TAP Canada

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, Globe and Mail
Friday, October 20, 2006

A company in Eastern Ontario is hoping to find that the solution to pollution is dilution.

The company, SRB Technologies Canada Inc. of Pembroke, Ont., has contaminated the groundwater around its factory with radioactive tritium, raising the ire of nuclear regulators. So it is proposing to clean up the problem by dumping some of the pollutant into the city’s sewers.

From there, the radioactivity would be mixed with sewage flushed by the city’s 13,000 residents and ultimately poured into the nearby Ottawa River.

In the plan, filed with regulators at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the company says its proposal is safe for people and the environment because the radioactivity would be diluted with all the city’s sewage and then have a further “immediate and substantial dilution upon discharge to the environment [the Ottawa River].”

The commission’s staff issued a report yesterday saying they approve of the cleanup idea, but are refusing to comment because the proposal is the subject of a hearing scheduled next week on the renewal of SRB’s operating licence.

SRB makes glow-in-the-dark signs, such as emergency exit lights, that don’t need electricity to run. They are made with tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen produced as a waste product from Canada’s nuclear power plants.

Some residents object to the proposal, saying it doesn’t make sense to take contaminants from the factory site and place them in the river, which is a drinking water source for downstream communities, including Ottawa.

“It’s just moving pollution from one place to another. It’s a bit of a shell game,” said Ole Hendrickson, a researcher with Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County, a local environment group, who worries that the plan, if approved, could make the city’s sewage plant radioactive.

SRB could not be reached for comment.

The company has released small amounts of radioactive waste into the sewers, but the plan proposes increasing it by up to fourfold.

SRB has been in hot water with nuclear regulators because groundwater around its factory, located in a strip mall in the Ottawa River valley community, is contaminated with tritium. One well has radioactivity levels about eight times the Ontario drinking water standard, but there are pockets of even higher contamination in the soil.

In August, the commission ordered the company to shut its operations because of the contamination, but it has since resumed production after agreeing not to operate when it rains—the company and regulators are concerned that tritium going up the factory’s smokestack is washing back down onto the site in wet weather.

To stop a further buildup in radiation, the company is proposing to divert the contaminated rain falling around the factory and its smokestack into a holding tank, from which it would be periodically released to the sewer system.

“Although no significant risk to the public would exist as a result of releases of the diverted rainfall, in an attempt to allay any possible public concern, we will be performing monthly [radiation] measurements at the water sewage treatment plant to ensure that concentrations are as expected,” the company said.

The most contaminated water the company expects to collect will have tritium levels about 300 times Ontario’s drinking water standards. But by the time this water is mixed in with the 4.5 million tonnes of sewage Pembroke produces every year, it will have radioactivity of less than 1 per cent of the standard.

The company has investigated what other businesses handling tritium do with their radioactive water, and said “it is a known and accepted practice” to dispose of it down drains, provided the amounts are within the effluent limits in their operating licences.

There is debate over what constitutes safe exposure. Both the federal and Ontario governments have tritium drinking water standards of 7,000 becquerels per litre, about 10 times the U.S. level and 70 times the European one. A becquerel is a measure of radioactive decay.