TAP Canada

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.

When the rhubarb sample came out of the counter, the lab manager was horrified to find that it contained tritium at the level of 2000 Bequerels per litre. This was a thousand times higher than samples he was used to analysing, as the lab specializes in “background” radiation measurement. He asked us to find another lab to test the aspen leaves, which we did. A story about this incident made the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail with the headline “The Atomic Rhubarb of Pembroke” which made us very unpopular with local politicians, but that’s another story.

Lynn Jones,
Member of Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County, Pembroke Ontario.