By Matthew
Behrens
Hometown
News, June, 2017
A growing number of voices is
raising alarm over a secretive, unprecedented
series of liquid radioactive waste shipments from Chalk River’s nuclear
facilities to a South Carolina processing plant. While routes are not
publicized, two of the only roadways that meet the designated requirements for
the journey are Highways 17 and 416.
In March, Carleton Place’s emergency
management committee received a provincial fire marshal memo describing
imminent shipments of 23,000 litres of bomb-grade highly enriched uranyl
nitrate liquid (HEUNL). Fact sheets were provided to ensure “communities know
how to prepare for – and respond appropriately to…transportation incidents
involving radioactive materials,” according to the memo, which said the
shipments “pose a minimal risk to public health and safety due to strict
packaging and safety standards.”
But according to Dr. Gordon Edwards,
president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
(CCNR), a 42-year-old research organization documenting the nuclear industry’s
often under-publicized hazards, the province is not telling first responders or
the public the whole story. (Notably, the Lanark County emergency preparedness
handbook, distributed in May, addresses a range of threats, but includes no
mention of roadside nuclear accidents.)
“Nuclear authorities in both Canada
and the US have disguised the true nature of this liquid,” says Edwards, who has
provided consulting services on nuclear-related issues to provincial,
territorial, national, and international bodies, including the Auditor General
of Canada. “In fact, urynal nitrate is only one of dozens of radioactive
compounds in the liquid, which is 17,000 times more radioactive than uranyl
nitrate alone. Such high-level radioactive liquid has never been transported
over public roads anywhere in North America. If spilled, two ounces of this
liquid is enough to ruin the drinking water supply of a city as large as
Washington, DC.”
Noting the shipments have not been
subject to an environmental impact statement in Canada or the US, Edwards says the
uranium involved is the same material used in the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb.
He also warns that many of the radioactive materials being transported are “the
same stuff you find in the melted cores of the Fukushima and Chernobyl
reactors.”
Dr. Gordon Edwards
Dr. Edwards has produced a report questioning
the safety of casks transporting the liquid materials, which were designed 30
years ago to transport solid waste only. While documenting the radioactive
release hazards posed by a vehicle fire, Edwards also studied
potential crash impacts. Safety standards require the cask to withstand the
shock of a 30-foot drop, but most bridges to the USA are far higher, while the
cask’s cavity, with a thin two-inch stainless steel body, would not survive a
sideways impact of only 12.5 miles per hour.
Last fall, over 40 organizations,
including the Sierra Club, Canadian Association of Physicians for the
Environment, and Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County called on Justin Trudeau and
Barack Obama to cancel the shipments, citing the devastating impact of a spill
on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River ecosystems.
Members
of the Niagara Regional Council have expressed similar opposition, while last
month, the Anishinabek Nation and Iroquois Caucus jointly issued a pointed
statement declaring that they had not been consulted as per Aboriginal title
and treaty rights, warning that the “potential
for long-lived contamination to the environment and to all living entities is
too great.”
The shipments are rationalized under the Global Threat Reduction Initiative
to account for and secure nuclear weapons materials, but Edwards says far safer
means are available. Given
that liquid waste has been routinely solidified and rendered far less dangerous
on-site at Chalk River since 2003, Edwards also points to a 2011 federal report
calling for the “down-blending” of the liquid waste. Over three months during
2016, Indonesia carried out just such a down-blending of similar liquid
material, preventing the need to transport it to the U.S.
Interviewed by Hometown News, Carleton Place Fire Chief
Les Reynolds confirmed materials his office received did not discuss the consequences of a liquid
radioactive waste spill. “There’s been very little information,” he said, adding
he is never provided notice of any such shipments through the area.
While
Reynolds says his team’s response to dangerous chemical spills is to secure the
affected area and call in Ottawa HAZMAT teams, “I would expect that this stuff
is properly encased and protected. Having said that, anything can happen. A
propane tank is a very strong vessel, and yet we all know under certain
conditions they can turn into a traveling bomb. I’m not overly concerned
because I guess I’m trusting that the people who do know what they’re doing are
taking the necessary precautions.”
Edwards’
experience monitoring the nuclear industry provides him with no such
reassurance, citing recent welding failures in equipment associated with transport
casks as well as an April, 2017 U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report on the
first HEUNL shipment that revealed an unexpected hotpsot in unloading equipment
that was “not providing adequate radiological shielding.”
“Sending a hundred more shipments
carrying 23,000 litres of this stuff down the highway is like rolling a pair of
dice a hundred times,” Edwards cautioned. “Sooner or later our luck may give
out and we will roll snake-eyes.”
