Nuclear-waste-through-the-great-lakes

Nuclear Waste through the Great Lakes!

September 28, 2010 --Nuclear Waste through the Great Lakes!

The nuclear power disasters at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island are still with us today.
Radioactive waste land. Possible human nuclear exposure injury.

Yet, today, September 28, 2010, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission starts a perfunctory hearings to grant a licence to Bruce Nuclear Power, for 16 school bus-sized steam generators, contaminated from use in Bruce’s nuclear plants. The Commission has already stated that it sees no safety, health or environmental concerns to stop a licence to Bruce Power for the shipment of nuclear waste through the Great Lakes.

The plan is to move nuclear waste through the famous Great Lakes water system to Europe, where the generators shall be decommissioned –with any residue waste being returned to Bruce for storage!

Environmentalists warn of both the dangers of the actual shipment, and also of the dangerous precedent, to future nuclear waste transportation in major US and Canadian waterways.

Imagine, nuclear waste through the Great Lakes.

Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster created a nuclear cloud that still has forced bans on the sale of produce from British farms! And the untold damage to people and the environment by the raging Chernobyl nuclear leak?! Yet, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate officials are readily set to allow nuclear waste through the Great Lakes.

The destruction to the eco-system could be devastating.

Bruce’s CEO, Duncan Hawthorne, told the commission environmental groups are just deliberately scaring people!

"You know, I'm not living in a fantasy land. There are a number of people who oppose our technology and at every opportunity seek to oppose us. And they do that with misinformation and scare tactics in the public.

"I believe that factual, scientific debate will debunk many of those stories."
There was a call for a full environmental assessment before a licence could be issued, on the full issue of nuclear waste through the Great Lakes.

But the commission noted radioactive materials, medical isotopes, are routinely shipped from Canada, around the world! The commission fails to remember that Canada’s and the world’s largest reactor for medical isotopes, Chalk River, was unexpectedly shut down recently, because of a nuclear industry problem – a leak in its nuclear reactor –resulting in the global disruption of critical medical treatment and tests!

Some 100 mayors of communities along the shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River have joined together, to oppose the plan.

The frightening confidence of the commission, bureaucrats and industry experts is especially ironic, given the recent disaster of BP’s oil leak in the Gulf! Like the Titantic, BP offered assurances of its plan! Echoes of Bruce Power’s executives now as it fights to open up Canada and the world nuclear waste through the Great Lakes.


For more on this potential Great Lakes disaster, see articles at http://www.biofuels.coop/windblog/?p=338.

And a posting there by Kim, to http://www.glslcities.org/voice-of-mayors/Nuclear.cfm about an impressive bi-national US-Canada organization, a coalition of federal, state, and provincial governments! The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (GLSLCI). The ED is David Ullrich, formerly 30 years with EPA, including as Chief, Air Enforcement.

And they oppose the plan!? We need to mobilize the public and media! A new nuclear age is upon the world. Successfully blocked through the 1960's, 1970's to now... But now?!