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A company in Pembroke wants to put its radioactive waste in sewage that ends up in the Ottawa River. Those of us who live downstream have a right and a duty to speak up.
It may be that we citizens end up saying to the company: “Go right ahead.” It might turn out that this is the best, safest option for treating this waste. But until we in the Ottawa area have all the information and have made our views known, no drop of contaminated waste should enter our river.
The company is SRB Technologies Canada. It makes signs that glow without any external source of power: no battery, no wires. It makes the signs with tritium, a waste product from nuclear reactors. The SRB plant emits some tritium, so the soil and groundwater around the plant in Pembroke are contaminated. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which licenses the facility, wants SRB to stop contributing to that contamination.
The company’s plan is to mix some contaminated rainwater with Pembroke’s sewage, which would ultimately end up in the Ottawa River. The idea is to dilute the pollution enough to make it insignificant. By the time the water ends up in the Ottawa River, the company says, the concentration of tritium would be much lower than Ontario’s safe-drinking water standard.
Ottawa Riverkeeper is an environmental advocacy group. It’s that group’s job to be skeptical about anything that goes into the river, so it’s no surprise that executive director Meredith Brown is unconvinced of the merits of the SRB plan. She says different jurisdictions allow different concentrations of tritium, so it’s hard to know whether Ontario’s allowable level is really safe. “We really haven’t determined what a safe concentration is in my mind,” she says. “This is all emerging stuff. There’s not really a lot of science out there as to what tritium in the drinking water does.”
SRB Technologies puts it in a different perspective by saying that if a person drank water contaminated with enough tritium to be at the maximum level Ontario allows for a year, the radiation dose would still be much less than a person gets from natural sources.
The contaminated groundwater is not affecting the Ottawa River yet, Ms. Brown says. But she wants to discover more about what will happen when the contaminated water goes into the sewage. She encourages the public to participate in the public hearings the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will hold. There’s one scheduled for tomorrow and another on Nov. 27.
There are many questions to which citizens need answers, beyond the relatively simple one of whether the contamination will be below the legal limit for drinking water. How will the tritium affect aquatic life? How long will there be tritium in the river? The more SRB and the safety commission tell the public—in Pembroke and all along the Ottawa River—the better.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006