Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail — Federal nuclear regulators are allowing SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc. to resume making radioactive glow-in-the-dark signs, after ordering the company to stop production 11/2 years ago over concern about its tritium emissions.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved a new two-year operating licence on Thursday.
The commission said that based on a two-day hearing with company officials, it believes SRBT, which makes emergency exit signs that glow without the need for electricity, can operate safely, although it will continue to receive close scrutiny.
“The Commission expresses the view that, although it is satisfied with the important improvements that SRBT has implemented to address past deficiencies, enhanced CNSC regulatory oversight is still required for the length of the licence period,” the CNSC said in a statement on its website.
SRBT operates a plant near a residential community in Pembroke, Ont. Even though the facility wasn’t making signs for most of last year, air concentrations of tritium – a radioactive type of hydrogen that gives signs their glow-in-the dark feature – were still about 10 to 20 times normal background readings, according to testimony from CNSC staff.
At the hearings, local residents expressed concerns that some of the cancers in their community may be due to the tritium emissions, although likely exposures from the plant were well below Canadian regulatory standards, according to other testimony.
SRBT welcomed the decision.
To try to cut the amount of radiation around the plant, the company told regulators that it won’t operate during precipitation, which tends to shower the tritium from its smokestack around the site. During better weather, tritium is dispersed by winds across a greater area, diluting its concentration.
At its peak, the company employed about 40 people, but now has 15. With the new licence, it expects to rehire a number of former employees.
SRBT received the licence even though it is in arrears on cost-recovery fees the commission levies on nuclear companies to defray the expenses of regulating them. According to testimony at the hearings, SRBT said it didn’t immediately have the money to pay the fees. In response to e-mailed questions from The Globe and Mail, the commission said the company is “in arrears for approximately $190,000” and that the unpaid regulatory fees make the regulator “an unsecured creditor.”
The CNSC maintains that being both a creditor and a regulator doesn’t put it in a conflict-of-interest position. It had to give SRBT an exemption from provisions of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act to issue a licence to a company in arrears.
“The CNSC does not profit from these cost-recovery fees. These fees are deposited to the [government’s] consolidated revenue fund. The CNSC’s budget is established through a different process,” it said.
As a requirement of the new licence, the company has been given a schedule to pay in instalments all its cost-recovery fees by 2013, and to have approximately $550,000 available in an account by April, 2014, to handle the future decommissioning of its site.
The commission’s action on the arrears and the lengthy time to pay the decommission fund angered some opponents of the plant. “Why bend over backwards for this particular company when all the other nuclear facilities in Canada have to … pay their money?” asked Ole Hendrickson, a spokesman for Concern Citizens of Renfrew County, a local activist group.
The CNSC said in response to questions from The Globe that “a few” firms haven’t paid their fees. It refused to name them or the amounts owed.
Globe and Mail