(361.3573) WISE Amsterdam - The facilities had routinely released large quantities of radioactive substances and there were fears that the discharges might have posed dangers to Ontario and British Columbia residents. The AECB, however, was more fearful that questions about the US facilities might lead to questions about discharges from its own facilities.
"The AECB has made some attempt without success to advise External Affairs to put these matters into perspective," John Beare, who was director of AECB's research and radiation protection branch at the time, wrote in a confidential memo to R.M. Duncan, then manager of the board's occupational radiation protection section. A copy of the memo, along with a confidential cable dated 8 Nov. 1988 between the AECB's Ottawa headquarters and the External Affairs staff in Washington, DC were leaked to Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group.
AECB critics say the action is a serious breach of the agency's watchdog role. (The AECB is supposed to be Canada's chief nuclear 'watchdog' and is assigned to protect the public from nuclear hazards...) "It's clear to me that they're speaking as part of the nuclear industry and not part of the forces trying to protect the environment and public health," said Norman Rubin, Energy Probe's director of nuclear research.
In the memo, Beare expressed his fear that questions by External Affairs might cause US officials to complain about discharges from nuclear power plants and uranium refineries in Canada. These discharges, he wrote, "are as large or larger than releases from USA facilities and also closer to the border." If the two countries began to squabble over nuclear discharges "this could provoke a fight which both sides would lose if it became public." In a recent interview in The Globe and Mail newspaper, Duncan said that the AECB worried that External Affairs might be embarrassed if it raised the question of radiation releases only to find that Canada was a worse offender. In fact, a subsequent study by the AECB into fallout from nuclear facilities found that Canada did indeed have the largest cross-border polluter: the Cameco uranium refinery in Port Hope, on Lake Ontario.
The main worry at External Affairs, according to the cable, concerned discharges from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington, 275 km from the Canadian border. The facility's soil and groundwater are contaminated by plutonium, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and leaking radioactive-waste storage tanks, and there is seepage into the Columbia River. External Affairs told US officials that Canadian monitoring equipment hadn't revealed that emissions from Hanford "have had any environmental effect on Canada." However, the department wanted more information on the discharges and further assurances that Canadians were not being harmed.
In the report of AECB's own investigation of Canadian and US nuclear facilities near the border, researchers noted that "in the past, the operators of US nuclear weapons facilities allowed fairly large radioactive releases to the environment," sometimes 100 times higher than present levels. This report was also obtained by Energy Probe through a request under Canada's Access to Information Act. It examined releases from 10 US border facilities and three in Canada: the the Cameco refinery in Port Hope, the Pickering nuclear generating station in Pickering, Ontario, and the Gentilly nuclear generating station near Trois-Rivières, Quebec.
Source: The Globe and Mail (Canada), 24 Oct. 1991.
Contact: Energy Probe, 255 Brunswick Ave., Toronto, Ont. M5S 2M6, Canada.
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