Collusion between government and nuclear industry

many companies anticipate decades of assured industrial growth (along with huge windfall profits from the sale of carbon entitlements). For the same reason, governments expect enormous increases in taxes and royalties. Combined, these normally divergent interests have melded into a single influential pro-nuclear constituency.

Canada’s dirty nuclear secret THE GLOBE AND MAIL , by Neil Reynolds 2 Jan 2010 With Atomic Accomplice: How Canada Deals in Deadly Deceit, Mr. McKay documents the official secrecy that has protected Canada’s nuclear industry from public scrutiny for two generations – and demonstrates why Canadian environmentalists have much more to worry about than global warming.It is a damning and alarming indictment – and thoroughly bipartisan, too.

Written from years of accumulated research, Mr. McKay spares neither the left nor the right. The CCF’s Tommy Douglas, the socialist premier from uranium-rich Saskatchewan, lobbied hard in the 1950s for federal subsidies to bankroll uranium mines. More recently, the NDP’s Lorne Calvert, as Saskatchewan premier, championed the sale of uranium to China – only one in the list of dictatorships courted by Canada as prospective clients for this country’s government-sustained nuclear industry.

Beyond doubt, this industry has survived solely through overt and covert government manipulation of the marketplace; in the case of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, for example, through a shameful price-fixing conspiracy that inflated the price of uranium more than fivefold. Federal subsidies to the industry – so far – exceed $30-billion. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has trebled support for the industry, committing a further $1.7-billion in the past three years….
many environmentalists have embraced it as a “clean” method of averting global warming.

For the same reason, many companies anticipate decades of assured industrial growth (along with huge windfall profits from the sale of carbon entitlements). For the same reason, governments expect enormous increases in taxes and royalties. Combined, these normally divergent interests have melded into a single influential pro-nuclear constituency.

Mr. McKay begs, most emphatically, to differ, which helps explain why he published this book privately, at his own expense, to tell the story exactly as he wanted to tell it – castigating the nuclear industry as a corrupt and sinister trade that literally imperils the planet………..
For 60 years, he says, Canada has participated in the global dispersal of weapons-related elements, technologies and secrets. Indeed, Canada has helped in the making of nuclear bombs for the United States, Britain, Russia, France, Israel, India and Pakistan and has “dealt atomic supplies and secrets” to Argentina, Taiwan, Romania, South Korea and Communist China.
Atomic Accomplice (available online at paulmckay.com ) is a serious warning that Canadians should know first-hand.

Canada’s dirty nuclear secret – The Globe and Mail