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PM vows to hold someone to account for shutdown
OTTAWA; TORONTO—Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed yesterday that someone will be held to account for the shutdown of the reactor that produces half of the world’s medical isotopes as his government searched for culprits to blame in its battle with the country’s nuclear regulator.
“I can certainly assure the House that when this is all behind us, the government will carefully examine the role of all actors in this incident and make sure that accountability is appropriately restored,” Mr. Harper said in the House of Commons.
He blames Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Crown corporation that owns the reactor in Chalk River, Ont., and the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, whom he accuses of partisan intransigence, for the fact that the reactor has not operated since Nov. 18. And the nuclear regulator is feeling the repercussions.
Commission president Linda Keen said that Justice Department officials had ordered the commission’s lawyers on Monday to stop providing legal advice or other work on the Chalk River case.
Ms. Keen said she was given no warning and no written justification for the order, which she said would hamper the commission’s efforts to analyze the safety of the plant.
“Because of the capricious nature of the Department of Justice, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will be severely impacted and restrained in terms of its ability to analyze any safety case from AECL, any request for license amendment to allow the restart of the reactor and the required documents by the licensee, CNSC staff and possible intervenors,” Ms. Keen wrote in a letter to the deputy minister of justice, John Sims.
The letter was posted on the commission’s website Tuesday as the government was preparing to rush through an emergency law to restart the reactor. Ms. Keen said in Commons testimony Tuesday night that the Justice Department “thought there was going to be a dispute over this bill.”
A Justice Department spokesman said government lawyers are still working for the commission, just not on the Chalk River file. Christian Girouard confirmed there were concerns the lawyers would be in a conflict of interest if they were advising both the government and the nuclear regulator. He said the department suggested the commission hire an outside lawyer.
The emergency legislation, which was approved by the Senate and received royal assent last night, will allow AECL to restart the reactor for 120 days, despite continuing concerns by the CNSC that required safety upgrades had not been performed.
AECL assured the CNSC last year that an emergency power system had been connected to the cooling pumps on the 50-year-old unit. But the CNSC discovered last month that the required installation had not been completed and took the reactor out of service.
The unit’s closing forced many hospitals in Canada, and around the world, to refuse critical medical tests and procedures involving isotopes to all but emergency cases.
Health Minister Tony Clement praised his department for finding a way to get the reactor operating again. But he said someone will have to answer for the fact that he was not informed of the closing until 2½ weeks after it stopped producing isotopes.
“I think it’s shocking quite frankly,” Mr. Clement told reporters. “We heard last night in the testimony from AECL that they confirmed that they did not in fact inform Health Canada. ... If there is an issue of extended shutdown in the future, Health Canada has to be notified immediately.”
The lack of communication, said the minister, will undoubtedly be included in a review of the nuclear energy corporation that is being conducted by the Natural Resources Department.
Dale Coffin, the director of corporate communications for AECL, could not explain yesterday why Mr. Clement and his department had been left in the dark.
“Those are good questions,” Mr. Coffin said. “There is an ongoing root-cause analysis of the whole process and that is one area [to be examined] – the communications between agencies and between us and our customers which is MDS Nordion as well as the federal government.”
Nor could he explain why the CNSC had been told that the upgrades had been completed.
“Again, those are good questions,” Mr. Coffin said. “Right now we believe and still maintain that we were operating within the confines of our licence.”
The attack on Ms. Keen and the CNSC has prompted an unusual about-face by environmentalists, who are usually among the atomic watchdog’s fiercest critics, based on their view that it is too cozy with industry.
But Greenpeace, along with two other prominent groups, the Canadian Environmental Law Association and Ecojustice, issued a statement yesterday defending the CNSC, and telling MPs they should have backed the embattled regulator instead of voting to overrule it and restart the aging isotope reactor.
“The CNSC is typically a lap dog to nuclear industry. When it says a reactor should be shut down, there is clearly a significant threat to public safety,” said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, a spokesman for Greenpeace, in the statement.
The decision by the government and the three other political parties to order the aging reactor to resume operations, ignoring the expert advice of the CNSC, now means that MPs and the Conservative government will have to take the blame should anything go wrong.
“If we end up with Chernobyl on the Ottawa [River], they’ve all got to take responsibility for that,” said Mark Winfield, an assistant professor of environmental studies at York University. “They’re rolling the dice.”
The CNSC has been taking a tough line on the reactor because it is concerned that it doesn’t have emergency back-up power systems that would prevent dangerous overheating during a disaster, such as an earthquake or fire.