Nuke

Canada's dirty nuclear secret

By NEIL REYNOLDS, Globe and Mail, Friday January 1 2010
[[email protected]]

Paul McKay is an environmental journalist who has won Canada's
highest awards for business writing and investigative reporting. In
his distinguished career, he has written for newspapers (The Globe
and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen), magazines
(Harrowsmith, Maclean's) and the CBC (television and radio
documentaries).

He has published five books. With Atomic Accomplice: How Canada
Deals in Deadly Deceit, Mr. McKay documents the official secrecy that
has protected Canada's nuclear industry from public scrutiny for two
generations -- and demonstrates why Canadian environmentalists have
much more to worry about than global warming.

It is a damning and alarming indictment -- and thoroughly bipartisan,
too. Written from years of accumulated research, Mr. McKay spares
neither the left nor the right. The CCF's Tommy Douglas, the socialist
premier from uranium-rich Saskatchewan, lobbied hard in the 1950s for
federal subsidies to bankroll uranium mines. More recently, the NDP's
Lorne Calvert, as Saskatchewan premier, championed the sale of
uranium to China - only one in the list of dictatorships courted by
Canada as prospective clients for this country's government-sustained
nuclear industry.

Beyond doubt, this industry has survived solely through overt and covert
government manipulation of the marketplace; in the case of Liberal prime
minister Pierre Trudeau, for example, through a shameful price-fixing
conspiracy that inflated the price of uranium more than fivefold. Federal
subsidies to the industry -- so far -- exceed $30-billion. Prime Minister
Stephen Harper has trebled support for the industry, committing a further
$1.7-billion in the past three years.

Mr. McKay's muckraking book -- using this term in its original, honourable
meaning -- comes at a sensitive time. Because nuclear energy emits no
carbon, many environmentalists have embraced it as a "clean" method of
averting global warming. For the same reason, many companies
anticipate decades of assured industrial growth (along with huge windfall
profits from the sale of carbon entitlements). For the same reason,
governments expect enormous increases in taxes and royalties.
Combined, these normally divergent interests have melded into a single
influential pro-nuclear constituency.

Mr. McKay begs, most emphatically, to differ, which helps explain why
he published this book privately, at his own expense, to tell the story
exactly as he wanted to tell it - castigating the nuclear industry as a
corrupt and sinister trade that literally imperils the planet. Although lonely
in this position, he is not altogether alone. In a foreword, David Suzuki
lauds Mr. McKay for his revelations on the history, the science and the
economics "of the purveyors of nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors."

You can perhaps discount Mr. McKay's concerns about the proliferation
of nuclear wastes as alarmist. Explicitly or implicitly, most people will.
But you can't dismiss them. As nuclear technology spreads inexorably
from one Third World country to another, these residual concerns must
become more compelling. (Iran has promised to share its nuclear
technology with other Islamic countries; Russia has promised to help
Venezuela develop a nuclear industry.)

Mr. McKay's first task, however, is to persuade Canadians that our
nuclear record is as dirty as sin. He succeeds.

"Canada has been dealing atoms since 1942," he says. "The prevailing
myth is that these tragedies [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] ended Canada's
involvement with the military atom. This is false." For 60 years, he says,
Canada has participated in the global dispersal of weapons-related
elements, technologies and secrets. Indeed, Canada has helped in the
making of nuclear bombs for the United States, Britain, Russia, France,
Israel, India and Pakistan and has "dealt atomic supplies and secrets" to
Argentina, Taiwan, Romania, South Korea and Communist China.

"Canada now exports 7.3 million kilograms of uranium annually," he says.
"When fissioned in any reactor, this will create 19,000 kilograms of
plutonium a year - or enough to make 2,300 warheads annually when
extracted from the spent fuel. Canada's annual exports also contain
52,000 kilograms of fissile uranium-235, enough to make 2,600 atomic
bombs each year.

"Because it is essentially immortal, this embedded Canadian plutonium
and U-235 will imperil global security for millennia because it will outlast,
for all intents and purposes, the rest of human history."

Further: "Plutonium embeds a dimension of destruction that defies the
human imagination. A fissioned mass the size of a stick of chewing gum
can destroy a city."

Canada is now the world's leader in uranium exports and, therefore, the
world's leader in potential plutonium proliferation. These exports generate
$1-billion a year in Canadian cash flow but bequeath to the world enough
fissile material to make 5,000 nuclear warheads every year. "We are a
Boy Scout nation," Mr. McKay says, "with a very dirty secret."

I have worked with Paul McKay on a number of difficult investigative
stories over the years and I know that his research is impeccable and his
environmental perspective rational.

Atomic Accomplice (available online at www.paulmckay.com) is a serious
warning that Canadians should know first-hand.

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