HARDING: The Nuclear Future is Now!
Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 8:47 am Letter: The Nuclear Future is Now!
From: Stoody Harding
To: feedback@prairiedogmag.com
Cc: reception@prairiedogmag.com ; Ponops ...
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 4:22 PM
(See original "Behind the Uranium Curtain" Prairie Dog article below. Ed.)
Dear Prairiedog Editor:
Though I'm credited at the end of your feature "Behind The Uranium Curtain" by Paul Dechene, I, of course, did not see it before it went to print. The scenerios are all realistic because they are based on things that have already happened somewhere along the nuclear fuel system.
However, some technical, semantic and historical clarifications will perhaps deepen your readership's insights into this obselete, ecologically destructive technology.
1. I don't know whether the volume of the hypothetical spill at Cluff Lake in 2026 would be of the magnitude of the one that actually occurred at Church Rock, New Mexico in 1979. But we don't have to create hypothetical spills or radioactive leaching from uranium tailings in our north, since these are already well documented, e.g. in 2006 by the Sask Research Council (SRC) at the Gunnar uranium mine near Uranium City closed down since 1964 and still not decommissioned.
2. The tailings ponds weren't "lined with concrete", as your feature says. Rather the high-level radioactive wastes (e.g. Thorium. Radium) , which weren't to go into trailings disposal at Cluff Lake, were placed in concrete caskets, which were to be later buried to somehow separate them from the waterways. However, these concrete caskets ended up cracking and leaking in a few years (surprise, surprise), and the high-level radioactive wastes were then re-milled to get more uranium and gold, and then put in with the tailings; something earlier ruled out.
3. Your hypothetical story links leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma cancers to aboriginal "communities downstream from Cluff Lake." The direct link between lung cancer, and the radon gas that comes from Radium in the uranium decay series going on in the tailings, is long established. In fact, for decades, Canada's regulations have set permissable radon gas exposure well above what the science had already established as placiing people at greater risk. Furthermore, a 2008 study of villagers near uranium mines in India, done by the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), found that congenital deformations, and deaths of children from these; the incidence of cancer as cause of death; and shortened life expectancy, were all statistically significantly increased compared to other villlages. Because of the power of the nuclear "lobby" we avoid such systematic studies in communities near uranium mines as well as those, like Port Hope, Ontario, where uranium refining has occurred for 75 years.
4. The hypothetical Mankiewicz Report's conclusion in your feature "that government's should not be involved in the energy sector" deserves comment. I agree that it was a grave economic and ecologic mistake for the Blakeney NDP government in the 1980s to go into uranium mining joint-ventures. But crown corporations like Sask Power could play a positive role in shaping our conversion to renewables, such as is happening in places like Germany.
5. Your feature talks of how "plutonium in the French bomb was refined from our uranium". Actually plutonium comes from the nuclear fission process in a reactor, or from reprocessing of reactor spent fuel (i.e. nuclear wastes). This, by the way, is something that the recent Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) report said Saskatchewan should consider getting into, even though it's been a catatrophe at the Sellafield plant in England.
6. Your feature continues, "When it came out that by processing Saskatchewan uranium for reactor fuel the US was producing depleted uranium that was turned into weapons...." The story-line is accurate, though this occurs through enrichment (not processing) of uranium. And the story would be even more accurate if if had said it was "Canadian" uranium used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some of this uranium came from Port Radium, in the NWT (not Saskatchewan); while Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was a plutonium weapon. The two nuclear bombs immediately killed 180,000 people, and left thousands more injured, many to die from radiation-induced illnesses.
Finally, you having the Liberals being elected here after the Sask. Party was "20 years in power" ironically may be the most unrealistic thing in your feature. I wonder if the author considered having the Greens taking power?
Well done, and keep it up. We need many more such "fictional" investigations of what doesn't seem to make it into the corporate media.
Cheers, Jim Harding
. . . .
Behind The Uranium Curtain
http://www.planetsmag.com/content.php?v ... =1275&sc=1
COVER STORY · AUG 13 2009
A SPECULATIVE HISTORY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S NUCLEAR-POWERED FUTURE by Paul Dechene
Editor’s note: The following article is a work of fiction, although some elements are true. Nevertheless, the events described are based on actual incidents, reasonable assumptions and legitimate science. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real individuals is a co-incidence.
AUGUST 13, 2044 — “I’ve something I thought you’d get a kick out of,” says Penelope Bamberly as she roots around in her purse.
We’re meeting in The Grindhouse coffee shop in Saskatoon to discuss her late father, Noah Bamberly, for a feature I’m writing on Saskatchewan’s nuclear legacy. Bamberly Senior, of course, was the architect of Saskatchewan’s nuclear power grid — which, as Planet S readers will doubtless know, suffered the latest in a long series of setbacks Aug. 2 when Resources and Sustainability Minister Stella Avowdsen announced plans to decommission the Clearwater reactor next spring.
The oft-troubled, Generation Three CANDU reactor has been in service only 22 years —substantially less than its promised 50-year lifespan.
Privately, those close to Saskatchewan’s lone nuclear power plant admit the provincial government’s decision to pull the plug is not much of a surprise. The reactor has been closed since April to repair the latest in a series of heavy water leaks. Ultimately, Avowdsen’s announcement two weeks ago was just the latest embarrassment in a two-decade saga of cost overruns and unfulfilled promises.
As the man originally hired 30 years ago to sell nuclear power to the Saskatchewan electorate, Noah Bamberly’s name is practically synonymous with the Clearwater facility. Ironically, the news it is to be retired comes just a week before the one-year anniversary of his death.
And it’s the reason I’m meeting with his daughter , arguably Western Canada’s foremost oncologist — the vice-president of research at the Saskatoon Cancer Centre who, not coincidentally, has been a lifelong opponent of the nuclear power infrastructure her father helped build in Saskatchewan.
“If he’d still been alive, this would’ve killed him,” Bamberly told me by phone as we arranged this meeting.
“Here it is,” she says, drawing out a little tin toy. An antique, clockwork car. Its red and blue paint is chipped, fins swoop out from the sides. A bakelite driver juts from the top but his face has partly worn off, turning his expression ghastly.
Next to the driver is written, “Atom-O-Car”.
“He gave this to me after the first time one of our disagreements went public,” says Bamberly. “It had been sitting on his desk as long as I could remember. He never let me play with it. Said he had to be mindful of liability issues. The sharp edges, you see. That’s what counted as a joke with dad.”
She winds it up, lets it scoot across the table. Catches it just before it goes over the edge.
“The clockwork’s nearly a hundred years old,” she says. “It’ll probably never have to be decommissioned.”
SASKATCHEWAN’S ATOMIC SNAKE-OIL SALESMEN
Who were the men — and, in an anachronistic case of reactionary, inertial sexism, they were all men — who brought Saskatchewan’s long-incubated atomic dreams to fruition?
“They were all true believers, Bamberly included,” says Thomas Grey, author of The Nuclear Alphabet: From Ambition to Zealotry. “I call them acolytes of the peaceful atom. Swords into ploughshares and all that.
Bamberly was part of the second generation of nuclear engineers but he bought into the dream. They really wanted to redeem the technology to a public unwilling to forgive Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Hiroshima.”
But Grey is quick to add that Noah Bamberly did not become a player in the nuclear industry because of his engineering contributions.
“Yeah, he didn’t have a lot to do with that side of things,” says Grey. “Actually, I’d heard that he wasn’t even that good with numbers. There’s this story of him being asked at a public consultation what the half-life of thorium is — that’s a common waste product in uranium mine tailings and its half life is 76,000 years, pretty elementary stuff you’d think for a nuclear engineer — and he didn’t have a clue. Someone in the audience had to tell him.
“But he was a personable guy with a BSc after his name,” continues Grey. “The perfect public face for nuclear in Saskatchewan. So the provincial government made him Director of Communications for Resources and Sustainability.
“Later, Bruce Power made him a vice-president and kept him in front of the cameras as much as possible,” Grey adds. “He’s a big part of why the Saskatchewan’s Nuclear Future to 2050 document — that was the big policy statement that started us down that whole road — he’s largely why it survived all those years of opposition.”
The strategy laid out in the Nuclear Future document was an ambitious one inspired by recommendations in the Uranium Development Partnership report of 2009. While it was a lengthy and multifaceted plan, it could be boiled down to three main stages.
Stage one was to shore up Saskatchewan’s competitive position in the uranium mining sector. That was done by changing up the royalty structure to “lessen the financial burden on mining companies” when uranium prices are high, and also by “streamlining and simplifying” the licensing process for new mines. The result, of course, was lower royalty rates and higher profits for mining companies with strong connections to government.
But the chief step — and the most disturbing to environmentalists of the day, says Grey — was limiting the length of time an environmental assessment could take. The move crippled opponents’ ability to collect project-specific criticism and ultimately sabotaged early legal actions against the project.
Stage two was the Clearwater Reactor, which was originally slated to be completed by 2017. The expressed purpose was to supply Saskatchewan’s growing power needs while having some excess capacity for export.
“Right in the plan, they had them building electrical infrastructure into northern Alberta,” says Grey. “So it’s clear their goal all along was to make tarsands co-generation possible, if not inevitable.”
Stage three was probably the most contentious. In the document, it was written that the Saskatchewan government should simply provide support to any community desiring to take on a nuclear waste facility — and the implication to the public was always that this meant some suitable community in some other province.
But the wording of the document made it clear that the provincial government wasn’t averse to the idea of waste facilities inside Saskatchewan’s borders.
“It’s my feeling that there was a tacit understanding among those involved that a nuclear waste facility for Saskatchewan was something to be pursued,” says Grey. “And, the proof’s in the pudding. By 2030, all three goals had been pretty much achieved: mining deregulation (they’d never use those words but what else are you going to call it?), a nuclear reactor and nuclear waste disposal — with only the waste facility not built yet, sure — but far enough along in the approval process.”
He adds, “I know what you’re thinking; that was their plan for energy security? Well, they were investing a lot in heavy oil too. You have to remember, ideas about energy were pretty primitive back in those days.”
THE MYTH OF THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
“It’s the engineer’s tragic flaw,” says Canadian Democratic Party senator Winston Train. “They can’t cope with the rules changing. They go out and assess a site and build their stuff on it assuming that’s the way it is and that’s how it’ll always be. Can’t imagine things getting worse than their worst-case scenario.
“Bamberly and all the [Department of Natural] Resources people were like that with us,” says Train. “They had managed to get some of the chiefs on side with their mining plans and just assumed we’d have their back through thick and thin. Or at least keep our mouths shut.
“But the Cluff Lake leak was Church Lake all over again, only worse.”
The Church Lake incident Train refers to was a notorious tailings dam breach in New Mexico in 1979. A hundred million gallons of radioactive water and 1,100 tons of radioactive tailings spilled out of the Church Lake tailing pond in a flash flood that travelled 60 miles down the Rio Perco River.
The main victims of the spill were the local Navajo population, whose livestock drank from the contaminated waters.
It was a similar situation in 2026 with Cluff Lake — except that the quantity of radioactive waste washed into the natural water system was much larger.
“I don’t think it was 40 days and nights of rain straight, but it was bloody biblical,” recalls Train. “The Cluff Lake site had all this mining waste, really high grade ores, very radioactive, thorium and suchlike, sitting in piles there dating back to the ’70s. You look at the environmental assessments for the site; they’d considered the effect of heavy rains, like maybe 10 inches. But nowhere did their engineers say, ‘here’s what to expect if it rains off and on all through July, then you get three weeks of torrential downpour to kick off August.’
“Back in the 20th century, that never happened in Saskatchewan,” he says. “But now, the climate’s changed everything. And as usual, the engineers are playing catch-up to the science.”
And, Train notes, it wasn’t until the Cluff Lake Inquiry and the full weight of an independent investigation that the public discovered just how much more dangerous things had become in the uranium mining sector.
“This could have happened with the Key Lake tailing piles, or the new ones up by Cigar Lake. Still could,” he says. “Next time, if it’s Cigar Lake that’ll be a far more serious deal because they were pulling the purest uranium on the planet out of that mine until — well, you know — and that means the leftovers are extra toxic.”
Train points out that the inquiry found significant instances of radioactive contamination that had been happening for years across the uranium mining sector — contamination that was consistently covered-up or overlooked.
“The permafrost had been disappearing for decades,” says Train. “Tailing ponds had been lined with plastic, concrete, clay but everything was shifting around, cracks appearing. Turned out there’d been radioactive water seeping into underground systems for years.”
In the end, a report drafted largely by Noah Bamberly found no wrongdoing on the part of the mining sector beyond the usual wear and tear on fail-safe systems that wind up overlooked by complacent employees.
“That’s precisely my point,” says Train. “If your safety measures are running at peak efficiency to the end of time then the engineers are right, there’s nothing to worry about. But mine waste is around, and dangerous, for centuries — and things change.”
According to Train, the Cluff Lake findings had a lot to do with Saskatchewan’s so-called Aboriginal Resurgence.
“We were mad, of course,” he says. “We remembered Church Lake and the Key Lake spill in ’84. We knew how it was always our people who suffered first. Look at the numbers — it’s 17 years on and aboriginal communities downstream from Cluff Lake have leukemia numbers 40 per cent higher than the general population. Lymphoma and myeloma cancers, it’s the same thing.
“Meanwhile, our numbers had been on the rise and our anger couldn’t be ignored this time, says Train “There were almost 400,000 of us in the province by 2026, over a quarter of the population back then. Our average age had started skewing upwards and we’d always been politically active, so one in five MLAs either had aboriginal heritage or some kind of close connection to the First Nations community. No big surprise then that the government would get upset about the inquiry’s findings. It was a bi-partisan shitstorm.” He pauses. “You probably shouldn’t put that in your article.”
I tell him I probably will.
“Well, do what you want. It was a shitstorm, and they were totally unprepared for it,” he says. “We brought down the Sask. Party after 20 years in power. Got the Liberals of all people elected, because everybody knew the mines were the fault of the Democratic Party of Saskatchewan as much as anyone else’s.”
“It was a powerful moment for the aboriginal community in Canada. Our voice shamed a government and our votes drove them from office.
“You should have heard talk radio,” adds Train. “The racism was naked. They said we were taking over the province.
“Well, maybe we are,” he says. “But look at what you’ve left us with. Thanks for that.”
THE GREAT URANIUM TAXPAYER BACKLASH
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re ‘behind’ the Get the Nuke Out of Saskatchewan campaign. Makes it sound so conspiratorial,” says Tad MacMillan, executive director of the Saskatchewan Taxpayer’s League. “But yes, we do provide them with administrative support, access to our mailing list, that sort of thing.”
MacMillan argues the Get the Nuke Out campaign is a reflection of grassroots citizen anger over the Mankiewicz Report from 2039, which tallied up government financial support for the province’s uranium-related industries — including the Clearwater plant and nuclear power generation in general, public infrastructure built to support uranium-based industries, decommissioning costs and environmental remediation — and demonstrated they have been a considerable burden for the public coffers and are unlikely to ever become self-sustaining.
It seemed that within hours of the release of the Mankiewicz Report, support for nuclear in the province began to dissolve and constituencies traditionally associated with a pro-uranium stance found their desire for fiscal responsibility drove them into the arms of the anti-nuke movement. The Get the Nuke Out promotional literature even boasted how many in their organization held Saskatchewan Party and Conservative Party memberships.
MacMillan, meanwhile, says the Mankiewicz Report vindicates the position his organization has held all along: that governments should not be involved in the energy sector.
“The STL applauds the government’s decision to close the Clearwater Reactor,” says MacMillan. “We only wish that earlier governments had shown a little foresight and never burdened the taxpayer with the nuclear boondoggle to begin with.”
“I mean, what were they thinking? Their ‘plan’,” says MacMillan, making air quotes, “was to follow Ontario’s lead on this? We were to stand back and watch while they build a third-generation CANDU — a dubious technology that the rest of the world had more or less turned their back on by 2010. And we buy one of our own, out of what? Some kind of patriotism because AECL was a Canadian company?
“So, we let Ontario build this over-complicated, out-of-fashion reactor at Darlington, then we follow along a year later but we’re supposed to somehow learn from their mistakes? Because of course, Ontario has such a stellar record with nuclear power.
“The Nuclear Future document said we were letting Ontario run the First of a Kind Risk. Fine,” says MacMillan. “The Generation Three CANDU design was new, and no one in North America had built any kind of reactor for over 50 years, so the pool of people with the needed expertise was limited. But for Saskatchewan, letting Ontario trailblaze meant when it came time to hire people to build Clearwater, the best and brightest were all already working on Darlington.
“And Nuclear Future also ignored the fact that there are lots of different ways to get yourself a $40 billion cost overrun and turn that into a billion and a half deficit every year for 22 years,” adds MacMillan. Maybe we avoided some of Ontario’s pitfalls but we sure managed to find plenty of our own.”
THE COMPLEXITY SINKHOLE
“When France used a tactical nuke on Cameroon in ’32, the rest of the world said that was it, we’re finished with nuclear fission,” says Penelope Bamberly. “The Simpsons was finally cancelled in 2033 because no one could stand the sight of even a cartoon nuclear reactor.”
“Saskatchewan, of all places, should have been doubly disgusted as the plutonium in the French bomb was refined from our uranium,” she says. “But it didn’t even slow us down.
“When it came out that by processing Saskatchewan uranium for reactor fuel the U.S. was producing depleted uranium that was turned into weapons it was using in Afghanistan and Iraq, the news didn’t even phase us, says Bamberly. “And there’s always been this cloud of amnesia around the fact that there was Saskatchewan uranium in Fatman and Little Boy.
So much blood on our hands but we remain blissfully unaware. Such is life behind the Uranium Curtain.
“Even when the evidence is right in our backyard — the Cluff Lake Disaster, the Key Lake spills, the Cigar Lake Incident — none of that could turn us from the dream of an Atom-O-Car in every driveway,” she says, holding up the tin toy.
“In the end what killed nuclear in Saskatchewan was that it was simply too expensive — some accountant finally showed that pulling uranium out of the ground and burning it up just cost the taxpayer too much money.
“Of course it did. It’s called the Complexity Sinkhole,” she says, referring to the title of an article she wrote for LeaderPost.com back in 2017. “The physics of a nuclear chain reaction is incredibly complicated. You can’t just dunk fissioning uranium in water to power our generators and hope all will go well without multiple safeguards. On its own, uranium can’t even be handled without heavy layers of protection. Why is that? Because its structure is so complicated it can’t hold together: that’s what radioactivity is. Complexity breaking down.
“All this complexity at every step in a process makes for an inherently unstable system,” Bamberly says. “Coping with it is bound to be fraught with inefficiencies. And danger. That’s the star we hitched our dreams on.”
“Meanwhile, most of Europe got over their infatuation with the atom ages ago and — whub whub whub,” she says, her finger tracing circles in the air, “they solved their energy problems, their greenhouse gas emission problems with windmills. What could be simpler?
“The Saskatchewan government just announced they’ll be starting construction on a wind farm project just south of here,” concludes Bamberly, sipping the last of her coffee “They’re saying we have some of the best terrain in the world for harvesting wind energy. What’s the slogan they have for the project? ‘Now, as always, an energy leader.’
“It’s sad, really. So much time and energy wasted.”
Special thanks to Jim Harding, author of Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System (Fernwood Publishing), whose knowledge and work contributed greatly to this article.
From: Stoody Harding
To: feedback@prairiedogmag.com
Cc: reception@prairiedogmag.com ; Ponops ...
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 4:22 PM
(See original "Behind the Uranium Curtain" Prairie Dog article below. Ed.)
Dear Prairiedog Editor:
Though I'm credited at the end of your feature "Behind The Uranium Curtain" by Paul Dechene, I, of course, did not see it before it went to print. The scenerios are all realistic because they are based on things that have already happened somewhere along the nuclear fuel system.
However, some technical, semantic and historical clarifications will perhaps deepen your readership's insights into this obselete, ecologically destructive technology.
1. I don't know whether the volume of the hypothetical spill at Cluff Lake in 2026 would be of the magnitude of the one that actually occurred at Church Rock, New Mexico in 1979. But we don't have to create hypothetical spills or radioactive leaching from uranium tailings in our north, since these are already well documented, e.g. in 2006 by the Sask Research Council (SRC) at the Gunnar uranium mine near Uranium City closed down since 1964 and still not decommissioned.
2. The tailings ponds weren't "lined with concrete", as your feature says. Rather the high-level radioactive wastes (e.g. Thorium. Radium) , which weren't to go into trailings disposal at Cluff Lake, were placed in concrete caskets, which were to be later buried to somehow separate them from the waterways. However, these concrete caskets ended up cracking and leaking in a few years (surprise, surprise), and the high-level radioactive wastes were then re-milled to get more uranium and gold, and then put in with the tailings; something earlier ruled out.
3. Your hypothetical story links leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma cancers to aboriginal "communities downstream from Cluff Lake." The direct link between lung cancer, and the radon gas that comes from Radium in the uranium decay series going on in the tailings, is long established. In fact, for decades, Canada's regulations have set permissable radon gas exposure well above what the science had already established as placiing people at greater risk. Furthermore, a 2008 study of villagers near uranium mines in India, done by the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), found that congenital deformations, and deaths of children from these; the incidence of cancer as cause of death; and shortened life expectancy, were all statistically significantly increased compared to other villlages. Because of the power of the nuclear "lobby" we avoid such systematic studies in communities near uranium mines as well as those, like Port Hope, Ontario, where uranium refining has occurred for 75 years.
4. The hypothetical Mankiewicz Report's conclusion in your feature "that government's should not be involved in the energy sector" deserves comment. I agree that it was a grave economic and ecologic mistake for the Blakeney NDP government in the 1980s to go into uranium mining joint-ventures. But crown corporations like Sask Power could play a positive role in shaping our conversion to renewables, such as is happening in places like Germany.
5. Your feature talks of how "plutonium in the French bomb was refined from our uranium". Actually plutonium comes from the nuclear fission process in a reactor, or from reprocessing of reactor spent fuel (i.e. nuclear wastes). This, by the way, is something that the recent Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) report said Saskatchewan should consider getting into, even though it's been a catatrophe at the Sellafield plant in England.
6. Your feature continues, "When it came out that by processing Saskatchewan uranium for reactor fuel the US was producing depleted uranium that was turned into weapons...." The story-line is accurate, though this occurs through enrichment (not processing) of uranium. And the story would be even more accurate if if had said it was "Canadian" uranium used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some of this uranium came from Port Radium, in the NWT (not Saskatchewan); while Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was a plutonium weapon. The two nuclear bombs immediately killed 180,000 people, and left thousands more injured, many to die from radiation-induced illnesses.
Finally, you having the Liberals being elected here after the Sask. Party was "20 years in power" ironically may be the most unrealistic thing in your feature. I wonder if the author considered having the Greens taking power?
Well done, and keep it up. We need many more such "fictional" investigations of what doesn't seem to make it into the corporate media.
Cheers, Jim Harding
. . . .
Behind The Uranium Curtain
http://www.planetsmag.com/content.php?v ... =1275&sc=1
COVER STORY · AUG 13 2009
A SPECULATIVE HISTORY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S NUCLEAR-POWERED FUTURE by Paul Dechene
Editor’s note: The following article is a work of fiction, although some elements are true. Nevertheless, the events described are based on actual incidents, reasonable assumptions and legitimate science. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real individuals is a co-incidence.
AUGUST 13, 2044 — “I’ve something I thought you’d get a kick out of,” says Penelope Bamberly as she roots around in her purse.
We’re meeting in The Grindhouse coffee shop in Saskatoon to discuss her late father, Noah Bamberly, for a feature I’m writing on Saskatchewan’s nuclear legacy. Bamberly Senior, of course, was the architect of Saskatchewan’s nuclear power grid — which, as Planet S readers will doubtless know, suffered the latest in a long series of setbacks Aug. 2 when Resources and Sustainability Minister Stella Avowdsen announced plans to decommission the Clearwater reactor next spring.
The oft-troubled, Generation Three CANDU reactor has been in service only 22 years —substantially less than its promised 50-year lifespan.
Privately, those close to Saskatchewan’s lone nuclear power plant admit the provincial government’s decision to pull the plug is not much of a surprise. The reactor has been closed since April to repair the latest in a series of heavy water leaks. Ultimately, Avowdsen’s announcement two weeks ago was just the latest embarrassment in a two-decade saga of cost overruns and unfulfilled promises.
As the man originally hired 30 years ago to sell nuclear power to the Saskatchewan electorate, Noah Bamberly’s name is practically synonymous with the Clearwater facility. Ironically, the news it is to be retired comes just a week before the one-year anniversary of his death.
And it’s the reason I’m meeting with his daughter , arguably Western Canada’s foremost oncologist — the vice-president of research at the Saskatoon Cancer Centre who, not coincidentally, has been a lifelong opponent of the nuclear power infrastructure her father helped build in Saskatchewan.
“If he’d still been alive, this would’ve killed him,” Bamberly told me by phone as we arranged this meeting.
“Here it is,” she says, drawing out a little tin toy. An antique, clockwork car. Its red and blue paint is chipped, fins swoop out from the sides. A bakelite driver juts from the top but his face has partly worn off, turning his expression ghastly.
Next to the driver is written, “Atom-O-Car”.
“He gave this to me after the first time one of our disagreements went public,” says Bamberly. “It had been sitting on his desk as long as I could remember. He never let me play with it. Said he had to be mindful of liability issues. The sharp edges, you see. That’s what counted as a joke with dad.”
She winds it up, lets it scoot across the table. Catches it just before it goes over the edge.
“The clockwork’s nearly a hundred years old,” she says. “It’ll probably never have to be decommissioned.”
SASKATCHEWAN’S ATOMIC SNAKE-OIL SALESMEN
Who were the men — and, in an anachronistic case of reactionary, inertial sexism, they were all men — who brought Saskatchewan’s long-incubated atomic dreams to fruition?
“They were all true believers, Bamberly included,” says Thomas Grey, author of The Nuclear Alphabet: From Ambition to Zealotry. “I call them acolytes of the peaceful atom. Swords into ploughshares and all that.
Bamberly was part of the second generation of nuclear engineers but he bought into the dream. They really wanted to redeem the technology to a public unwilling to forgive Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Hiroshima.”
But Grey is quick to add that Noah Bamberly did not become a player in the nuclear industry because of his engineering contributions.
“Yeah, he didn’t have a lot to do with that side of things,” says Grey. “Actually, I’d heard that he wasn’t even that good with numbers. There’s this story of him being asked at a public consultation what the half-life of thorium is — that’s a common waste product in uranium mine tailings and its half life is 76,000 years, pretty elementary stuff you’d think for a nuclear engineer — and he didn’t have a clue. Someone in the audience had to tell him.
“But he was a personable guy with a BSc after his name,” continues Grey. “The perfect public face for nuclear in Saskatchewan. So the provincial government made him Director of Communications for Resources and Sustainability.
“Later, Bruce Power made him a vice-president and kept him in front of the cameras as much as possible,” Grey adds. “He’s a big part of why the Saskatchewan’s Nuclear Future to 2050 document — that was the big policy statement that started us down that whole road — he’s largely why it survived all those years of opposition.”
The strategy laid out in the Nuclear Future document was an ambitious one inspired by recommendations in the Uranium Development Partnership report of 2009. While it was a lengthy and multifaceted plan, it could be boiled down to three main stages.
Stage one was to shore up Saskatchewan’s competitive position in the uranium mining sector. That was done by changing up the royalty structure to “lessen the financial burden on mining companies” when uranium prices are high, and also by “streamlining and simplifying” the licensing process for new mines. The result, of course, was lower royalty rates and higher profits for mining companies with strong connections to government.
But the chief step — and the most disturbing to environmentalists of the day, says Grey — was limiting the length of time an environmental assessment could take. The move crippled opponents’ ability to collect project-specific criticism and ultimately sabotaged early legal actions against the project.
Stage two was the Clearwater Reactor, which was originally slated to be completed by 2017. The expressed purpose was to supply Saskatchewan’s growing power needs while having some excess capacity for export.
“Right in the plan, they had them building electrical infrastructure into northern Alberta,” says Grey. “So it’s clear their goal all along was to make tarsands co-generation possible, if not inevitable.”
Stage three was probably the most contentious. In the document, it was written that the Saskatchewan government should simply provide support to any community desiring to take on a nuclear waste facility — and the implication to the public was always that this meant some suitable community in some other province.
But the wording of the document made it clear that the provincial government wasn’t averse to the idea of waste facilities inside Saskatchewan’s borders.
“It’s my feeling that there was a tacit understanding among those involved that a nuclear waste facility for Saskatchewan was something to be pursued,” says Grey. “And, the proof’s in the pudding. By 2030, all three goals had been pretty much achieved: mining deregulation (they’d never use those words but what else are you going to call it?), a nuclear reactor and nuclear waste disposal — with only the waste facility not built yet, sure — but far enough along in the approval process.”
He adds, “I know what you’re thinking; that was their plan for energy security? Well, they were investing a lot in heavy oil too. You have to remember, ideas about energy were pretty primitive back in those days.”
THE MYTH OF THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
“It’s the engineer’s tragic flaw,” says Canadian Democratic Party senator Winston Train. “They can’t cope with the rules changing. They go out and assess a site and build their stuff on it assuming that’s the way it is and that’s how it’ll always be. Can’t imagine things getting worse than their worst-case scenario.
“Bamberly and all the [Department of Natural] Resources people were like that with us,” says Train. “They had managed to get some of the chiefs on side with their mining plans and just assumed we’d have their back through thick and thin. Or at least keep our mouths shut.
“But the Cluff Lake leak was Church Lake all over again, only worse.”
The Church Lake incident Train refers to was a notorious tailings dam breach in New Mexico in 1979. A hundred million gallons of radioactive water and 1,100 tons of radioactive tailings spilled out of the Church Lake tailing pond in a flash flood that travelled 60 miles down the Rio Perco River.
The main victims of the spill were the local Navajo population, whose livestock drank from the contaminated waters.
It was a similar situation in 2026 with Cluff Lake — except that the quantity of radioactive waste washed into the natural water system was much larger.
“I don’t think it was 40 days and nights of rain straight, but it was bloody biblical,” recalls Train. “The Cluff Lake site had all this mining waste, really high grade ores, very radioactive, thorium and suchlike, sitting in piles there dating back to the ’70s. You look at the environmental assessments for the site; they’d considered the effect of heavy rains, like maybe 10 inches. But nowhere did their engineers say, ‘here’s what to expect if it rains off and on all through July, then you get three weeks of torrential downpour to kick off August.’
“Back in the 20th century, that never happened in Saskatchewan,” he says. “But now, the climate’s changed everything. And as usual, the engineers are playing catch-up to the science.”
And, Train notes, it wasn’t until the Cluff Lake Inquiry and the full weight of an independent investigation that the public discovered just how much more dangerous things had become in the uranium mining sector.
“This could have happened with the Key Lake tailing piles, or the new ones up by Cigar Lake. Still could,” he says. “Next time, if it’s Cigar Lake that’ll be a far more serious deal because they were pulling the purest uranium on the planet out of that mine until — well, you know — and that means the leftovers are extra toxic.”
Train points out that the inquiry found significant instances of radioactive contamination that had been happening for years across the uranium mining sector — contamination that was consistently covered-up or overlooked.
“The permafrost had been disappearing for decades,” says Train. “Tailing ponds had been lined with plastic, concrete, clay but everything was shifting around, cracks appearing. Turned out there’d been radioactive water seeping into underground systems for years.”
In the end, a report drafted largely by Noah Bamberly found no wrongdoing on the part of the mining sector beyond the usual wear and tear on fail-safe systems that wind up overlooked by complacent employees.
“That’s precisely my point,” says Train. “If your safety measures are running at peak efficiency to the end of time then the engineers are right, there’s nothing to worry about. But mine waste is around, and dangerous, for centuries — and things change.”
According to Train, the Cluff Lake findings had a lot to do with Saskatchewan’s so-called Aboriginal Resurgence.
“We were mad, of course,” he says. “We remembered Church Lake and the Key Lake spill in ’84. We knew how it was always our people who suffered first. Look at the numbers — it’s 17 years on and aboriginal communities downstream from Cluff Lake have leukemia numbers 40 per cent higher than the general population. Lymphoma and myeloma cancers, it’s the same thing.
“Meanwhile, our numbers had been on the rise and our anger couldn’t be ignored this time, says Train “There were almost 400,000 of us in the province by 2026, over a quarter of the population back then. Our average age had started skewing upwards and we’d always been politically active, so one in five MLAs either had aboriginal heritage or some kind of close connection to the First Nations community. No big surprise then that the government would get upset about the inquiry’s findings. It was a bi-partisan shitstorm.” He pauses. “You probably shouldn’t put that in your article.”
I tell him I probably will.
“Well, do what you want. It was a shitstorm, and they were totally unprepared for it,” he says. “We brought down the Sask. Party after 20 years in power. Got the Liberals of all people elected, because everybody knew the mines were the fault of the Democratic Party of Saskatchewan as much as anyone else’s.”
“It was a powerful moment for the aboriginal community in Canada. Our voice shamed a government and our votes drove them from office.
“You should have heard talk radio,” adds Train. “The racism was naked. They said we were taking over the province.
“Well, maybe we are,” he says. “But look at what you’ve left us with. Thanks for that.”
THE GREAT URANIUM TAXPAYER BACKLASH
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re ‘behind’ the Get the Nuke Out of Saskatchewan campaign. Makes it sound so conspiratorial,” says Tad MacMillan, executive director of the Saskatchewan Taxpayer’s League. “But yes, we do provide them with administrative support, access to our mailing list, that sort of thing.”
MacMillan argues the Get the Nuke Out campaign is a reflection of grassroots citizen anger over the Mankiewicz Report from 2039, which tallied up government financial support for the province’s uranium-related industries — including the Clearwater plant and nuclear power generation in general, public infrastructure built to support uranium-based industries, decommissioning costs and environmental remediation — and demonstrated they have been a considerable burden for the public coffers and are unlikely to ever become self-sustaining.
It seemed that within hours of the release of the Mankiewicz Report, support for nuclear in the province began to dissolve and constituencies traditionally associated with a pro-uranium stance found their desire for fiscal responsibility drove them into the arms of the anti-nuke movement. The Get the Nuke Out promotional literature even boasted how many in their organization held Saskatchewan Party and Conservative Party memberships.
MacMillan, meanwhile, says the Mankiewicz Report vindicates the position his organization has held all along: that governments should not be involved in the energy sector.
“The STL applauds the government’s decision to close the Clearwater Reactor,” says MacMillan. “We only wish that earlier governments had shown a little foresight and never burdened the taxpayer with the nuclear boondoggle to begin with.”
“I mean, what were they thinking? Their ‘plan’,” says MacMillan, making air quotes, “was to follow Ontario’s lead on this? We were to stand back and watch while they build a third-generation CANDU — a dubious technology that the rest of the world had more or less turned their back on by 2010. And we buy one of our own, out of what? Some kind of patriotism because AECL was a Canadian company?
“So, we let Ontario build this over-complicated, out-of-fashion reactor at Darlington, then we follow along a year later but we’re supposed to somehow learn from their mistakes? Because of course, Ontario has such a stellar record with nuclear power.
“The Nuclear Future document said we were letting Ontario run the First of a Kind Risk. Fine,” says MacMillan. “The Generation Three CANDU design was new, and no one in North America had built any kind of reactor for over 50 years, so the pool of people with the needed expertise was limited. But for Saskatchewan, letting Ontario trailblaze meant when it came time to hire people to build Clearwater, the best and brightest were all already working on Darlington.
“And Nuclear Future also ignored the fact that there are lots of different ways to get yourself a $40 billion cost overrun and turn that into a billion and a half deficit every year for 22 years,” adds MacMillan. Maybe we avoided some of Ontario’s pitfalls but we sure managed to find plenty of our own.”
THE COMPLEXITY SINKHOLE
“When France used a tactical nuke on Cameroon in ’32, the rest of the world said that was it, we’re finished with nuclear fission,” says Penelope Bamberly. “The Simpsons was finally cancelled in 2033 because no one could stand the sight of even a cartoon nuclear reactor.”
“Saskatchewan, of all places, should have been doubly disgusted as the plutonium in the French bomb was refined from our uranium,” she says. “But it didn’t even slow us down.
“When it came out that by processing Saskatchewan uranium for reactor fuel the U.S. was producing depleted uranium that was turned into weapons it was using in Afghanistan and Iraq, the news didn’t even phase us, says Bamberly. “And there’s always been this cloud of amnesia around the fact that there was Saskatchewan uranium in Fatman and Little Boy.
So much blood on our hands but we remain blissfully unaware. Such is life behind the Uranium Curtain.
“Even when the evidence is right in our backyard — the Cluff Lake Disaster, the Key Lake spills, the Cigar Lake Incident — none of that could turn us from the dream of an Atom-O-Car in every driveway,” she says, holding up the tin toy.
“In the end what killed nuclear in Saskatchewan was that it was simply too expensive — some accountant finally showed that pulling uranium out of the ground and burning it up just cost the taxpayer too much money.
“Of course it did. It’s called the Complexity Sinkhole,” she says, referring to the title of an article she wrote for LeaderPost.com back in 2017. “The physics of a nuclear chain reaction is incredibly complicated. You can’t just dunk fissioning uranium in water to power our generators and hope all will go well without multiple safeguards. On its own, uranium can’t even be handled without heavy layers of protection. Why is that? Because its structure is so complicated it can’t hold together: that’s what radioactivity is. Complexity breaking down.
“All this complexity at every step in a process makes for an inherently unstable system,” Bamberly says. “Coping with it is bound to be fraught with inefficiencies. And danger. That’s the star we hitched our dreams on.”
“Meanwhile, most of Europe got over their infatuation with the atom ages ago and — whub whub whub,” she says, her finger tracing circles in the air, “they solved their energy problems, their greenhouse gas emission problems with windmills. What could be simpler?
“The Saskatchewan government just announced they’ll be starting construction on a wind farm project just south of here,” concludes Bamberly, sipping the last of her coffee “They’re saying we have some of the best terrain in the world for harvesting wind energy. What’s the slogan they have for the project? ‘Now, as always, an energy leader.’
“It’s sad, really. So much time and energy wasted.”
Special thanks to Jim Harding, author of Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System (Fernwood Publishing), whose knowledge and work contributed greatly to this article.