nuclear-news

Letter laments the unscientific assurances of safety by spokesmen from the nuclear industry.

Dr. Paul Moroz, 25 Oct 24

I am writing about the Deep Geological Registry (DGR) proposed for Teeswater by the NWMO as a way of managing all of Canada’s high-energy nuclear waste. I can no longer remain silent as I have witnessed the reckless way that the NWMO has misinformed the public and municipal leaders on the real potential risks of DGR technology.

I am a Professor of Medicine having taught in Canadian and US medical schools for more than three decades. I have served as an independent reviewer for many, many research proposals for new medications, new surgical procedures, new technologies with the obvious focus being on the evidence-based demonstration of human safety for the proposed intervention.

Having observed for the last two years the public disclosures by the NWMO, I am appalled at their claims of DGR technology as a “settled science” and “best practice” for the management of high-level nuclear waste near human settlements and water-sources. There are currently no functioning DGRs anywhere in the world. One currently being built in Finland is years away from starting up. Also, three test-DGRs done in the last two decades (one in the US and two in Germany) all reportedly leaked or had major problems. The NWMO are simply in no position to call this a “settled science” or “best practice”.

The NWMO may think it is a “settled science” from a geological point of view, but they cannot claim this from a medical or population health perspective at this time. No one can. Yet, NWMO nuclear engineers and physicists claim it is safe for humans; but, where are NWMO’s doctors, professors, population health experts and epidemiologists? They do not have any, as far as I can see.

I contacted Health Canada to ask about DGR safety and they told me they have left this all to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), an offshoot of the nuclear industry. I cannot trust this relationship as a truly independent assessment of something so crucial as the possibility of thousands of years of leaking radiation into our environment. This is just so wrong.

No Canadian or US medical school or medical regulatory board would accept this kind of non-evidence-based, non-independent claim of safety of an unproven technology, I believe. If a surgeon tried to perform a never-done-before surgical procedure without first extensive study, testing and reliable confirmation of testing over time, that surgeon would very quickly lose [his or her] medical license. 

Yet, it seems OK for the NWMO to so openly mislead the public and council members with claims of safety when they simply do not know how safe a DGR really is. No one does, since there are no working DGRs anywhere in the World. “Taking a chance” with a million years of decaying high-level nuclear waste in populated farmland and watershed is simply just unacceptable if it can first be tested remotely.

Canada’s first DGR should be done in an area far away from populated farmland and waterways and certainly away from the Great Lakes, the source of water for 40 million people in both Canada and the US. Such a DGR could then be tested for a reasonable period of time before it can be labeled “safe”. I would suggest testing a DGR for at least 100 years. Yes, 100 years is not unreasonable given that DGR radioactivity will be active for an estimated one million years. Only then might we call a DGR “reasonably safe” to nearby humans.

I went to NWMO sponsored DGR public meetings twice, once in Teeswater in 2023 and once in Mildmay in 2024. Opposition voices were not allowed a platform – so much for an open public meeting. No open microphone for questions were allowed and written submitted questions were hand-picked. I submitted questions that were not read out or answered.

On Oct 5, 2024 Protect Our Waterways featured presentations in Teeswater by physicians, nuclear physicists, scientist/broadcaster David Suzuki and a legal scholar, all of whom were never invited to speak at NWMO public meetings. Open minded people should be asking themselves why? All these speakers were against the unproven DGR claims made by NWMO.

I am not anti-nuclear, and I am not even anti DGR technology. But the fashion in which this has been presented by the NWMO is irresponsible and misleading, I believe. No one should accept placing never-before tested DGR technology into populated farmland and cattle country near the Great Lakes, the biggest collection of fresh water in the world. The risks over the course of thousands of years of possible radiation leakage, even a small one, is simply too much for a never tested technology.

Dr. Paul Moroz, MD, MSc, FRCSC, FAAOS,

Southampton, Ontario

Prof of Surgery (part-time), McMaster University,

Faculty of Health Sciences.

Former Prof of Surgery,

University of Hawaii,

John A. Burns School of Medicine.

October 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, safety | Leave a comment

Canada’s nuclear watchdog green-lights operation of aging Pickering reactors to 2026

Pressure tubes, which are six-metre-long rods that contain fuel bundles of uranium, are regarded as the major life-limiting component in CANDUs. They deteriorate as they age, gradually increasing their propensity to fracture, an event which could lead to a serious accident.

Matthew McClearn,  October 11, 2024 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadas-nuclear-watchdog-green-lights-operation-of-aging-pickering/

Canada’s nuclear safety regulator again extended a crucial permit for the country’s oldest nuclear power plant on Friday, allowing it to continue operating beyond its original design life.

On Friday the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission authorized its owner, Ontario Power Generation, to operate the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station for an additional two years, to Dec. 31, 2026. The extended permit applies only to its newest four reactors, Units 5 through 8, which are collectively known as Pickering B. Those reactors entered service between 1983 and 1986.

The licence extension was granted by commissioners Timothy Berube, Marcel Lacroix and Andrea Hardie, who decided OPG would make adequate provisions for protecting the environment and public safety.

Canada’s homegrown reactor, the CANDU, was originally assigned a design life of 30 years, which had been incorporated into CNSC licensing requirements. If followed, they would have dictated that all four reactors shut down for major overhauls or decommissioning years ago. The CNSC, though, amended those rules and extended the station’s licence three times, while imposing more thorough inspection requirements on key components. The Pickering B reactors are now around 40 years old.

Pickering Station, located roughly 30 kilometres northeast of downtown Toronto, employs about 3,000 people and until recently supplied about 11 per cent of Ontario’s electricity. Nuclear power plants play a crucial role in the province’s grid, but their output has declined: Pickering Unit 1 shut down permanently last month, and Unit 4 is scheduled to follow in December. (The other two Pickering A units were idled permanently decades ago.)

OPG said Pickering B’s continued operation is needed because reactors at other stations are offline for overhauls.

Pressure tubes, which are six-metre-long rods that contain fuel bundles of uranium, are regarded as the major life-limiting component in CANDUs. They deteriorate as they age, gradually increasing their propensity to fracture, an event which could lead to a serious accident. Pressure tubes and related components are collectively known as fuel channels.

Nuclear reactor pressure tubes are deteriorating faster than expected. Critics warn regulators are ‘breaking their own rules’

The main cause of that deterioration is called deuterium ingress, which is measured in parts per million (ppm) of hydrogen equivalent concentration. Previously, Pickering’s licence contained a condition that effectively capped hydrogen concentrations at 120 parts per million.

But in recent years a small number of pressure tubes in Canada have been found to have greatly exceeded that limit. The CNSC removed the 120 ppm limit from Pickering Station’s licence on Friday, and introduced a new requirement that OPG “implement and maintain an enhanced fitness for service program” for its fuel channels.

Familiar patterns of support and opposition emerged during public hearings held by the CNSC in June, with host municipalities emphasizing the plant’s economic importance. A deluge of submissions from nuclear industry contractors, lobbyists and unions also supported the plant’s continued operation, including the Society of United Professionals and the Canadian Nuclear Association.

The CANDU Operators Group, which represents utilities that use those reactors, wrote in a statement that experimental work had confirmed that the station’s fuel channels could operate safely until 2026, and that OPG “will continue with its exemplary safety record in every aspect of its operations.”

Environmental activists such as the Canadian Environmental Law Association recommended the CNSC reject the permit, partly owing to risks associated with the plant’s aging equipment.

“Old nuclear plants are particularly susceptible to accidents,” it wrote in its submission, adding that the dangers of allowing the plant to continue operating are “high and increasing.”

Sunil Nijhawan, a nuclear safety consultant and frequent intervenor before the CNSC, said that OPG’s own estimates showed “that the degradation of fuel channels is widespread; a number of component and system failure mechanisms are fast converging to put the reactor into unsafe operation territory.”

Several First Nations asserted that the plant’s continued operations required their consent, and some also raised concerns about aging pressure tubes. The Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation declared in a written statement that it was “not comfortable with the risk management methods being employed by the CNSC and OPG.”

The CNSC found that the licence extension “does not present any novel adverse impact on any potential or established Aboriginal claim or right.”

A second life is planned for the Pickering B reactors following the planned 2026 shutdown: In January, the Ontario government authorized OPG to begin a refurbishment that would return them to service in the mid-2030s.

October 14, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, safety | Leave a comment

Canada’s false ‘solution’ for used nuclear fuel waste

Potentially trucking waste to a deep geological repository could be a recipe for disaster.

BY WILLIAM LEISS | October 7, 2024, William Leiss is an author, and emeritus professor at Queen’s University

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is a curious hybrid body created out of whole cloth by the federal government in its 2002 Nuclear Fuel Waste Act to find a permanent solution for that waste. Governments tried and failed to find that solution for the previous quarter-century. Now, NWMO is weeks away from identifying the “final resting place” in a deep geological repository (DGR) in Ontario, either far into the province’s northwest at Ignace near Dryden/Wabigoon Lake First Nation, or South Bruce close to Lake Huron near Teeswater and the Bruce Peninsula. One of two small municipalities and one of two groups of treaty-rights holding First Nations will need to agree, but millions of Canadians potentially affected won’t get a say.

Last month, The Globe and Mail described the organization’s DGR solution: “For 40 or so years … big trucks carrying specially designed waste containers would trundle from the reactor sites to the DGR facility, where the fuel canisters would be lowered.”

More than 90 per cent of that waste is currently at the Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear generating stations. The rest is at far-off Point Lepreau, N.B., and in Quebec, Manitoba, and Ottawa. If NWMO chooses the Ignace site and an all-road transportation method, it estimates that those trucks will travel 84 million kilometres on Canadian roads.

Each truckload will hold exactly 192 used fuel bundles, packed into a special steel container weighing 35 tonnes. The current array of operating reactors will ultimately produce a total of six million bundles. But that figure doesn’t include the announced “Bruce C” development of new reactors, or other new ones yet to be unveiled, adding at least two million more bundles. Eight million bundles will require 40,000 truckloads over at least a 40-year period.

And there will be a further 20,000 dry-cask containers in which those bundles had previously been stored which will also require transportation to a DGR. Empty, they each weigh 60 tonnes and will be radioactive. They will need to be cut in half due to their weight, adding up to another 40,000 truckloads. If they go to a DGR in Ignace, that will add another 84 million kilometres of truck travel on Canadian roads. (The NWMO has not done this estimate.)

Is everybody OK with all this? Are most Canadians even aware of these scenarios? The NWMO says that the containers on the trucks will survive any imaginable road accident, and no radioactivity will escape. But trucks travelling 168 million kilometres are—quite obviously—going to be involved in a fair number of road accidents, some serious, across those four or more decades. In those cases, folks likely will be told, “Don’t worry, it may look awful, but you and your kids won’t be irradiated.”

The two small communities designated as potential “hosts” for the DGR do not, apparently, care too much about the transportation issue. However, others are starting to become alarmed, especially in and around the city of Thunder Bay, which is on the road route for those 80,000 trucks if the DGR is sited in Ignace. If the choice is South Bruce, well, who knows? The NWMO has not published any kind of transportation plan for that choice. Just looking at a map, however, a lot of those trucks will have to go through or near the already grid-locked GTA.

And what about the First Nations? Here’s where things get interesting. The designated First Nation treaty rights holders for the Ignace site are the 28 First Nation communities of Grand Council Treaty 3, the governing body of the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty 3, which maintains rights to all lands and water in the territory. Development in the Treaty 3 territory requires the consent, agreement, and participation of the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty 3. To date, that consent hasn’t been granted.

The designated First Nation treaty rights holder for the South Bruce site is Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON): the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation–Neyaashiinigmiing Anishinaabek, and the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation. CBC News recently quoted Greg Nadjiwon, one of SON’s two chiefs, that “if you think about how many [other] treaty territories that waste would have to go through, I don’t think it will happen.” The CBC then paraphrased the chief: “Nadjiwon says even if Ignace and nearby Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation say yes to the proposed nuclear dump, he doubts the spent nuclear fuel from the Bruce station, which is currently in temporary storage, would ever leave his nation’s traditional territory.” Mere weeks from a site selection announcement, there clearly isn’t agreement.

NWMO’s approach isn’t going to work. Canadians do not have an acceptable solution to the problem of long-term storage or disposal of used nuclear fuel. It’s past time to consider some alternative options.

October 13, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, safety | Leave a comment

Construction of Ontario nuclear reactor should move forward despite incomplete design, ! regulator says

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-though-its-design-is-incomplete-nuclear-safety-regulator-says-the/ Matthew McClearn, 4 Oct 24

Canada’s nuclear safety regulator has recommended that the country’s first new power reactor in decades should receive the go-ahead to begin construction, even though its design is not yet complete.

At a hearing Wednesday, staff from Ontario Power Generation argued that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission should grant a licence to construct a 327-megawatt nuclear reactor known as the BWRX-300 at OPG’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ont., about 70 kilometres east of Toronto.

he application received unequivocal support from the CNSC’s staff, despite the fact that several safety questions remain unresolved.

“The level of design information needed for CNSC staff to recommend a licence to construct is not the final design, but the information must be sufficient to ensure that the regulations have been met,” Sarah Eaton, the CNSC’s director-general ofits Directorate of Advanced Reactor Technologies, said before the commission.

It would be the first small modular reactor built in a G7 country and among the first globally – although its output would exceedthe informal 300-megawatt cutoff for SMRs.

The BWRX-300 is currently being developed by U.S. vendor GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy. Someaspects of its design are based on the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), which was licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2014 but never built. The CNSC said the 1,600-megawattESBWR underwent significant testing that is “mostly applicable” to its smaller cousin.

OPG, which submitted its application two years ago, is seeking a 10-year licence andplans to build three additional BWRX-300s at Darlington.

A second part of the CNSC hearing, scheduled for January, will hear interventions from the public, including Indigenous communities. OPG has already partly prepared the site – building roads and moving earth – under an earlier licence granted by the CNSC.

David Tyndall, OPG’s vice-president of new nuclear engineering, said the reactor’s design had advanced sufficiently to meet Canada’s regulatory requirements.

One significant unresolved issue, though, is its emergency shutdown systems.

Typically, reactors are required to have two independent shutdown systems. The BWRX-300would have 57 control rods that could be inserted rapidly into its coreby high-pressure water in an emergency to halt reactivity. Should that hydraulic method fail, electric motors would drive them in instead.

Mr. Tyndall assured the commission that the BWRX-300 was designedin such a way that all safety systems “are guaranteed to be fully independent and redundant, which ensureshigh reliability and fail-safe operation.”

CNSC staff, however, questioned whether the shut-off systems were truly independent because both systems rely on the same control rods. That remained unresolved at Wednesday’s hearing.

To address unresolved issues, CNSC staff proposed that the commission impose three “regulatory hold points” during the reactor’s construction at which work would halt until OPG provided sufficient information to satisfy CNSC staff. Ramzi Jammal, the commission’s executive vice-president and chief regulatory operations officer, would administer the hold points.

Throughout an assessmentrunning more than 1,000 pages, published by the CNSC this summer, staff repeatedly noted missing information in OPG’s submission that they vowed to review once it becomes available.

“In many cases, there is a discussion about a topic, and it’s noted that the design is not complete,” commissioner Jerry Hopwood observed at the hearing.

“It’s not entirely clear to what extent the design has been completed in such a way that the conclusions that support a licence to construct are then justified.”

M.V. Ramana, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs who specializes in nuclear power, said the CNSC doesn’t have enough information to answer key safety questions necessary to grant a construction licence. He added that, as the first of its kind, the Darlington SMR’s design is likely to require further significant changes during construction.

“What it does tell me is that OPG really has rushed through this,” he said. “It may be that they don’t feel they know enough about the design and are waiting for information from GE Hitachi, or that OPG is under its own self-imposed deadline to submit this application by a certain date.”

Prof. Ramana said the CNSC’s role as a safety regulatoris in conflict with statements its leadership has made in recent years promoting SMRs.

“The CNSC has acted as a cheerleader for small modular reactors,” he said. “This is completely at odds with what a good regulator ought to be doing.”

October 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, safety | Leave a comment