Gordon Edwards has written to CNSC President Michael Binder to point out CNSC failure to provide accurate, scientific information to the public about tritium. The letter challenges Mr. Binder to remove inaccurate statements from the CNSC website and urges an end to CNSC-sanctioned tritium dumping in the Ottawa River.
Here is an excerpt from the TAP letter:
“On behalf of the Tritium Awareness Project, I urge the CNSC to discontinue the practice of allowing AECL to dilute and release tritium-contaminated water into the Ottawa River. This practice is unjustified, as it does no good and only harms the population that drinks the water.
Regulatory limits must not be regarded as a license to pollute.”
For the complete letter, continue reading: Read more…
This letter was submitted to the Ottawa Citizen today by Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
Putting radioactive materials in people’s drinking water is not wise, no matter what current regulations say.
Medical doctors do not recommend that people “smoke in moderation”. They tell them to stop smoking altogether.
Restaurants are not asked to oversee a permissible level of second-hand smoke. They are ordered by law to disallow it altogether.
The reason is that cigarette smoke is cancer causing. There is no scientifically accepted safe level of exposure to any known carcinogen. That goes for radioactive materials as well as for non-radioactive ones.
For the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to say that deliberately dumping eighteen trillion becquerels of tritium into the Ottawa River is “of no concern” and “perfectly safe” is not only scientifically wrong, but it is contrary to that organization’s legal mandate to protect the public health and to disseminate objective scientific information.
It is deeply distressing to see how the polluter (AECL) and the regulator (CNSC) join forces to obscure the facts and to provide unscientific reassurances of safety to the public and to their elected representatives.
Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President,
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
Our TAP press conference on Parliament Hill Wednesday has raised concern about Ottawa’s drinking water among some members of the media and general public. People are surprised to learn that drinking water in Ottawa is radioactive. Perhaps this is because previous media reports included assurances from authorities like this one:
“Radioactive water never reached river: Feds” (Ottawa Sun, January 30, 2009_
Peter Zimonjic The federal government says no radioactive material from a recent leak at
the Chalk River nuclear research facility made its way into the Ottawa River…
No wonder people are upset to learn that in fact millions of bequerels of radioactive tritium entered the Ottawa River in December and subsequent spills in January and February.
Data released yesterday by the City of Ottawa show that the Ottawa River is chronically contaminated with tritium at the level of 6 bq / litre. This level is more than three times the background level. In essence this means that in every litre of tap water in Ottawa, there are six radioactive decay events going off every second, second after second. This is equal to more than or 20,000 every hour, and more than half a million per day in this one litre of tap water.
When you drink water with tritium in it, much of the tritium passes through the body. However, small quantities get absorbed into organic molecules in the body including DNA. Inside organic molecules and especially in DNA, tritium can do significant damage. TAP’s position is that it’s good to keep tritium out of drinking water for this reason.
The Tritium Awareness Project (TAP) is being launched today with a Press Conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario. The media advisory and press release for this event are available for download in our press release section.
The mission of The Tritium Awarenss Project is to raise public awareness about radioactive tritium, sometimes referred to as “Canada’s national radionuclide” because Canada is the world’s leading tritium producer.
We are excited about getting this project off the ground. For too many years, the risks of tritium have been seriously underestimated and as a result, Canadians have been subjected to excessive amounts of tritium in their air and drinking water. We aim to change that with the TAP project.
TAP is a voluntary and cooperative undertaking involving Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, le Mouvement vert Mauricies, and other groups.
We are fortunate to have an excellent advisory board for the project. Please visit the “About TAP” to meet the advisory board members.
SRB is the tritium light factory in Pembroke Ontario that has emitted extremely large quantities of tritium into the environment in the City of Pembroke since beginning operations in 1991. In two years out of the last 10, SRB emitted more tritium than all of Canada’s nuclear generating stations combined. Mr. Stuber lives a few hundred metres from SRB’s stacks; vegetables grown in his backyard have been contaminated with tritium at thousands of times the background level.
Dear Commission members, I live in one of the worst places one could ever live, right next door to a nuclear facility where the environment has become so polluted with tritium that people are becoming ill. I wonder how come the Commission could ever let this happen.
Read more…
Here in Pembroke, Ontario, we have a tritium light factory (SRB Tecnhologies Inc.) right inside the city, just steps away from a residential subdivision. For seven years we tried to get the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to make the company do some environmental monitoring, to no avail. In 1999 we decided to take matters into our own hands. We collected two vegetation samples from the neighbourhood, one of rhubarb and one of aspen leaves. We sent them to the University of Waterloo for analysis.
Read more…
Letter to Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources Canada- expressing disappointment about the fact that she did not recieve accurate information about tritium leaks and health impacts.
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The Tritium Awareness Project (TAP) has learned that more than a TRILLION becquerels of radioactive tritium were vented into the atmosphere at the time of the heavy water leak at Chalk River on December 5, 2008. In addition, TENS OF TRILLIONS of becquerels of tritium in liquid form are being or have already been deliberately dumped into the Ottawa River by Chalk River authorities, with the permission of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Read more…
Letter to Bill Pilkington, president of Atomic Energy of Canada, asking for information about quantities of tritium released to the Ottawa River
Read more…