For a minute, there, I thought we had gone back in time. Here I was, just working away at home, with the radio on in the background, and I hear news of a worrisome medical isotope shortage, what with the Chalk River nuclear plant going offline for two months.
But, no, there were no eddies in the space-time continuum. It wasn’t a case of deja-vu. Chalk River, a fifty-year-old nuclear reactor that’s situated over a fault line, has been taken offline for safety upgrades, raising concerns about a shortage of medical isotopes, as this is one of the very few reactors in the world where this work is done.
Why, it seems like only eighteen months ago that we were having this same debate, when the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission took the Chalk River facility offline, raising fears of the medical isotope shortage. And when questioned by the government, the head of the CNSC, Linda Keen, basically responded that she was doing her job as part of an arms-length agency whose mandate it was to ensure the safety of the Chalk River facility and the surrounding countryside.
Rather than simply take on the political task of ruling that the shortage in medical isotopes was more important to address than some overdue safety retrofits, the Conservatives, particularly Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn attacked Keen and her agency. Conservative party supporters impugned Keen’s credentials and her impartiality, suggesting that she was a Liberal Party hack. It was a blatantly partisan attack on what was supposed to be a non-partisan agency. Keen was eventually forced to resign, and is pursuing the issue of her dismissal in the courts.
Now, however, we see that Chalk River had to be shut down on May 14 after a power outage in eastern Ontario and western Quebec. The very next day, a leak in the heavy water reservoir was detected, and the facility must remain offline while the maintenance work is completed. Our supply of medical isotopes might not last beyond the end of this month.
One wonders if this work would have been required if Atomic Energy of Canada Limited had been able to do the retrofits ordered by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission eighteen months ago, if the government hadn’t forced the order to be rescinded in the most arrogant and partisan manner possible. And, it’s worth pointing out: the amount of work done over the past eighteen months to bring Chalk River up to current safety standards appears to be negligible. Likewise, there does not seem to have been much effort on the part of this government to set up an alternative facility to generate medical isotopes, leaving all the eggs in one basket.
It would seem that not only has Linda Keen been vindicated, but the amount of attention the government gave this matter once the controversy died down has been minimal. This certainly raises questions about the competence of this government, both in terms of maintaining our supply of medical isotopes, and in maintaining the safe operation of our aging nuclear reactors.
So, if this is the case, will Gary Lunn, or anybody within the Conservative caucus apologize to Linda Keen? Will those supporters who questioned Ms. Keen’s competence or her impartiality step forward to acknowledge their mistake?
Somehow, I suspect I may have to wait a while.
Further Reading
May 21, 2009 11:14 PM
Yup. If responsible government is to mean anything, the relevant ministers should resign. Or maybe just Harper. Either way…
May 22, 2009 7:45 AM
Harper is way too arrogant to admit to a mistake. Interesting in light of the Conservative attack ads. Hey what’s wrong with “Iggy” being out of the country for more than 30 years? It makes him cosmopolitan - a citizen of the world well-qualified to deal with global crisis like the current economic one. Although Harper is a university trained economist and like “Iggy” an intellectual, all his experience is relatively insular; much of it with the Citizen’s Coalition. Another point, much of Wayne Gretzky’s hockey experience has been outside Canada; does that make him any less Canadian? Look at “Iggy’s” family, as Canadian as they come - his grandfather wrote Lament for a Nation!
May 22, 2009 9:53 AM
While I’m with you on “minister should resign,” or at least offer a very sincere apology, I’m not sure about setting up alternative plants. Aren’t nuke plants fantastically expensive to set up? What would “the populace” say if the government said “Hey, we’re going to set up a $20 billion nuclear plant whose primary raison d’etre won’t even be to eliminate some coal plants”? Even if it did recoup the investment within, say, 10 years?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those Greens who’s pro-nuke, but I really can’t see that flying very far.
May 22, 2009 11:24 AM
I don’t think an additional reactor should be set up to make up the shortfall. Rather, if this had been a planned maintenance shut down factor, we could have informed the Europeans to have them increase their output - as they offered to do last time Chalk River was shut down.
And yes, I’d like to see some apologies - and some action! - as well.
May 23, 2009 8:02 PM
From what I’ve read, this shut-down is for fixes completely unrelated to the 2007 shut-down extension. In 2007, there were issues with the back-up power system for the regulators that prevent the reactor from going into uncontrolled chain reaction. This time, there’s corrosion in the reactors. If the shut-down in 2007 had gone according to plan, this one would still have happened.
The point is that I don’t think this incident is any new reason to apologize to Linda Keen or any reason for her to be vindicated. The reasons for an apology must come out of the circumstances surrounding her firing, and vindication must come from us learning all the details of the situation so that we can ascertain the appropriateness of what was done by the government. The government’s response certainly seems to have been overly-partisan and an attempt to defect attention from the Auditor-General’s criticisms of the government’s handling of the AECL. However, there were experts on the government’s side of this issue, and we don’t really know what they stood argued—the government decided to fight the closer on partisan lines rather than meritorious ones.
I’m also a bit wary to blame the government for what they’ve done to increase radioisotope supplies. Many places in Canada have private facilities to produce their medical imaging radioisotopes (e.g. most of Alberta’s supplies are produced by a company in Edmonton). It’s not obvious to me whether it should be up to the government or the private sector to produce more.
As a final comment, it is very easy to overgeneralize in politics. We have a government that is indisputably very partisan (too partisan for my liking, though this is probably in part a symptom of being in a narrowly-competitive political landscape). The government’s partisanship has at times led to them making decisions for political advantage rather than the most meritorious decision. But while we can show this clearly in some situations, we need to remember that it isn’t the case in every situation (the government’s extension of the Afghan mission is a good example of bucking public opinion and likely a reflection of policy conviction). Just because the government sometimes looks and acts very partisan doesn’t mean that they’re acting out of partisanship; they may be acting on a merit-based decision, but have decided to exploit a partisan opportunity from it as a bonus.
The only way to assess the competence of a decision is to study the merit behind it. Let’s be wary of reflexively jumping to the political explanation. If we do, we become just as bad as we blame the CPC, Liberals, NDP, and Bloc of being.
June 7, 2009 10:29 AM
Let’s be honest, how stupid is it to build a nuclear reactor over a fault line?
June 9, 2009 12:56 PM
Well, to be fair to the people who set up Chalk River, our understanding of the area’s tectonics fifty years ago wasn’t as good as it is now.