|
MAY 18th, 2008 |
IN THIS ISSUE: |
|
1) ROBERT LOVELACE BEGINS HUNGER STRIKE/PAULA
SHERMAN MAY GO TO JAIL
On February 15, 2008 Ardoch Algonquin First Nation (AAFN) Spokesperson Robert Lovelace was sentenced in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Kingston to 6 months in maximum security, plus crippling fines, for peacefully protesting uranium mining in the Ardoch homeland. Chief Paula Sherman was fined $15,000 and given until today to pay the fine, failing which she will be jailed. Lovelace, who turned 60 in jail, announced that he will begin a hunger strike tomorrow to press the government to respond to Ardoch's request for good faith negotiations. "I do not want my children and grandchildren to have to go through what we are going through" he said. "Starting tomorrow I will consume only water in the hopes that our cry for justice will be heard by Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Bryant." Chief Paula Sherman said: "I will soon be going to jail because I cannot and will not pay this unjust fine. I am a single mother with three dependents whose only crime is the defense of our land. Like Bob Lovelace and the KI 6, I would rather go to jail than take food out of my children's mouths or let our land be destroyed." 2) GATHERING OF MOTHER EARTH PROTECTORS Please contact Susan at sdelisle@kingston.net for busing to this event from Ottawa Valley and Kingston. May 26th - SOVEREIGNTY RALLY May 27th - Ongoing events May 28th - Appeal of the Bob Lovelace/AAFN and KI council sentences (6 months incarceration and in Bob's case, fines) May 29th - Aboriginal Day of Action 3) EVENT REMINDER: DWAIN SCUDDER'S WHATEVER CCAMU will be participating in this event. Come out and enjoy some fun. Saturday May 24th Maberly Hall Cappuccino Hour: 10am Free Concert: "The Sirens Sounding The Alarm" at 3pm Evening Concert: Cost $8 4) ONTARIO TOWN CHOSEN AS SITE FOR NUCLEAR WASTE STORAGE A "deep geologic repository" for the storage of nuclear waste has been proposed by the Ontario Power Generation to be located on the Bruce nuclear site in the municipality of Kincardine, Ontario. The federal government has released documents related to the licensing of this storage facility and the environmental assessment that is required for it. (These documents are available at www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca.) The radioactive waste to be stored in this proposed repository would come from the OPG-owned nuclear stations at Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington, Ontario. Before a license for this facility can be granted, a study of the possible environmental impacts must be conducted by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Written comments are invited from concerned citizens on this project. They should be mailed or faxed to: Deep Geologic Repository Project, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, 160 Elgin Street, Place Bell Canada, Ottawa, ON K1A-0H3. Tel. 1-866-582-1884; Fax: 613-954-0941. The deadline for receiving such written views is June 18, 2008. 5) SPAGHETTI DINNER BENEFIT FOR ROBERT LOVELACE AND PAULA SHERMAN Wednesday, May 28; 6:30 pm to 8:00 6) PRESS RELEASE: MAPS OFFER FIRST TIME, NATIONWIDE OVERVIEW OF IMPACTS OF OUTDATED MINING LAW Report details free-entry mining conflicts with First Nations, conservation and wildlife May 14, 2008 - Ottawa A report and set of maps released today offer a first time overview of the extent to which mining claims staked under an outdated free entry system conflict with Aboriginal rights, private landowners, conservation, wildlife, and other values in Canada's Boreal Forest. The report calls for modernizing the mining law. Over a half-million sq km of mineral claims are currently staked across Canada's Boreal Forest under a "free entry" tenure system implemented 150 years ago during the Klondike gold rush era. Under the free entry system, mineral rights are acquired automatically without consideration of other land-use priorities or the prior and informed consent of affected Aboriginal people. Ten per cent of Canada's vast Boreal Forest is staked for mining. "We are living in the 21st century with a mining law that dates back to the colonial era. It needs to be reformed," noted Larry Innes of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, "Social and environmental objectives - such as resolving Aboriginal land claims and ensuring conservation planning before development - should take precedence but under the current system, mineral rights are given first priority." The maps released today show potential conflicts over vast regions of Canada, including areas where mineral exploration overlaps with unsettled Aboriginal land claims; mineral claims which encroach on proposed protected areas; and regions where intensive exploration is occurring within threatened woodland caribou habitat. The report offers case studies of British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec to illustrate the rising conflicts fuelled by booming investments in mineral exploration and the outdated free entry mining system. This report comes out as seven Ontario First Nations leaders serve extended jail sentences for peacefully protesting unwanted mining exploration activities on traditional land, underscoring the extent of the conflicts. To read the rest of this press release go to, http://www.borealcanada.ca/pr/05-14-2008-e.php 7) ARTICLE: NATIVES SPEAKING OUT ON URANIUM May 18, 2008 BRATTLEBORO - The recent spate of advertisements promoting the electric power generated at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as "clean and green" doesn't tell the true story, said two Native Americans whose native lands are severely affected by the nuclear power industry. Lorraine Rekmans, of the Northern Ojibwa people from Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Ian Zabarte, from Mercury, Nev., secretary of state of the Western Shoshone National Council, spoke in Brattleboro Monday night, their last stop in a weeklong visit to Vermont organized by the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance and Citizens Awareness Network. To read the rest of this article go to, 8) ARTICLE: DEVELOPMENT HALTED ON 2 NEW MEDICAL ISOTOPE REACTORS May 16, 2008 Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. said Friday that it's stopping development of its two MAPLE reactors at its laboratories in Chalk River, Ont. To read the rest of this article go to, http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/05/16/aecl-maple.html 9) ARTICLE: WESTERN EXPERTS MONITOR CHINA'S NUCLEAR SITES FOR SIGNS OF EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE By William J. Broad China's main centers for designing, making and storing nuclear arms lie in the shattered earthquake zone, leading Western experts to look for signs of any damage that might allow radioactivity to escape. To read the rest of this article go to, 10) ARTICLE: NUCLEAR WATCHDOG WARNS OF SAFETY 'EROSION' AT PICKERING PLANT May 14, 2008 "Erosion of safety margins" at the Pickering B nuclear station near Toronto. A letter from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission surfaced Tuesday on the eve of a hearing in which Ontario Power Generation will make the case for renewing the station's operating licence until 2014. To read the rest of this article go to, http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/05/14/pickering-nuclear.html 11) GORDON EDWARDS COMMENTS ON CHALK RIVER AND THE MAPLE REACTORS The Chalk River Nuclear Establishment is owned and operated by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) which is a corporation wholly owned by the Government of Canada (a "crown corporation"). AECL is in fact the agency that sells reactors to clients abroad. They are the designers of the MAPLE reactors as well as the NRU reactor which started operation in 1957. The decision to build the first reactors at Chalk River (the ZEEP and the NRX reactors) was made in 1944 in Wahington DC by a tripartite committee (US, UK, Canada) set up to administer the Quebec Agreement of 1942 between Churchill, FDR, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, to cooperate on the world war II atomic bomb project. This agreement stipulated that the bombs would never be used against each other, nor against any third party (e.g. Japan) without unanimous consent. This agreement led to a secret laboratory in Montreal with top nuclear scientists from England, France, and other parts of Europe, together with Canadian scientists eager to join this elite group. The Europeans brought with them the world's only stockpile of heavy water, which had been spirited out of Norway by the French just before the Nazi takeover, and used by Joliot-Curie's group outside of Paris to ascertain the feasibility of a sustained nuclear reaction, then escorted to England when the Nazis invaded France through Belgium. Once the British had determined the feasibility of atomic bombs using either enriched uranium or plutonium, a top-level mission was sent to the US to convince the skeptical Americans that all this could be accomplished. When the Luftwaffe started bombing London the Brits decided to move their operation to North America. After being rebuffed by the Americans because of security concerns re. some of the Europeans (e.g. communist leanings) they set up shop in Montreal. There this brilliant team of elite scientists designed the NRX reactor, and developed advanced chemical approaches to reprocessing irradiated nuclear fuel to separate plutonium for military and/or civilian use. After the end of the war in 1945, the French and British scientists built their countries' own nuclear arsenals and peaceful nuclear power programs based on their experiences in Montreal. They developed their own reprocessing industries, also based on the Montreal experience, which gave them the technological lead that they have enjoyed in reprocessing up until recent times. The British stayed on at Chalk River in Canada where they built a pilot plant for reprocessing irradiated fuel from the NRX reactor; the first billet of plutonium metal to arrive in Britain actually came from Chalk River several months before the first British A-bomb test. The French were not far behind. The NRU reactor, which started up in 1957, was the result of European expertise as much as Canadian ingenuity. The reactor is very versatile, designed to irradiate many different kinds of target materials and therefore ideal for producing a variety of isotopes. The cost was partially defrayed by selling plutonium from the NRU reactor to the US military for many years. The NRU is the reactor that has been producing 50-60 percent of the world's medical isotopes -- a field that was pioneered by the Canadians in the post-war years. The important point is that the brilliant men who designed the NRX and the NRU reactors are no longer to be found at Chalk River. The Euro-peans have gone home a long time ago. Many of the old-timers have died or retired or gone into other fields. Nuclear power no longer attracts the brightest science students as it once did. In fact AECL has not designed a successful new reactor for over 40 years. That lack of experience, coupled with a certain arrogant form of incompetence, has led to the debacle with the MAPLE reactors. I do indeed believe that this has important implications for the new power reactors being designed by AECL -- the so-called "Advanced CANDU reactors" or "ACR"s. I have been interviewed by radio and TV today in relation to AECL's decision
to abandon the MAPLE reactor project after 17 years of effort and $600
million in expenditures -- not to mention an agreement to supply the privately
owned company My two main points have been: (1) the isotope supply is now on a permanently slippery footing, as the NRU reactor is the only reactor that is supplying the isotopes and it is 51 years old (started up in 1957); in fact the entire rationale for the MAPLE reactors was to provide an alternate source of supply when the NRU reactor would be permanently retired by 2003 at the latest.... (2) the failure to build two small 10 megawatt reactors that can function safely calls into question AECL's competence in designing and building reactors. The control rods and shut-off rods of the MAPLE reactors were so poorly constructed that they tended to jam when used, and the designers were completely wrong in their predictions of how the reactor would operate when undergoing a n increase in power. Remember some years ago how some cars had a problem with the accelerator pedal? When drivers would press on the pedal the car would sometimes hyper-accelerate, even jumping curbs and injuring people and damaging property? Well the MAPLES had an analogous problem in that whenever the power level was increased, the nuclear reaction would tend to accelerate out of control, making the reactor too unsafe to operate. It turns out that the much, much larger CANDU power reactors have a similar type of problem in that, under certain accident conditions (a loss of coolant or boiling of the coolant within the fuel channels due to inadequate cooling) the nuclear reaction also tends to accelerate out of control. In fact one of the main reasons for the new ACR (Advanced CANDU Reactor) design is to try to overcome this safety problem experienced by the older CANDU models --but there are indications that AECL has not succeeded in resolving the problem. First of all, the ACR design is still unfinished, and Sheila Fraser (the Auditor General of Canada) has reported that it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to complete the design (one of the reasons the Harper Govt recently gave AECL an additional $300 million of our money). Secondly, AECL has already withdrawn the ACR design from two different pre-licensing examinations, one in the USA (withdrawn in 2004) and one in the UK (withdrawn in 2008). In the case of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, their expert staff discovered that -- contrary to assurances from the AECL designers -- the ACR design would experience a pronounced (the word they used was "substantial") power surge in the event of a large loss of coolant accident (e.g. the breakage of a large pipe). This was the exact opposite of the behaviour claimed by the AECL designers of the ACR. It may well be that AECL no longer has people with the necessary competence to design a successful new nuclear reactor. In fact, they have not done so in over 40 years, and the folks who designed the older reactors (like the NRU) were of a much higher caliber than what we have today. Indeed, as I stated earlier, the NRU design was as much the result of British and European expertise as it was a product of Canadian ingenuity. And even the Canadian nuclear scientists at Chalk River today are not necessarily of the same caliber as the Canadians that were there in the 1940s and 1950s. Cheers, Gordon Edwards |