One day just before Christmas in December 2000, after a particularly depressing relicensing hearing for SRB Technologies (the tritium light factory in Pembroke Ontario) I picked up the Ottawa Citizen and noticed a tiny little blurb about boxes of radioactive material falling off a Purolator truck in downtown Ottawa. SRB had just been granted a 5-year license despite our protests about their sloppy and highly polluting practices.
Turns out that a passerby in downtown Ottawa noticed three boxes in the middle of Bank St. with radiation symbols on them. She called the police and several blocks of downtown Ottawa were cordoned off while the boxes were dealt with by emergency services. Personnel from SRB in Pembroke were called to retrieve the material, compressed tritium gas and lights bound for an undisclosed destination in the United States. Read more…
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.
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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.
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