Nuclear push questioned
Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2008 1:39 pmNuclear push questioned
http://www.yorktonnews.com/archive/11-20-2008/a03.pdf
By JEN ANTONY N-R Writer The News Review, Yorkton, SK
“We have our heads in the sand in terms of the short term economic benefit without looking at the harms that the whole system has attracted.” – Jim Harding
“Is Yorkton willing to have a train with nuclear waste going through it at 6 o’clock in the morning?” – Heinz Wanders
“Everywhere in the world a certain economic interest gets locked in. Opium in Afghanistan. Cocaine in Columbia. Uranium in Saskatchewan,” says Dr. Jim Harding. “I think a lot of people have been struggling and even suffering over this as they learn more and begin to realize there’s a huge gap between decision making and public reins.”
Surprised by the recent announcement of the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) – a 12 person board that will be reporting to the Sask. Government on how to grow the province’s uranium industry – Harding says this government wanting to ‘value-add’ to the province’s uranium is nothing new.
“They’re following the same logic the NDP was and the NDP ran into trouble with it as far back as 1980. And now here we go again,” says Harding.
“I’ve been watching this since the 70’s, back to the liberals. What’s new about this Sask Party initiative is that they’re assuming that the public is so gullible now and so conditioned to buying in to this economic development hype that they can turn it over to the industries themselves.”
A long time ecology professor, Harding is concerned the UDP is imbalanced and the government has created a recommendation body in favor of the very industry it will benefit.
“If you look at that committee, you’ve basically got the four big companies on the committee that’s supposed to recommend to the government how to expand the industry that they own and control,” says Harding.
“Cameco, the biggest uranium company in the world supplies to Bruce power and then Bruce power runs the first privatized nuclear reactor and still gets public subsidies for waste disposal.
They’re in a corporate conglomeration with Trans Canada which builds transmission lines for thermal plants; coal or nuclear and then Areva is in there to balance it off because they’re the biggest integrated nuclear company on the planet coming out of France.
Here they are, sitting on a committee in Saskatchewan that is supposed to recommend the way to go forward with the very industry they own and control.”
The environmental community has been silenced according to Harding who says Patrick Moore has been included as the environmental representative because of the work he has done with the American Nuclear Industry promotional body Nuclear Energy.
“They’ve also pretended they’re going to have First Nations representation and then they go and pick someone who has actually worked with the industry around trying to get a nuclear waste site in the Meadow Lake area in the 80’s and luckily he was defeated by a group of native grandmothers who oppose nuclear waste as a way to create work,” says Harding. “It goes on and on.”
Meeting with a number of government ministers, Harding is concerned about decision makers he has spoken with who are unaware of where Sask’s uranium goes.
“I spoke with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian chiefs about a month ago and they’re getting very concerned,” adds Harding. “They were told that it’s just another natural resource that’s getting exported and that was good for the local economy. They had no conception, 25 years ago of what transformation occurs as this highly radioactive element is brought up. “Radon gas is what is released at the refining process,” explains Harding. “When they finally last year lowered the permissible exposure levels of radon gas by about 400 per cent, it’s still too high, Europe’s been down at low, low levels for 20 years... the reason our exposure standards and our so called safety standards are so out of whack with the science is because we are so tied in to this industry... if they really enforced the kind of standards we should have in terms of environmental health, whether it’s water quality, exposure to workers or people living in the vicinity of radium mines, you’d add an economic cost to these enterprises which would make the renewables even more attractive.
“People in the UN know that if you expand the enriching and the nuclear power capacity now, because the world is so unregulated, we’re going to be paying dearly for the created weapons. It’s not just Iran... Canada’s already been involved in proliferation in India, Pakistan, we’ve exported a CANDU technology,” says Harding.
“We have our heads in the sand in terms of the short term economic benefit without looking at the harms that the whole system has attracted.”
“Power is of course really important. Everybody needs it but not everybody knows where their power comes from,” says Heinz Wanders.
“I think they don’t really want us to know. They don’t want us to be concerned about it. It’s more of a thing, ‘well it comes out of the plug-in and don’t worry about it.’ I think we should be beyond that. Now-a-days the world is just too small to say, ‘who cares.”
Coming to Canada from Germany, Wanders is now living and working in Yorkton but he was in Germany when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and if the Sask. Government decides to build a nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan, Wanders won’t be sticking around.
“When I was reading in the paper six months ago that they were maybe thinking about building a nuclear power plant, I said right away, ‘well I’m going to move out of here because that’s ridiculous.’ I didn’t come to Canada to come to a nuclear power plant. Period.”
When the dome that normally held water in the Chernobyl plant failed, Wanders explains the escaping water and nuclear waste gathered into a cloud that began traveling towards Europe.
“When Europe found out about this cloud, it was actually days later when the cloud was already on the way,” says Wanders.
“Once we knew scientists were saying this is really dangerous stuff coming, we should be aware of where it goes, at that time we didn’t really know what had happened. It turned out later that the cloud actually went over Finland.
There was another system coming so they met and it rained down. There was a radioactive fallout. It rained down into the vegetation on Finland, into the moss. They had to kill thousands and thousands of reindeer because they all ate the moss and they were radioactive. They had to burn the reindeer.”
Having lived through the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, Wanders sees the recent Ontario nuclear scare as similar to what happened in the Ukraine but in Canada, Wanders says it is a politician’s mistake that is critical to any safety in today’s technology and the decision to grow Sask’s nuclear industry.
“In Chernobyl, the first cooling system was failing and the secondary cooling system was failing as well and then they had an explosion,” explains Wanders.
“The nuclear plant in Ontario produces a certain kind of isotope for medical reasons. They had a problem with their backup system. There is this organization in Canada that oversees all of the nuclear power plants. This organization told them that if your secondary system doesn’t work, you have to shut the plant down. Then they were saying well, we have to produce this by-product because we need it. They didn’t have to because in Europe they were saying, ‘no, we have enough of these isotopes that we can produce to satisfy the whole world market.’ Still, the politicians went through and they just put this power plant back, even though that secondary system was not working. If they would have had a failure in the primary cooling system, they would have had a melt down. Then Ottawa and everything around it would have been radioactive,” says Wanders.
“It’s not right that any politician, even the Prime Minster can go and say, ‘you know what, I don’t care what this organization, the security measures says about putting this power plant into place, it’s alright. Let’s just open it up.’
"Now-a-days, all this talk about it’s safer, it’s just not true because one day some politician is going to say, ‘you know what, there might be a problem but we need the power more than anything else right now so just go ahead and open it.
“What happens if?” asks Wanders.
“If they really make the power plant, they’re not going to bury the nuclear waste then and there. They have to transport it and they can’t do it on the highway because it’s way too unsafe so they’re going to do it by rail. Is Yorkton willing to have a train with nuclear waste going through it at 6 o’clock in the morning?
“Still to this day, kids in Chernobyl get born; three hands, two heads, you name it,” says Wanders.
“It’s not like a gas tank that explodes and everything within a radius of two miles is waste land. This is way bigger than that, way bigger than anyone can imagine. I don’t think we should play with that, not if there’s other alternatives and we have other alternatives.”
http://www.yorktonnews.com/archive/11-20-2008/a03.pdf
By JEN ANTONY N-R Writer The News Review, Yorkton, SK
“We have our heads in the sand in terms of the short term economic benefit without looking at the harms that the whole system has attracted.” – Jim Harding
“Is Yorkton willing to have a train with nuclear waste going through it at 6 o’clock in the morning?” – Heinz Wanders
“Everywhere in the world a certain economic interest gets locked in. Opium in Afghanistan. Cocaine in Columbia. Uranium in Saskatchewan,” says Dr. Jim Harding. “I think a lot of people have been struggling and even suffering over this as they learn more and begin to realize there’s a huge gap between decision making and public reins.”
Surprised by the recent announcement of the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) – a 12 person board that will be reporting to the Sask. Government on how to grow the province’s uranium industry – Harding says this government wanting to ‘value-add’ to the province’s uranium is nothing new.
“They’re following the same logic the NDP was and the NDP ran into trouble with it as far back as 1980. And now here we go again,” says Harding.
“I’ve been watching this since the 70’s, back to the liberals. What’s new about this Sask Party initiative is that they’re assuming that the public is so gullible now and so conditioned to buying in to this economic development hype that they can turn it over to the industries themselves.”
A long time ecology professor, Harding is concerned the UDP is imbalanced and the government has created a recommendation body in favor of the very industry it will benefit.
“If you look at that committee, you’ve basically got the four big companies on the committee that’s supposed to recommend to the government how to expand the industry that they own and control,” says Harding.
“Cameco, the biggest uranium company in the world supplies to Bruce power and then Bruce power runs the first privatized nuclear reactor and still gets public subsidies for waste disposal.
They’re in a corporate conglomeration with Trans Canada which builds transmission lines for thermal plants; coal or nuclear and then Areva is in there to balance it off because they’re the biggest integrated nuclear company on the planet coming out of France.
Here they are, sitting on a committee in Saskatchewan that is supposed to recommend the way to go forward with the very industry they own and control.”
The environmental community has been silenced according to Harding who says Patrick Moore has been included as the environmental representative because of the work he has done with the American Nuclear Industry promotional body Nuclear Energy.
“They’ve also pretended they’re going to have First Nations representation and then they go and pick someone who has actually worked with the industry around trying to get a nuclear waste site in the Meadow Lake area in the 80’s and luckily he was defeated by a group of native grandmothers who oppose nuclear waste as a way to create work,” says Harding. “It goes on and on.”
Meeting with a number of government ministers, Harding is concerned about decision makers he has spoken with who are unaware of where Sask’s uranium goes.
“I spoke with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian chiefs about a month ago and they’re getting very concerned,” adds Harding. “They were told that it’s just another natural resource that’s getting exported and that was good for the local economy. They had no conception, 25 years ago of what transformation occurs as this highly radioactive element is brought up. “Radon gas is what is released at the refining process,” explains Harding. “When they finally last year lowered the permissible exposure levels of radon gas by about 400 per cent, it’s still too high, Europe’s been down at low, low levels for 20 years... the reason our exposure standards and our so called safety standards are so out of whack with the science is because we are so tied in to this industry... if they really enforced the kind of standards we should have in terms of environmental health, whether it’s water quality, exposure to workers or people living in the vicinity of radium mines, you’d add an economic cost to these enterprises which would make the renewables even more attractive.
“People in the UN know that if you expand the enriching and the nuclear power capacity now, because the world is so unregulated, we’re going to be paying dearly for the created weapons. It’s not just Iran... Canada’s already been involved in proliferation in India, Pakistan, we’ve exported a CANDU technology,” says Harding.
“We have our heads in the sand in terms of the short term economic benefit without looking at the harms that the whole system has attracted.”
“Power is of course really important. Everybody needs it but not everybody knows where their power comes from,” says Heinz Wanders.
“I think they don’t really want us to know. They don’t want us to be concerned about it. It’s more of a thing, ‘well it comes out of the plug-in and don’t worry about it.’ I think we should be beyond that. Now-a-days the world is just too small to say, ‘who cares.”
Coming to Canada from Germany, Wanders is now living and working in Yorkton but he was in Germany when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and if the Sask. Government decides to build a nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan, Wanders won’t be sticking around.
“When I was reading in the paper six months ago that they were maybe thinking about building a nuclear power plant, I said right away, ‘well I’m going to move out of here because that’s ridiculous.’ I didn’t come to Canada to come to a nuclear power plant. Period.”
When the dome that normally held water in the Chernobyl plant failed, Wanders explains the escaping water and nuclear waste gathered into a cloud that began traveling towards Europe.
“When Europe found out about this cloud, it was actually days later when the cloud was already on the way,” says Wanders.
“Once we knew scientists were saying this is really dangerous stuff coming, we should be aware of where it goes, at that time we didn’t really know what had happened. It turned out later that the cloud actually went over Finland.
There was another system coming so they met and it rained down. There was a radioactive fallout. It rained down into the vegetation on Finland, into the moss. They had to kill thousands and thousands of reindeer because they all ate the moss and they were radioactive. They had to burn the reindeer.”
Having lived through the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, Wanders sees the recent Ontario nuclear scare as similar to what happened in the Ukraine but in Canada, Wanders says it is a politician’s mistake that is critical to any safety in today’s technology and the decision to grow Sask’s nuclear industry.
“In Chernobyl, the first cooling system was failing and the secondary cooling system was failing as well and then they had an explosion,” explains Wanders.
“The nuclear plant in Ontario produces a certain kind of isotope for medical reasons. They had a problem with their backup system. There is this organization in Canada that oversees all of the nuclear power plants. This organization told them that if your secondary system doesn’t work, you have to shut the plant down. Then they were saying well, we have to produce this by-product because we need it. They didn’t have to because in Europe they were saying, ‘no, we have enough of these isotopes that we can produce to satisfy the whole world market.’ Still, the politicians went through and they just put this power plant back, even though that secondary system was not working. If they would have had a failure in the primary cooling system, they would have had a melt down. Then Ottawa and everything around it would have been radioactive,” says Wanders.
“It’s not right that any politician, even the Prime Minster can go and say, ‘you know what, I don’t care what this organization, the security measures says about putting this power plant into place, it’s alright. Let’s just open it up.’
"Now-a-days, all this talk about it’s safer, it’s just not true because one day some politician is going to say, ‘you know what, there might be a problem but we need the power more than anything else right now so just go ahead and open it.
“What happens if?” asks Wanders.
“If they really make the power plant, they’re not going to bury the nuclear waste then and there. They have to transport it and they can’t do it on the highway because it’s way too unsafe so they’re going to do it by rail. Is Yorkton willing to have a train with nuclear waste going through it at 6 o’clock in the morning?
“Still to this day, kids in Chernobyl get born; three hands, two heads, you name it,” says Wanders.
“It’s not like a gas tank that explodes and everything within a radius of two miles is waste land. This is way bigger than that, way bigger than anyone can imagine. I don’t think we should play with that, not if there’s other alternatives and we have other alternatives.”