Putting radioactive materials in people’s drinking water not wise
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