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NUCLEAR watchdogs have a straightforward job to do: safeguard the public and workers at nuclear plants from the well-established dangers of nuclear power. Not so in Canada, apparently, where the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Linda Keen, found herself without a job last week when the government took offence at her shutting down a reactor whose safety was causing concern.
The reactor, at Chalk River, Ontario, makes more than half the world’s medical isotopes, the type used in diagnostic imaging for cancer or heart disease. Closing it down led to an acute shortage of these isotopes, and the government claimed Keen’s decision had put lives at risk so she had to be sacked (see “Sacking of Canada’s chief nuclear watchdog prompts questions over regulator remit”).
The saga started in November last year, when scheduled maintenance checks revealed that two back-up cooling pumps, which were required as a condition of the reactor’s licensing agreement, had never been fitted. It had been operating without them for 17 months, in clear breach of safety requirements, so Keen ordered that the reactor should stay closed until they were installed.
Closing a reactor is one of the few cards a safety watchdog has up its sleeve when a company fails to meet safety standards, and Keen was only doing the job expected of safety authorities the world over. Canada’s parliament apparently disagreed: in December, it voted to reopen the reactor, overruling Keen’s decision and undermining the watchdog’s authority.
It gets more bizarre still. The natural resources minister, Gary Lunn, who ultimately fired Keen, claims that as part of its mandate to safeguard the health and safety of the population, the safety commission has a duty to protect the supply of medical isotopes. At the weekend, he suggested he would write that into the job description of Keen’s successor.
It is hard to imagine a more blatant conflict of interest. Either your priority is to ensure people are protected from radiation, or you are responsible for what the reactor produces. A watchdog cannot do both. The Canadian government needs to sort out this mess quickly, and not just because the safety of its population is at stake.
The world is watching because Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which owns and operates the Chalk River facility, is also a producer and exporter of nuclear technology. Customers for its CANDU heavy water reactor include South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Romania and Pakistan. Canada is sending a dangerous message to these countries when it is prepared to undermine its own watchdog and compromise the protection of its workers and the public in order to keep one of its reactors open.
From issue 2640 of New Scientist magazine, 26 January 2008, page 5