nuclear-news

Inside the ‘suitably opaque’ response to a toxic sewage spill at Chalk River nuclear lab

Internal communications raise questions about transparency at nuclear organizations amid pollution incident

Brett Forester · CBC News ·Aug 20, 2024 

When a nuclear research facility was directed to stop polluting the Ottawa River with toxic sewage earlier this year, at least one official seemed pleased with the non-transparency of the facility’s public messaging.

“This is suitably opaque,” wrote Jennifer Fry in an April 24 email to Jeremy Latta, director of communications and government reporting at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a Crown corporation.

The two AECL officials were discussing a planned public communiqué from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to be released that day. AECL owns the Chalk River nuclear research campus near Deep River, Ont., about 150 kilometres upstream from Ottawa, but outsources site management to private sector corporate consortium CNL.

Chalk River’s sewage plant began failing toxicity tests on Feb. 21, meaning the treated wastewater, or effluent, was confirmed toxic to fish. (One hundred per cent of the rainbow trout directly subjected to the effluent died over a four-day period, records show. A death rate over 50 per cent fails the test.)

And so on April 23, after two months of this toxic water going into the Ottawa River, Environment Canada stepped in, prompting both CNL’s communiqué and AECL’s assessment of it.

“Reads fine to me, not major risks,” Latta had written, “and who knows if it gets traction.”

Those emails are among more than 100 pages of internal communications released by AECL under access-to-information law, which are raising questions about transparency around the pollution incident.

CBC News requested an interview with an AECL spokesperson to discuss the corporation’s handling of the incident based on a review of the records, and Latta agreed to speak last week.

Latta defended the response, maintaining there was no deliberate effort to hide information. He brushed off Fry’s comment as one person’s opinion………………………………………………………………………

“We have absolutely no confidence in the fact that, if there is a major incident, they will disclose it to us,” said Haymond, a vocal opponent of CNL’s plan to build a radioactive waste dump at Chalk River.

“It just really speaks to the challenge in the relationship where they profess to want to have better communications, and said they would make the effort. Time and time again, there’s incidents which demonstrate that that’s not happening.”…………………………………….

CNL ultimately didn’t answer many of CBC’s questions directly at the time, including one explicitly asking whether the effluent was going into the Ottawa River……………………….. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/chalk-river-sewage-foi-documents-1.7299822

August 24, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, secrets,lies and civil liberties