After discovering groundwater contaminated with radioactive tritium, regulatory agency recommends shutting company
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, ENVIRONMENT REPORTER, The Globe and Mail
Wednesday, November 30, 2005 Page A3
Alarmed about radioactivity levels around Pembroke, Ont., that are hundreds of times above normal, staff at Canada’s nuclear regulatory agency have taken the unprecedented step of recommending the closing of a manufacturer of glow-in-the-dark signs.
Staff at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission have found that emissions from the company, SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc., have created a trail of groundwater contaminated with radioactive tritium more than a kilometre long under the Ottawa River Valley community of 15,000. The most contaminated water had tritium levels 743 times normal. Read more…
Martin Mittelstaedt, Globe and Mail (Canada)
February 8, 2006
The federal government is licensing companies to handle dangerous nuclear materials that have both peaceful and military uses without knowing who ultimately owns the businesses.
Nuclear critics say the fact that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the federal watchdog agency, does not know the identity of owners of the companies it oversees is a major blunder, given the high-security risks presented by nuclear materials and the potential costs of any accident involving radioactive releases. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, ENVIRONMENT REPORTER, The Globe and Mail
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
The Ministry of Environment has found elevated levels of radioactive tritium in ground water at the municipal dump serving Pembroke, Ont., and several other nearby Ottawa River valley communities.
The dump, the Alice and Fraser Township Landfill, is not licensed to receive radioactive waste, and it is not known exactly how tritium, used to make glow-in-the-dark lights, among other products, and nuclear weapons, got into the dump. 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.
Read more…
The Tritium Awareness Project (TAP) has learned that more than a TRILLION becquerels of radioactive tritium were vented into the atmosphere at the time of the heavy water leak at Chalk River on December 5, 2008. In addition, TENS OF TRILLIONS of becquerels of tritium in liquid form are being or have already been deliberately dumped into the Ottawa River by Chalk River authorities, with the permission of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Read more…