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Brian McGee admitted to a House of Commons committee yesterday that safety upgrades that forced a shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear research reactor were not given proper “attention and priority.”
Mr. McGee is senior vice-president and chief nuclear officer of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Crown-owned corporation whose reactor is at the centre of a controversy over the government firing of Linda Keen as president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
Mr. McGee refused to comment on Ms. Keen’s performance or the firing when questioned by MPs during the hearing and by reporters after.
But he told the Commons natural resources committee that AECL’s compliance with a licence requirement for safety upgrades should have been timelier. He was referring to the connection of two earthquake-resistant backup pump motors. The connection, first ordered in 2006, was finally completed a few days ago.
“I’m dissatisfied with my performance and the performance of my organization,” Mr. McGee said. “It was not given the attention and the priority that I believe it should have been given.”
The reactor shutdown in November caused a medical isotopes shortage, prompted the government to persuade Parliament to override the nuclear regulator, and led to the government firing Ms. Keen as president, although she remains a commissioner.
Mr. McGee said his relationship with the commission is too “one-dimensional” to offer an opinion on her abilities, but he praised commission staff as competent and said the AECL has a strong relationship with them.
MPs also heard from Gordon Edwards, president and co-founder of the non-government organization, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, who said the firing of Ms. Keen was “a classic case of shooting the messenger rather than listening to the message.”
He questioned how AECL and MDS Nordion, the private company for which isotopes are produced, “managed to escape responsibility” for the shortages. The testimony of two doctors also cast doubts on assertions by two federal cabinet ministers that patients would have died if Parliament had not reopened the reactor.
One of them, Dr. Karen Gulenchyn, a nuclear medicine specialist from Hamilton and an adviser to the government, said there was no certainty people would have died, although “they could have under certain circumstances.
“It is very difficult to point your finger at who would have died and under what circumstances,” Dr. Gulenchyn said, “but in Canada, we do 30,000 tests a week. Those tests are useful to physicians in terms of decision-making.
“Approximately 10 per cent of those patients who are seen have critical conditions and they need the information to make a decision as to how the patient is to be treated. So I think that the risk was there that, yes, there could have been a death.”
Health Minister Tony Clement and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn have said there was certainty people would have died if Parliament had not intervened and the shortages had continued. They justified Ms. Keen’s firing in part on grounds that she had put patients’ lives in jeopardy.
Mr. McGee told reporters “there was no planning” for an isotopes shortage.
“We’ve left the planning or lack of planning for supply of medical isotopes, really, up to the market,” Dr. Gulenchyn said.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008