Lights out for glow-in-the-dark sign factory
Globe and Mail
Pembroke facility shuts down operations temporarily amid
radioactivity concerns
By MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
Thursday, December 1, 2005
A company that contaminated groundwater around its plant in Pembroke, Ont., with radioactive tritium says it has halted operations and will not resume manufacturing until it puts in place better pollution controls.
SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc. announced its temporary shutdown in an e-mail sent late Tuesday night to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the country’s nuclear watchdog agency. The letter was sent just before the company was scheduled to appear at a CNSC hearing yesterday into the future of the plant.
The company is a manufacturer of glow-in-the-dark signs, such as emergency-exit markers, which run without electricity. It makes the signs using tritium, a waste product taken from Ontario’s nuclear-power plants.
Last month, staff at the commission recommended the plant be closed after they discovered the company was not able to provide reliable estimates on the amount of radioactivity being released into Pembroke, an Ottawa River community of 15,000.