“One of the characteristics of the nuclear industry is stringent regulation. In 2002, the Japanese regulator severely penalized its largest nuclear operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, for falsifying certain documentation. All 17 of its reactors will shut down in 2003 for inspection, while one unit will be removed from service for one year as a penalty.”
This obscure note in the 2002 annual report of the Canadian-based uranium exporter, Cameco Corporation, now has chilling relevance in light of the Fukushima nuclear crisis still unfolding.
It is not only because the inept and nearly insolvent nuclear utility, TEPCO, has been a customer of Cameco for almost four decades. Nor because the Fukushima reactors were almost certainly burning Saskatchewan uranium when the partial meltdowns occurred.
Rather, the special significance is that Cameco’s management received explicit warnings in 2002 that TEPCO was falsifying key safety reports — then continued to not only ship it uranium but to subsequently enlist TEPCO as Cameco’s partner to co-develop a rich new Canadian uranium property.
It planned to be partners for decades more. Mere days after the Fukushima accident, Cameco’s CEO assured TEPCO it would impose no contract penalty for short-term uranium supply reductions, and stated that Cameco’s faith in a global “nuclear renaissance” remained undiminished — even as its share price plunged.
Mr. Grandey (who retired in June) was joined by other fission fundamentalists in Ottawa, Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Delhi and Beijing, who cited differences in their country’s reactor size, design, age, manufacturer and models to bolster public confidence. These claims were made as the cores at three Fukushima reactors were still partially melting, and as spent fuel assemblies were emitting lethal beams of neutrons through gaping holes caused by hydrogen explosions.
These assurances came six weeks before the first robots could enter the damaged reactors, before the main cooling systems could be re-activated, before regional Japanese farmers and fisherman had their livelihoods shattered due to escaping radioactive contaminants, and before TEPCO conceded that it might take a decade to bring all the reactors to cold shutdown, entomb them in a concrete sarcophagus, and de-contaminate the devastated prefecture (the Japanese equivalent of a municipality.)
These “it-can’t-happen-here” pronouncements by other nuclear-dependent countries were not merely premature. They occurred before the accident was even over, and thus pre-empted the elementary engineering and scientific precepts that, logically, one must draw lessons only after cold, sober study. More importantly, the atomic apostles failed to acknowledge the crucial similarities among all power reactors world-wide, the common bio-hazard posed by long-lived reactor wastes and the proliferation peril embedded in the proposed global nuclear expansion plans they simply could not pause to re-consider.
Cameco serves as a case in point. It supplies uranium for CANDUs in Ontario and New Brunswick, but also different reactor models in Japan, China, South Korea, France, the U.S. and a dozen other countries. In the best of all possible outcomes, every reactor Cameco supplies with uranium fuel over several decades will never have a Fukushima accident.
Yet, the neutron furnace in each civilian reactor will create more than 200 deadly fission products, some of which will remain lethal for hundreds of centuries. As Fukushima and Chernobyl demonstrated, many of these radioactive particles often mimic elements essential to the human body (and other animals), and bio-accumulate in the environment. Over years and decades, they can silently, invisibly execute seek-and-destroy attacks on adjacent cells in bones, teeth, muscle tissue and organs. Especially vulnerable are women of child-bearing age (whose life-stock of ova can incur genetic damage which can be transferred to future generations) and children (who constantly produce new cells susceptible to damage).
These are facts of physics and biology. All reactors of all makes, models, sizes and country of origin produce long-lived, lethal wastes. They are so deadly that even a one-percent escape rate could harm the human gene pool.
Currently, these wastes are stored in cooling pools such as those at Fukushima or Ontario’s Pickering complex, or in concrete canisters. But no country in the world has yet developed a proven, safe, publicly endorsed disposal method or location. That is precisely why the Fukushima spent fuel was on site — because Japan does not have any nuclear waste disposal site. Nor does Canada, the U.S., Germany, France, India or China.
All these existing and pending nuclear wastes will also contain plutonium which is always created during the nuclear fission process. Besides being a deadly occupational hazard, and a particulary insidious emitter of alpha radiation which collects in lung and muscle tissue, it is a potential atomic bomb ingredient.
Plutonium is essentially indestructible, and has a half-life of 24,400 years. This means it will take 240 centuries for plutonium’s mass (and the related public health or proliferation risk) to reduce by half.
Currently, the world inventory of plutonium being stored at civilian nuclear plants like Fukushima is about two million kilograms. A typical atomic weapon requires 10 kilograms of plutonium. A “dirty” weapon, which can be delivered by a suicide bomber in a single-engine Cessna or even on a bicycle, requires about 20 kilograms of plutonium.
An additional 70,000 kilograms of plutonium is created each year by the world’s non-military power reactors. These reactors collectively produce about 5 percent of global energy demand. Doubling that output to 10 percent would double the annual mass of lethal reactor wastes and create enough plutonium to produce 14,000 plutonium bombs per year.
Canada currently exports some 7.3 million kilograms of uranium annually. Obviously, a doubling of global uranium demand will delight shareholders of companies such as Cameco, and those of its partner, TEPCO. Rival companies such as French-owned Areva are poised to open new uranium mines in Nunavut and Niger. Russia has reactors and uranium it wants to sell. They are banking their future on a vaunted “nuclear renaissance.”
These commercial imperatives and pressures may explain why Cameco not only ignored TEPCO’s past flagrant falsification of reactor safety reports, but interpreted the related penalty TEPCO received as proof of stringent regulation. Cameco is also apparently unconcerned about that fact that every ounce of its uranium inevitably is transmuted into deadly spent fuel wastes, like those at Fukushima, which will pose risks for centuries. Nor about the proliferation perils embedded in its exported uranium. Nor does this seem to trouble its commercial rivals.
But these should be troubling issues for Canada’s foreign affairs, trade and consular corps and those of their counterparts in other world capitals. Many will be deeply conflicted, because their governments have invested enormous amounts of financial capital, and political prestige, into fostering a “nuclear renaissance.”
But if the moral dimensions of this trade are not acknowledged and accounted for, then it must be admitted that ethics are being discounted to zero, that more Fukushimas are likely, and that the production of more latently lethal nuclear wastes and plutonium will accelerate.
This dilemma has a parallel with Britain’s wrenching 19th-Century debate over whether to abolish the slave trade. It essentially forced a choice between deeply entrenched but immoral commercial conduct, and defending human beings whose own worth had been discounted to zero.
Perhaps those who fought for abolition could not imagine a future society worth cherishing, one which had ethics embedded in its scriptures but not in its enterprises. That historic lesson applies again. But this time, it pertains to a form of commerce without conscience which puts at risk — essentially forever more — everything humans cherish most.
Paul McKay is an award-winning investigative reporter, and author of Atomic Accomplice: How Canada Deals in Deadly Deceit. See www.paulmckay.com for details.
