Wednesday-Night

If ever there were two categories that we would not wish to identify for the same topic, they would be nuclear and politics. Regrettably, the controversy over the AECL Chalk River facility and oversight by the Nuclear Safety Commission falls into both. We believe that the public and partisan attack on a career civil servant by the Minister is beyond the pale and should be filed under B for Bullying. We trust that the firing of Ms Keen will come back to haunt the PM.
Background document: A Framework for the Application of Precaution in Science-based Decision Making about Risk

February 14
(National Post)Joint review launched into Chalk River shutdown
OTTAWA — A special review team will try to get to the bottom of why the Chalk River, Ont., nuclear reactor that produces life-saving medical isotopes was shut down in late November, prompting a medical and political crisis.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which operates the nuclear plant in eastern Ontario, and its regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, announced Thursday they will conduct a joint review of the circumstances that led up to the extended closure of the NRU reactor.

February 6
TORONTO - The Ottawa-based supplier of medical isotopes made at the federal nuclear facility in Chalk River, Ont. rejects allegations made in a recent Canadian Medical Association Journal article, calling them “untrue.” Press Release
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s senior vice-president says there were no safety problems that required the shutdown of AECL’s research reactor in December, a move that led to a shortage of medical isotopes and the firing of Ottawa’s top nuclear safety regulator.
At a parliamentary committee yesterday, AECL’s Brian McGee told MPs that the Chalk River plant had operated safely for 50 years, that the additional safeguards required by the regulator were modest and that the fallout from a “worst case” accident would be minor.
February 5
Doubt cast on assertion that thousands of lives at risk in Chalk River fiasco
OTTAWA - Doubt was cast Tuesday on the Harper government’s assertion that thousands of lives could have been lost if it hadn’t forced resumption of isotope production at the Chalk River nuclear reactor.
Dr. Karen Gulenchyn, a nuclear medicine expert who helped advise federal Health Minister Tony Clement during the isotope shortage last December, said it’s “very difficult” to speculate on what might have happened to patients whose diagnostic tests were delayed due to the shortage.
Her cautious appraisal of the situation was in contrast to the bold assertions by Clement and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn. They have raised the spectre of massive loss of life to justify the government’s decision last December to force the reopening of the reactor over the objections of Canada’s nuclear safety regulator.
February 4
Obviously the fat lady has not begun to warble!
Canada snubbed international efforts to protect isotope supply, report says
(The Canadian Press) Canada could have avoided the recent medical isotope crisis if supplier MDS Nordion had joined international efforts to co-ordinate global production, a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal says.
The article Monday in the journal said MDS Nordion wouldn’t co-operate with Europe’s two large-scale isotope suppliers — Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group in the Netherlands, and the Institut National des Radioelements in Belgium.
… [Alan J. Kuperman, a policy analyst for the Nuclear Control Institute in the United States] maintained there is plenty of “surplus capacity” among isotope suppliers but MDS Nordion and AECL didn’t want their competitors to pick up the slack when the Chalk River reactor was shut down.
Health Minister Tony Clement has maintained the government had no choice but to legislate reopening the reactor given Keen’s intransigence and the absence of an alternate supply of isotopes.
Clement last week insisted that the four other isotope-producing reactors in the world could not have filled more than about 15 per cent of the gap left by the Chalk River shutdown.
January 30
AECL Clarifies Inaccurate Statements by Former CNSC CEO Linda Keen
Chalk River, 2008 January 29 — Comments by former CNSC President & CEO Linda Keen today at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources were erroneous and misleading. Ms. Keen said that the chance of fuel failure in the NRU research reactor, without starter motors for two coolant pumps hooked up to a seismically-qualified, third back-up power system, is one-in-one-thousand. She further stated that the international standard is one-in-one-million.
January 29
(RCI) OTTAWA: FORMER NUCLEAR SAFETY HEAD DEFENDS HER ACTIONS
The former head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission on Tuesday made her first public comment since her dismissal earlier this month. Speaking before a House of Commons natural resources committee, Linda Keen said that she was simply acting according to the law when she ordered the nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, to shut down temporarily last month. The shutdown stopped production of isotopes that are used in many countries for medical scans and treatments. Miss Keen justified her action, saying that the safety risk at the time was one thousand times higher than acceptable. Parliament unanimously ordered the reactor to re-open on December 16. Miss Keen was dismissed one month later. At the same parliamentary committee, Canada’s auditor general, Sheila Fraser, expressed concern about the extent to which regulatory bodies such as the Nuclear Safety Commission may act independently of government. Last August, Miss Fraser wrote in a report that the Chalk River plant needed to invest CDN$600 million to address health, safety and security issues
Risk of restarting nuclear reactor too high: Keen
The woman who was fired by the federal Conservatives as president of Canada’s nuclear safety watchdog said Tuesday [in an appearance before a House of Commons natural resources committee] the safety risk of resuming the Chalk River, Ont., reactor was 1,000 times higher than accepted international standards.
Ottawa fires nuclear safety commission head
January 16, 2008
(CBC) The federal government has fired the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, days after she publicly accused Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn of interfering with the independence of the arm’s-length watchdog.
January 9, 2008
Fire Lunn over isotope crisis, Dion says
Liberal Leader calls on Harper to dismiss natural resources minister, make public ‘hidden’ Auditor-General’s report on Chalk River operator …Read the full article
OTTAWA — Linda Keen is accusing Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn of improper interference in the affairs of her independent and quasi-judicial nuclear safety commission and wants a public inquiry to defend her handling of the Chalk River, Ont., medical isotope crisis. More
January 8
It only gets worse for Lunn
Natural resources minister takes Homer Simpson approach with ill-advised letter to top nuclear watchdog
John Ivison, National Post
… What is clear is that Mr. Lunn wants to assert the supremacy of Parliament over an independent agency, which is perhaps as it should be. But power comes with responsibility and the buck for this whole debacle stops at the Minister’s desk. The commission’s role is to ensure that nuclear plants run in compliance with their licences. In the case of Chalk River, the operator, AECL, discovered that it had been running the reactor for almost two years without the safety upgrades required under its licence and voluntarily closed down the reactor.
Ms. Keen’s only crime seems to have been doing her job diligently. Then again, she was appointed by the Liberals, which makes her a convenient scapegoat.
The government is perfectly justified in trying to ensure that there is no repeat of the Chalk River fiasco but to get to the root of the problem would be complex, and it seems that in the Minister’s office these days, Homer’s credo rules: “If something’s hard to do, it’s not worth doing.”
Tories ready to fire nuclear watchdog
Isotope Fallout
OTTAWA - The Harper government is poised to fire Linda Keen, Canada’s top nuclear watchdog, amid renewed accusations that public health and confidence in nuclear safety have been jeopardized by her uncompromising handling of the Chalk River medical isotope scare.
In a letter obtained by the Ottawa Citizen, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn accuses the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission of refusing to heed a Dec. 10 ministerial “directive” from him and Health Minister Tony Clement to allow the restart of the isotope-producing nuclear reactor at Chalk River.
The commission insisted its decision in November to pressure Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to voluntarily shut down its National Research Universal (NRU) reactor until the upgrade was completed was essential for its safe operation.
The commission also said it was necessary if Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. was to comply with its operating licence.
In the debate that ensued, Mr. Harper accused the commission of putting lives in danger and called scientist-turned-career-bureaucrat Ms. Keen a Liberal partisan.
With support of opposition MPs, the government rushed through emergency legislation overriding the commission. The reactor restarted on Dec. 16, and is allowed to operate for 120 days, when work on the backup core cooling system is to be completed.
December 11, 2007
MPs pass bill to restart urgent isotope production
The Chalk River reactor ceased operating on Nov. 18. Pressure on the government to restart operations began to build after delays in the shutdown of government-run site, which generates two-thirds of the world’s radioisotopes, began to cause a critical shortage of radioisotopes. …
The Conservatives, facing pressure to solve the shortfall, introduced Tuesday’s bill to get Chalk River back online by circumventing the Liberal-appointed CNSC.