperse the radioactive plume, and, besides, people will have been evacuated. He takes comfort in the statistical probability that such an accident will not happen. He is right, the probability is minimal, almost insignificant.47 But it has happened: at Chalk River, at Three Mile Island, at Chernobyl. Speaking of radioactive contamination from nuclear accident, Sims writes that "it is likely to be considerably less than assumed in currently accepted studies”.48 Apparently Sims ignores "currently accepted studies,” he sets his own standards, he does not live in the real world . Speaking of nuclear storage, Sims writes that water pools are safe for storing waste nuclear fuel for fifty to a hundred years.49 That’s what he wrote in 1990. In 1999 the story changed. The pools are wearing out, there is danger of leakage. We are told we now need dry storage. Perfectly safe, the same tune they were playing back in 1990. The failure of government, federal and provincial, to find a final disposal site for nuclear waste and thereby allow more and more waste to be stored on site at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development adjacent to Inverhuron and at the Pickering plant near Toronto implies that these communities, that these men, women, and children, are expendable. This is the ultimate violation of human rights. And don't forget Darlington. NUCLEAR
DISASTER WIPES OUT CANADIAN TOWNS AND CITIES:
HUMAN ERROR AT FAULT The Genie rides off into the sunset, a very red sunset because of all the radioactive dust in the air. FALLOUT FROM THE CANADIAN CATASTROPHE
REACHES THE U. S.
Part IX - COMPETENCE, COMPETITION AND THE GENIE When the mess made by the Nuke Dudes became evident in the 1990s, word began to circulate that Ontario Hydro should be broken up. Put out in the market place. The Nuclear Genie had never been out in the market place; he was inducted into a crown corporation, he was a monopoly run by the governments in Ottawa and Queen’s Park, Toronto. Now competition was the buzz word. No more: We Got To Have the Bomb. No more: We Got To Get a Nuclear Industry Going Before the Americans Move In and Take Over. Now it's: WE GOT TO HAVE COMPETITION. Get the Genie into the market place. In August of 1997 Ontario Hydro's President and Chief Executive Officer, Allan Kupcis, resigned, acknowledging poor performance at the nuclear installations. He himself had brought a team of American nuclear experts in to evaluate that performance. They gave the nuke set-up a barely passing grade. The main problem, they said, was management. The Genie's keepers were simply not up to the job. Hence all the secrecy, those managers didn't want the truth to get out. The report put the truth plainly: "Failure to perform adequately or poor performance is routinely accepted by management, and many managers have similarly low expectations of themselves." 50 Government reacted to the report immediately. Environment Minister Norm Sterling declared that the mismanaged-utility would be brought to heel; rates would have to go up, spending would need to be justified, and a really effective oversight board would be put in place. If the Environment Minister made the appropriate noises, the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), which is supposed to be in charge, responded to a request for interviews in the usual offensive (defensive) manner: A spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Control Board told Sun Media Newspapers that Bishop and other board members were unavailable for an interview and if they were, "They wouldn't talk to you anyway." 51 The attitude expressed here is more of the arrogance which routinely infected management at Ontario Hydro: They are responsible to no one but themselves. Granted, the Americans' report must have left them winded, but so winded as to be unable to respond to an interview? Or was there nothing they could say? When you're in charge of an incompetent staff and you don't see it or if you see it and do nothing to improve it, what can you say? The most damning twist here is that the AECB was dependent on that very same management for the information it was supposed to act on. Not good. Not good at all. The same sort of inbreeding still goes on. When plans were put forward for the nuclear waste storage silos (canisters) at Bruce, an environmental assessment was ordered. Who did that assessment? Ontario Hydro. There was no outside, impartial evaluation. There still is none. Allan Kupcis had the courage to resign and accept the responsibility for Ontario Hydro's bad performance. And the AECB did what Ontario Hydro management has always done, they refused to be held accountable. Small wonder the shop was in a mess. In 1996 the pressure was already on to "solve" the Ontario Hydro problem. A search was on for investors who would be interested in running the nuclear division as a private business. Then came the zinger: [Ontario Hydro] does not want to release 'Confidential reviews on safety of its atomic plants because it worries the information would scare off these investors.54 Are there investors dumb enough to buy a pig in a poke? Did Ontario Hydro really believe they could bluff investors into accepting a stacked deck? When does secrecy become fraud? When The Globe and Mail was denied access to documents concerning safety and appealed to the privacy commissioner, who then ruled in the newspaper’s favour, Terry Young, Ontario Hydro's spokesman, refused to recognize the privacy commissioner's ruling: "It is our view that the public interest is served by the Atomic Energy Control Board," Mr. Young said. 55 Terry Young spoke in full confidence (read arrogance), sure that no one could question his authority to insist upon secrecy when he called upon the holiest of holies, the AECB. This was before the Americans' report blasted Ontario Hydro management and its imagined godhead, the AECB, shown with its feet of clay mired in a bog of ineptitude. In late 1997 the provincial government decided to appoint a select committee to see what could be done about the bog. They, the government, could tut-tut the Nuke Dudes and leave them to clean up their own mess, but even the government saw that this was not a good idea. They, the government, had a model to follow. In Britain nuclear plants which could not attract private investment were turned into a government-owned utility; power lines became a regulated monopoly; and non-nuclear generating facilities were given over to private ownership. In Britain the new order proved successful, rates fell. As of August 12, 1998, Energy Minister Jim Wilson did not want Ontario Hydro broken up into small pieces.56 He saw two large divisions, a company made up of the electricity generating facilities and a second company to handle transmission and distribution. The break-up would result in competition, reducing Ontario Hydro's sales by as much as 40 per cent, but sales to the United States would more than compensate for the loss. Too rosy a picture? Yes. Because the States have demanded open access to Canadian markets, and they are able to produce energy more cheaply, with an abundant surplus. Cutthroat competition would most probably be the result. Little prospect of a win for Ontario Hydro in that game. Privatization has not happened. Instead the government has created four "divisions" of Ontario Hydro, one is the Ontario Power Generation, or Genco as it is commonly called; division two is the Ontario Hydro Services Company, or Servco. Both are government-owned but debt is no longer guaranteed. The intention is that any power-generating source may now make use of Genco and Servco Ontario Hydro will no longer have a monopoly. A third entity has been created, a Crown Corporation for Stranded Debt. Since no investor in his right mind would take on any part of Ontario Hydro where debt is a large factor, the debt has become "stranded," - nobody wants it. By removing the debt from Genco and Servco, the way is paved for privatization. Now buyers might be interested in purchasing certain parts of Ontario Hydro. They might even get fire-sale prices if the government is eager enough - and lax enough - to get rid of the headaches associated with trying to run the botched, mismanaged giant. Hooray for competition and free enterprise! Or should we have second thoughts? But before we get to second thoughts, how about those first thoughts? Does stranded debt stay stranded? Does it eventually fade away? Die of neglect? No, it does not. It lives on "held" by the Ontario Hydro Financial Corporation, the third entity in the monopoly's break-up. How much is the debt? Estimates range from $16 billion to $32 billion (the "official" figure) to $47 billion, this last is Ontario Hydro Chairman Bill Farlinger's figure. At $32 billion that means $2900 for each of Ontario's some 11 million residents. Who is going to pay it? Nobody knows. One suggestion is that provincial electric companies, when they join Genco and Servco, will pay it. Instead of paying taxes, a usage fee will be charged and will go to pay down the stranded debt. If this all looks like three card Monte, don’t be puzzled or fooled. It is just the usual fiscal slight of hand: Don't call it what it is, call it something else and maybe no one will notice. Instead of taxes, we'll call it a "toll" or "grants." Wonderful! What a relief. Maybe now my electricity bill will go down. The money for those tolls or grants has to come from somewhere. Guess where? Right. You, the payer. The debt charge will be there somewhere, called something or something else. Whatever it's called, it's debt run up by Ontario Hydro's big spenders in the heyday of all that mismanagement, practically non-existent oversight (AECB), and political opportunism. You pay off the stranded debt. Private investors will be happy to let you do that while they buy off the now debt-free parts of Ontario Hydro. Genco, Servco, debt-co, and then a fourth creature: EMOco, the Electric Market Operator, a crown corporation to oversee the operation of Servco in order to give fair access to customers, local distributing companies, and miscellaneous power generators U.S. included? Fairness? Yes, get ready to fight for fairness. The one commendable move the government has made is to refuse any longer to guarantee Ontario Hydro's debt. Genco and Servco have to make it on their own - as long as they remain government-owned. You would expect things to change, but how can they when the same managers, more or less, are in charge, somewhat reshuffled,, the same workers are on the job, and the same sort of appointed Atomic Energy Control Board is doing the oversight? So we will probably get more of the same until, if and when, actual privatization takes place. If actual privatization takes place, will it work? Consider an example. Toronto. With the end of Ontario Hydro's monopoly (Genco and Servco are still government-owned monopolies) the City of Toronto anticipates a $100 million win from the restructuring of Toronto Hydro, the municipally-owned utility. The new Toronto Hydro, to be formed as a private corporation, will partake of $1.7 billion (with a B) of the $1.8 billion, the estimated worth of the then defunct municipal utility, leaving the rest, $100 million (with an M) in the hands of City Hall, a one-time win; the remainder will, we assume go to pay off the utility’s indebtedness. And taxes levied on the new-born private utility by the city are expected to further benefit Torontonians. True or false? Depends on how much private investors will be asked to pay for the $1.7 billion in assets and the good will (captive market) of the old utility. Will the sale be competitive? Or will crucial information be too confidential to reveal? Is anybody watching what City Hall is doing? Before it is a done deal? In any case, Toronto is given a rosy view of what is in the crystal ball. Better take a second look. How is the break-up of Ontario Hydro going to affect the rest of the province? Nobody knows. In May 1999 we hear from Ontario Premier Mike Harris: "If there are things that the private sector can do better, more efficiently, more effectively, we're prepared to put our Crown corporations to those tests." he told reporters in Cornwall. 57 The hitch here is the big IF. Mr. Harris can't tell IF the private sector can do better -until the government-run utilities are already sold. Then it may be too late. There’s also the waffle factor. As pointed out by Terence Corcoran a year earlier, Mr. Harris was known to have opined that gasoline prices are "rigged by gouging oil corporations."58 Mr. Harris expresses a notion held by many of his constituents, but does he do something about it? To do something about it would be politically unwise: The oil companies are very powerful people. Mr. Harris will blow the trumpet in the face of the enemy, then lead his troops somewhere else. A premier who thinks the gasoline market is uncompetitive, and that regulation is the answer, isn't likely to have a clear-eyed idea of how to bring competition to electricity.59 Regardless of how you view regulation or competition, the question is whether regulation or competition is right for a provincial power utility. Again in May of 1999 Craig Heron, Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at York University, wrote an open letter to Premier Harris published under the headings: WE HAVE
SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT DIDN'T WORK
Many of the Harris government's policies were found wanting -decades ago 60 Craig Heron points to a dozen aspects of Canadian life in the 1920s and 30s which the Harris government sees as the "world we have lost." 61 They view the growing gap between rich and poor with apparent indifference; they do not seem to see serious implications in the exploitation of the environment; they appear to see labour unions as a threat to good business; health, education, welfare, and cultural and local concerns are just that, local concerns: If your community can't pay for it, do without - like in the good old days. On and on. Mr. Heron sees a revival of an eagerness for privatization, But privatization in the energy industry didn't work in the good old days, that's why Ontario Hydro was born as a Crown Corporation. Central control proved to be a necessity. The fact that Ontario Hydro management ran amok, the fact that government oversight was incompetent, these facts are no arguments for an abandonment of a centralized energy entity. They become so when the central government wishes to divorce itself from a politically unattractive mess: LET SOMEBODY ELSE DO IT. Thus do politicians shed their problems. And what do they do when some detail or other threatens to get in the way? They invoke secrecy. They decide that Genco and Servco are to be exempt from freedom-of-information legislation. Keep the dirt under the carpet. For the government’s own Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian this was a bit too much. She pointed out that Genco and Servco are still publicly-owned and as such should be accountable to the public.62 Ah, but to reveal secrets would be to put Genco and Servco at a disadvantage when they try to compete with private companies in an open market - if it ever comes to that. Where are we now? Regulation or deregulation? It depends. Nobody knows. Will Ms. Cavoukian's common sense prevail? The odds are not in her favour. Secrecy? About what? There are no secrets about the CANDU as such. The CANDU has been sold worldwide. Everybody knows all there is to know about it. It seems that what Ontario Hydro management wants to keep secret are its mistakes - past, present, and future - and its inability to run the system, especially the nukes, safely, economically, and efficiently. Yes, keep those bits secret by all means, But just in ease somebody gets nosey, the Harris people have set user fees for anyone like you or me who would like a glimpse at what records they might be willing to let go of, a $5 filing fee up front is required, next something called an appeal fee of up to $25, and then if you get by the appeal, you’ll have to pay for the civil servant’s time to search the records. That civil servant is very quick and efficient, yes? Better plan on taking a long lunch break. So you pay nobody knows how much to learn about an outfit which you own! Well, in theory you own it. In practice the Nuke Dudes and the politicians own it and you can eat your heart out. Even former Premier Bob Rae found the Ontario Hydro people overbearingly self-important. They all but told him to go pedal his bicycle someplace else. Will a divided Ontario Hydro, be any different from the old outfit? Will privatization cure the utility’s ills? Nobody knows. Just when you've gotten used to thinking COMPETITION, they come along with a new buzz word: CONVERGENCE. Convergence refers, essentially, to the deregulation of the energy market; more specifically it means a customer can purchase energy from whatever source he chooses and be sent one bill for all uses - electricity, Internet, gas, cable, water, telephone, sewage - billing being done by one company via computer. The customer’s electricity costs should be less because the newer power companies use clean-burning natural gas and co-generation to produce power cheaper than nuclear or coal or hydro-electric power; the older technologies will be at a disadvantage when their monopolies are dissolved and they no longer have a captive market. An integrated distribution system, a connected grid of all power lines, will allow a customer to buy power from whichever source is cheapest; he will purchase this power through an agent whose job it is to locate the cheapest source. In order to get into or onto the Grid Game, as it is going to be played out, the power producer will need a license. The Grid Game is big-time and it will be played out where the market is the biggest, in the States. Canada will join its grid to the U. S. grid and then it will be every man for himself as each energy producer competes over the same grid for the same customers. Sounds like a jungle. It may turn out to be one. In order to join the grid, each company in the running will need that license, a permit to play, it’s called a FERC. FERCs are Issued by the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Canadian energy producers will need a FERC if they are to sell to the huge U. S. market or on an inter-provincial grid. A producer must become a non-monopoly. To become a non-monopoly, a producer must reorganize, deregulate, become competitive. Some, like Ontario Hydro, must get rid of debt or at least get it off the books. All the small municipal monopolies, like Toronto Hydro, will have to go private, become competitive, and presumably all provinces will go for a FERC - once they have been judged "free" in the sense of Free Enterprise, no longer controlled or influenced by non-competitive forces such as politicians or a secret club of utility owners. Where will Canada stand in a field of free play? Nobody knows. For the time being there is no expectation that competition will threaten weak energy producers because grid links between the provinces and between Canada and the States are relatively few. If and when those links multiply, the weak sisters are doomed. From deregulation to competition to convergence to FERCs. What next: Will energy prices go down, will your bill be less? Probably. So far experience shows that an open market produces cheaper power - which is a great boost to an economy. What about nuclear? Nobody knows. The Nuclear Genie plods on, shackled by his keepers’ bungling, so many of his reactors shut down without much hope of resurrection. Not for the last time: Nothing is amiss or wrong with the Genie. He can work the marvels advertised. Blundering management botches his efforts. Unforeseen glitches cripple his operations. An under qualified and truculent work force threatens his success. Politicians who seek their own advantage in whatever the situation may be trade him about at will. He becomes a pawn in the power game, "power" in all meanings of the word. Our Genie, our glittering, star-bursting magician is reduced to a pawn, a drudge, a much-maligned and pushed-about object to be bandied back and forth. The Nuke Dudes and the politicians have pushed him to the point where nobody can afford him and almost nobody wants his leftovers. Is nuclear power done for? Have they murdered the bright Genie after all? Goodbye, Genie? R.I.P.? Editor's note: Shortly after the author finished this document in 1999, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) was formed to take over the functions of the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB). Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the power generating arm created as one of the four divisions which evolved out of the former Ontario Hydro, sold the lease to operate the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station to a private sector consortium called Bruce Power. The consortium was headed by British Energy, a British energy production company privatized under Thatcher, a company with considerable offshore holdings including interest in the United States through a partnership called Amergen. One of Amegen’s holdings is Three Mile Island. Not too long after that, British Energy fell on hard times, largely due to underestimating the cost of nuclear waste management at home in England, and other financial issues. British Energy sold it’s majority interest in the Bruce Power operation to a consortium of Canadian companies headed by Cameco (the world’s largest producer of uranium) and Trans Canada Pipeline (TCP - a transporter of natural gas). Part X - THE FUTURE OF THE GENIE AND OTHER ENERGY TALES Is the Nuclear Genie really dead? Has the future of nuclear energy been decided? In France it produces 80% of that nation's electric power; no significant accidents have occurred, and they have established a site for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste and a method of storage, glassification, which has won worldwide attention. In Britain nukes are not popular but they continue to be a part of daily life; accidents have occurred but no disasters; no satisfactory permanent disposal site has been found. In the States nuclear’s future is uncertain; it has survived the Three Mile Island near meltdown; but the battle to find a site for the permanent disposal of radioactive waste is still being waged; the Yucca Mountain repository is ready for business, but few localities want nuclear waste transported over their roads. In Germany the nukes are in or out, depending on the mood of the politicians, although the general populace appears to wish the nukes would go away. Surprisingly - surprising from the German point of view - French and German concerns are at work to develop the European Pressurized Water Reactor to be the European Standard. In Canada, more particularly in Ontario, where the nukes are concentrated, all is in disarray; the politicians seem to have had enough of Ontario Hydro's extravagant spending so that there is little support now for a refitting of the shut-down reactors and no support for continuation and expansion of the Industry; no permanent disposal site has been found. In his exhaustive study of nukes, Robert Bothwell concluded that the Canadian nuclear program was a success, a success in terms of scale.63 The Bruce complex is the largest such installation in the world. Is to be big also to be successful? In 1988 Bothwell could write that nukes were successful also in operation, producing lower-cost power "from an essentially domestic source."64 A bit of chauvinism there. The record has shown Bothwell's happy times to have been a mirage, an illusion spun out by Ontario Hydro from an inaccessible tower of secrecy. The secrecy Bothwell acknowledges.65 But he does not seem to question far enough. Had he done so, would he have seen the looming billion dollar debt, billions. True, he does write that "there was a cost" to all this. 66 But he does not appear to see that cost as a serious negative factor. In 1988 Bothwell saw the safety of nukes assured in the use of the computer: The promise of the future was great; the computer could easily carry out sophisticated functions involving many inputs, and could routinely record everything it did and print it out any time the operator or a technical engineer wanted to know. 67 A dazzling picture. The same dazzle that got nukes started in the first place. The computer, however, is not all-powerful. It is only as good as the human input, and if the input does not include such factors as "creep" (metal fatigue) and "frets" (groove damage) or unanticipated corrosion or protection from cataclysms such as earthquakes, tornadoes, gas explosions, and terrorism or sabotage, then the computer is just another tool in the hands of a distracted or weary operator, one who might even be drunk or high on drugs. 68 The beauty of science is that it deals with the ideal, the search for the prototype, for the ultimate and all-defining answer, for the truth. Pure science, they call it. The computer is not a scientific instrument in this sense. Nor would anyone say man is "pure" anything. He is not an automaton, a machine, an ideal. He may aspire to ideals, but he is fallible, he makes mistakes. In the Genie's world there is no room for mistakes. Even so, the safety record for nukes is admirable. Canada has not had a nuclear disaster. Germany has not had a nuclear disaster. France has not had a nuclear disaster. Britain has come close. Russia has had Chernobyl. The U. S. had Three Mile Island. Fermi was shut down before it became a disaster. But the more than 100 U. S. nukes at work producing electricity daily have remained disaster free. Statistically, nukes are safe. You can trust the Genie. You can't trust the human element. And they say history repeats itself when man fails to learn from experience. For example, consider what's new at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development. Bev Fry of The Kincardine News reports on a recent development involving the BNPD, the BEC, and the IEDC.69 This alphabet soup is a bad beginning. And it gets worse. According to Bev's account a select group met on June 28, 1999, in the village of Tiverton, near the Bruce Nuclear Power Development, to talk about a plan for the Bruce Energy Centre, also near the BNPD. The select group watched a video presented by the Integrated Energy Development Corp. (IEDC), a video about the production and storage of hydrogen, hydrogen to combine with oxygen to produce electricity in fuel cells. The headline of Bev's article: BALLARD BACKS MACGREGOR'S IDEA
Ballard is Geoff Ballard of Ballard Power Systems, a company working on a pilot project in fuel cell technology aimed at the eventual widespread use in fuel cell vehicles. All very speculative. A bit of pie in the sky? Sam MacGregor is chair of IEDC and a primary concept man behind BEC. He is a real estate developer who owns a chunk of acres near the BNPD and adjacent to the BEC. The Bruce Energy Centre (BEC) sports a huge hothouse tomato facility, dependent on the BNPD for steam to keep it going. The agreement to supply that steam runs out in 2003, when BEC and Mr. MacGregor will need to find another source. Hence the envisioned hydrogen-producing project would be an ideal steam source for BEC since the project would require a co-generation set-up fired by natural gas. Both Geoff Ballard and Sam MacGregor will win significantly if the IEDC video and sales pitch can sell the scheme. The pitch was directed to such notables as Gord Jarrell, mayor of Kincardine-Bruce-Tiverton, who said: “We are standing on the threshold of the future.” Sounds familiar. Sounds like C. D. Howe way back when nukes were being promoted as the glittering key to the future. Bev Fry quotes Mayor Jarrell as going on to say: “For years we've talked about methanol, fuel calls, hydrogen and oxygen. Now it’s here. Council and I are excited about the possibilities.” A similar enthusiasm moved the people at Chalk River to rush ahead with plans to build nuclear power plants, one after the other, the other already begun before the one was finished. So Ballard and MacGregor have dropped their seed on fertile soil. And yet you might wonder at the picture of a small town council sitting there talking so much about methanol, fuel cells, hydrogen and oxygen. The mayor of Goderich also saw the video and saw benefits for his community in the further development of BEC industry. He is quoted as saying: The money seems to spill over. Yes, money does spill over. Money talks. Tell these people money is coming their way and then expect them to say no? The hook is baited. The bait is a gas pipeline. Jim Cook, Sam MacGregor's associate and vice president of IEDC, pointed to a potential $400 million new investment in the community through BEC. Guess who pays for the pipeline? Not Geoff or Sam or Jim. You pay, the taxpayer. Is there another hitch? There must be another hitch. The hitch is that in order for the hydrogen fuel cell scheme to go through, the now inactive heavy water towers at BNPD must be used to store the hydrogen. These towers, which have a history of leakage, at times serious, were scheduled for dismantling. But Barb Fisher, once Bruce County MPP, wants the towers to stay: “It will be a significant cost factor to replace them.” Editor's Note: The towers have since been dismantled.
Fisher is now chair of the BCDC (Bruce Community Development
Corporation). As such it is her job to promote Sam MacGregor's scheme, especially
since it will mean jobs, not more jobs, but replacement jobs. Jim Cook said:“We have the ability to replace the (Ontario Hydro) employees transferred out of the region over the last year and a half.” Does he have that ability? Or does he think he might have? Editor's Note: The new Bruce Power management has refused the supply excess steam from the nuclear plant to Sam MacGregor’s greenhouses, which have subsequently been closed. Still, got to get those jobs back, not those layed-off people, you understand, the jobs, those jobs which will restore the tax base. All those Ontario Hydro people who moved out don't pay taxes any more. We need that money! Businesses need that money! Is that what Bev Fry's report is all about, money? Tax revenues and the personal profits to be realized by the men pushing the scheme? You be the judge. What Fry's report is not about is the wisdom of using those BNPD towers to store hydrogen. Hydrogen is highly volatile. Hydrogen explodes. Leaky old towers are an invitation to explosion. A hydrogen explosion on the BNPD premises would blow the whole kit and caboodle to smithereens. The world's worst nuclear disaster is little known. Most people have heard about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But Chelyabinsk? What happened at Chelyabinsk about 1954 way back there in the Ural mountains? Nobody knows exactly. Nobody except those who are keeping the secret. What is known is that a tank of radioactive gas exploded, contaminating thousands of square kilometres. Thirty towns once shown on the map appear there no longer. Can you picture what would happen at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development once the radioactive waste dry storage containers are in place - hundreds of them? - each containing hundreds or highly radioactive "spent" fuel bundles - can you imagine the devastation when a huge tower full of hydrogen blows it all wide open? Most of southern Ontario - and how much more? - would become uninhabitable. What thirty towns will disappear from the map? What cities? When small-town councilmen, dazzled by the promises of a real estate developer, make decisions which fail to take into consideration all implications of such decisions, the community is not only poorly served, it is betrayed. Or is the community also bedazzled? How can you paint such a cynical, dismal, threatening picture? All right, perhaps this "hydrogen bomb" won't be placed next to the Bruce nukes. Perhaps. No perhaps about Servco buying up municipal electric utilities (MUI's) all over Ontario . The Nuke Dudes, now shifted off the old stamping ground and disguised as Servco (or Genco) are riding out to raid the wagon trains and plunder the countryside. One way or another they are determined to rule the range. The asking price for Hydro Toronto, $1.7 billion. The book value of the Burlington utility is $60 million. Hydro Mississauga next. On and on. Lambton County $11.5 million. The jaw drops: With $47 billion in debt now "stranded" is the "new" Ontario Hydro decked out in part as Servco now free to pile up more millions and/or billions of debt in order to build an even greater monopoly? Isn't this how they all but killed the nuclear industry? Pile up debt, debt for which the taxpayer is liable. Yes, the dudes say the municipalities will profit from the sale because the locals will get lots of money for the sale of the MUI; the "new" utility will, supposedly, pay back its sale price to Servco in the guise of a toll or usage fee for access to Servco's distribution lines. Of course that usage fee comes from the pockets of the customers, you. In other words, you pay Servco to buy from you what you already own. This appears to be one leer short of a scam. They pile up debt, debt for which the customer (read TAXPAYER) is ultimately responsible. Debt upon debt upon debt. All in the name of competition? No! A resounding NO! It is not competition. In fact, the new regulations put forth by the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) will discourage competition. And discourage investment in new environmentally friendly natural gas-fired plants. Where are we headed? Nobody knows. But somebody has figured out a way to avoid take-over by Servco: Keep municipal ownership of the utility but reorganize it as a private corporation, a non-profit operation becomes a for-profit operation close to local control. This will be a new experience for local governments, untested waters. As Burlington Mayor Rob MacIsaac put it: "So it's a tough call."71 On the one hand Servco wants to gobble up the municipal utilities, on the other hand municipalities think about going private to avoid the gobble. The Gobbling Goose gobbles and gobbles and leaves behind it a messy trail of debt. The taxpayer gets to clean it up. And the clean-up will involve more than debt. The Ontario Clean Air Alliance says the open-market policy will increase pollution because it will reward low-tech power plants. 72 Competition could oblige electricity producers to rely on coal-fired plants, which are a relatively cheap source of power rather than investing in newer technology which might raise the cost. As nuclear waste continues to pile up, as debt continues to pile up, and as more environmentally destructive air pollution from coal-fired plants piles up, citizens are left to wonder who is in charge. Is Ottawa in charge? Queen's Park? The municipalities? Your local councilmen? If you compare the Ontario Hydro mess to the success of nuclear power in France, you might be justified in concluding that a number of supposedly responsible officials in the power industry and in government are negligent to an almost criminal degree. And yet they go on bungling along. They want to bring nuclear waste from the States and from Russia for reprocessing in Ontario; the reprocessing of this waste will leave still more tons of radioactive waste to be disposed of. Disposed of how? In dry storage silos, canisters, which are a new technology just out of the experimental stage. Does this sound like the program which built Douglas Point before the NPD was proven, built Pickering before Douglas Point was proven, built Bruce before Pickering was proven, built Darlington at an initial estimated cost of $2.7 billion (with a B) but paid $14 billion, the actual final cost? Built Pickering on the outskirts of Toronto when all guide lines and common sense indicate that such a potentially dangerous installation be located off in the boondocks away from population centres? Continues to load the Bruce site with the makings of a cataclysmic end to life in much of Ontario? Continues to insist on keeping activities as much a secret as possible? Do you trust these people to lead you anywhere but deeper and deeper into the swamp of debt and disaster? Gary Gallon reports on the successes (and failures) of environmentalists who, at great expense to themselves and to the Ontario Intervenor Funding Act, have challenged Ontario Hydro’s policies.73 He reports that the environmentalists' economics have proven more accurate than Ontario Hydro’s. In 1988 Ontario Hydro, Gallon writes, wanted to expand Darlington to the tune of $13 billion and to be exempt from an environmental assessment in spite of the fact that one was required by Ontario's Environmental Assessment Act. In 1992, the environmentalists, supported by experts from Canada, the U. S. and Europe, showed there was an over-supply of electricity; the Darlington expansion was put on hold. What is next on the power agenda? Still unsolved is the nuclear waste storage problem. Ontario Hydro's plan to build troops of dry storage silos at Bruce is hanging fire. Federal Environment Minister Christine Stewart decided to allow the project to go ahead. She informed the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB) of her decision in a confidential letter. More secrets! Government lawyers declared Stewart's letter to be a public document. When her actions became known, a local (Bruce) ratepayers' association filed suit in court challenging the minister's disregard for an honest, unbiased, objective assessment of the dry storage canister plan.* Typically, Ontario Hydro had done its own assessment, like sending the fox out to guard the hen house. More back-scratching and inbreeding. Ontario Hydro, AECB, and the politicians, in this instance Ms. Christine Stewart. They make a mockery of Ontario's Environmental Assessment Act. They seem to feel they can count on the public to be a herd of nerds. We are not. But we need Information before we can act. Time and again you have read here: Nobody knows. Yet. Numerous studies have been made by people outside of Ontario Hydro only to be kept secret or simply ignored. Some people do know, they, especially newspaper people, make it their business to know; and those who seek to know more are shut out by Ontario Hydro's policy of secrecy. * The Inverhuron and District Ratepayers Association (IDRA) The ratepayers near the Bruce plant must go to court in order to stop the accumulation of nuclear waste near their homes. At considerable cost, they have to go to court to force Ontario Hydro, the AECB, and people like Christine Stewart to realize what is at stake. Editor's Note: The IDRA went to the Federal Court, the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada over what it felt was an abuse of the process used to licence the construction of a new above ground, high level nuclear waste site at the Bruce Power facility. The site was to be operated by Ontario Power Generation. The IDRA argued that the reference design approved by the Minister of Environment and the regulator was not the design which OPG chose to build. OPG joined in the suit on the side of the Minister. One after the other, the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal ruled that they were “not an academy of science” and thus unable to adjudicate. Each court awarded costs against the IDRA, as did the Supreme Court after ruling that it would not hear an appeal of the Federal Court of Appeal verdict. What is at stake is the future. Are you comfortable with the idea that Ontario Hydro be allowed to place in jeopardy you, your children, your parents, and your homes? Do you agree that politicians should approve such harebrained schemes as storing explosive hydrogen in old, out of service, leaky towers next to the Bruce nuclear plant? Or resurrecting shut-down reactors at the ageing Pickering plant, which has already surprised its creators with unanticipated defects such as creep, frets, corrosion, and poisonous deposits of tritium? Or importing radioactive nuclear waste from the U.S., and Russia, adding considerably to the unmanageable tons of nuclear waste we already have? Or the scheme to pile up that waste in silos next to the Bruce plant, 1200 silos, each containing 600 deadly bundles?. Editor's Note: Close to 2000 silos have been built on the site. A final irony: History is about to repeat itself. A small group of insiders led by one determined man is promoting a project which is being "sold" to the public in a deceptive propaganda campaign; the group persists in going ahead even though they have been advised that the cost will result in debt. Documents must be censored. Secrecy is the watchword. Sounds like C. D. Howe and his insider clique all over again, pushing for nuclear power at any price. Sounds like Mike Harris pushing for deregulation of Ontario Hydro, putting "stranded" debt in a Never Never Land, all in the name of competition but with the ultimate - and secret? - agenda of creating a huge entity - monopoly? able to get into the U.S. energy market. This time Prime Minister Jean Chretian is our Don Quixote of the hour. Martin Mittelstaedt, writing in The Globe and Mail of August 16, 1999, front page, tells the story as it is revealed in documents obtained by the newspaper through a federal Access to Information request. The Prime Minister's plan is to import surplus Cold War plutonium - 100 tons or more - from the U. S. and from Russia to be used to fuel nuclear plants in Ontario, probably the Bruce Nuclear Power Development (BNPD) on Lake Huron. End result: More tons of radioactive waste. Mittelstaedt writes that Carl Andognini, chief nuclear officer at Ontario Hydro, has indicated that Ontario Hydro, would consider the plutonium plan but only if it could be shown to be economically sound. The documents received by the newspaper indicate that the plan would be costly when compared to other ways of disposing of the plutonium, about 50 per cent more expensive. Despite the poor outlook for the Canadian disposal option, the government was at the time -(1996) and continues today to be firmly committed to advancing the program. The documents reveal that federal officials planned a media campaign to persuade the public that the plutonium plan would serve the purpose of world peace by getting rid of all this U.S. and Russian Cold War weapons fuel: Burn it up in CANDUs. While they touted service to mankind, these officials were, it seems, really focused on the money to be made, on the jobs to be saved, on keeping the failing nuclear plants in business. And what about the tons of radioactive waste generated by the plutonium plan? Does Ontario need more than it has already got? Will hundreds more waste storage silos be needed to contain the stuff? Is there no end to this madness? Jean Chretien will be out of office, pensioned off, as will his cronies in the plutonium plan, so they can ignore the ultimate responsibility, the long-term results of their actions, the tons of radioactive contaminants they will dump on Canada Have things gotten out of hand? If you think you should make your voice heard, why not share your ideas with the following: Your family. Your friends. Your local government representatives. Your man at Queen's Park. Your Man in Ottawa. Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility Box 236 Snowdon Station Montreal, Quebec H3X 3T4 ph 514-853-5736 The Canadian (and Provincial) Environmental Law Association 517 College Street suite 401 Toronto, ON M6G 4A2 ph 416-960-2284 Greenpeace 185 Spading Toronto, ON M5T 2C6 ph 416-597-8408 International Institute of Concern for Public Health830 Bathurst St. Toronto, ON M5R Z6Lph 416-260-0575 Nuclear Awareness Project P.O. Box 140 Uxbridge, ON L9P 1M6 ph 905-852-0571 Sierra Legal Defense 106 Front St. Suite 300 Toronto, ON M5J 1E5 ph 416-368-7533 Endnotes 1 The world of the Nuclear Genie is jammed full of this alphabet soup, acronyms. It's easy to get lost in the crowd, so you'll often find the full names repeated. 2 Richard Curtis and Elizabeth Hogan. Nuclear Lessons, p. 171 3 Near the close of the Second World War nuclear bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities and obliterated them. 4 A breeder reactor "breeds" or compounds the nuclear reaction so that It produces more fuel than It uses or at least uses fuel more efficiently. 5 Robert Bothwell, Nucleus, p. 294, quoting construction manager Phil Stratton. 6 The Sun-Times, January 6, 1997, P- 1 7 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov-Dec, 1997, p. 55ff. 8 The Sun-Times, Jan 6, 19979 P. 3 9 Idem. 10 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nov-Dec 1997, p. 55 11 Idem. P. 52. 12 A readable discussion of alternative energy sources is Augusta Goldin's SMALL ENERGY SOURCES (Harcourt Brace Javanovich). Another is ENERGY ALTERNATIVES, Charles P. Cozic and Matthew Polesetsky, eds. (San Diego, Greenhaven Press). l3 Gordon Sims, The Anti-Nuclear Game, p. 257. The Globe and Mail, Aug. 6, 1997, p. B2. 14 MacLean's, Aug. 25, 1997, p .18. 15The London Free Press, July 19, 1997, p. El. 16 Tom Spears, Southam Newspapers, Kitchener, Ontario, Aug. 30, 1997, P. 1. 17 Sims, p. 122. 18 Ibid. P. 108. 19 The Globe and Mail, June 11, 1998, p. A8 (quoting Ontario Hydro Chairman William Farlinger). 20 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 6, 19979 p. B2. 21 The Globe and Mail, Sept. 3, 1998, P. A9 22 The London Free Press, July 19, 1997, P. El. 23 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 1997, p. Al. 24 The Globe and. Mail, Aug. 15, 1997, p. A14. 25 The Ottawa Citizen, Oct. 20, 1997, p. A4. 26 The Sun Times, Dec. 10, 1997, p. B1. 27 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 1997, p. A23 28 Sims, p. 136. 29 The Toronto Star, Feb. 20, 1998, P. E3 30 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 31, 1995, p, A6. 31 MacLean’s, may 4, 1998, p. 1. 32 Not In My Back Yard 33 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 13, 1997, p. B2. 34 The Globe and Mail, Aug 26, 1997, p. Al. 35 Sims, p. 138. 36 The London Free Press, Sept. 26, 1998, p. Al. 37 The Globe and Mail, June 8, 1999, p. Al. 38 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 21, 1997, p. A6. 39 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 16, 1997, p. A4. 40 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 1997, p. A23 41 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 15, 1997, p. Al4. 42 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 19, 1997, p. Al.43 The Sun Times, Dec. 10, 1997, p. Bl. 44 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 1997, p. A23 45 Sims, p. 115 46 Ibid., p. 102. 47 Ibid.,p. 104. 48 Ibid., p. 103. 49 Ibid., p. 136. 50 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 15, 1997, p. A14. 51 The London Free Press, August 16, 1997, p. A3 54 The Globe and Mail, June 1, 1996, p. A8. 55 Idem. 56 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 12, 1998, p. A5. 57 The Globe and Mail, May 27, 1999, p. A12. 58 The Globe and Mail, June 19, 1998, Report on Business. 59 Idem. 60 The Globe and Mail, May 27, 1999, p. A15. 61 Idem. 62 The Globe and Mail, June 10, 1999. p. A149 63 Robert Bothwell, Nucleus p. 450 64 Idem. 65 Ibid. pp. 388, 440. 66 Ibid. p. 451 67 Ibid. p. 293 68 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 21, 1997, p. A6. 69 The Kincardine News, June 30, 1999, P. 1 70 The Globe and Mail, July 8, 1999, A7 71 The Globe and Mail, July 13, 1999, p. A9. 72 The Globe and Mail, July 9, 1999, p. A7 73 The Globe and Mail, Aug. 15, 1997, p. A15. |