To the editor,
On Sept. 17, I had the great pleasure of being emcee for a panel discussion entitled, “A Physician’s Perspective on Nuclear Waste,” at the Teeswater Community Centre. I was happy to see a wide range of attendees, young and old, those in favour of the deep geological repository (DGR) siting process and those opposed, there with apparently open minds to hear the two esteemed panelists.
Panelist Dr. Chris Keefer is an emergency medicine doctor, and a prominent speaker on topics related to nuclear energy. Dr. Doug Boreham is head of medical sciences at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the effects of radiation on the human body.
Dr. Keefer gave a compelling summary of the history of air pollution, and its tremendous effects on human health, back in the smoggy days of the early 2000s, when Ontario was still producing electricity from coal. Those days are a thing of the past, now that coal-fired generation has been shut down in Ontario, and some 90 per cent of the energy required to displace coal has come from restarting the Bruce A nuclear station, which was laid up in the 1990s. Ontario is one of only nine major power grids in the world that has achieved “deep decarbonization.” Except for areas like Quebec, which are favoured with abundant hydroelectric capacity, all the other jurisdictions use nuclear energy as an important part of the supply mix. Here in Ontario, nuclear accounts for more than 60 per cent of all electricity, with hydroelectric making up most of the difference.
Dr. Keefer explained some of the methodology behind planning the proposed DGR in South Bruce. In keeping with the obsession with nuclear safety, the scientists and engineers have designed layer upon layer of barriers, to ensure nuclear waste never gets into the environment. They have then conducted «what if» studies based on the most unlikely failure scenarios. For example, what if the used fuel containers all dissolved (or just didn›t exist), and there was some major tectonic event (earthquake) that created massive fissures in the rock, and then a family drilled a well right on top of the site and grew all their food there and drank all their water from the well. Even in these circumstances, the family would get almost no additional radiation.
Dr. Boreham brought a radiation meter, and performed a number of demonstrations to show how radiation is all around us all the time, and it gets concentrated in a number of regular day-to-day activities. Dr. Boreham explained that about half of the radiation an average person receives in his or her lifetime is naturally occurring, and the other half is from medical processes like chest X-rays and other diagnostic procedures. A percentage of all naturally occurring potassium is radioactive, so potassium-rich foods like bananas and brazil nuts give us radiation dose. Farmers handling potassium-rich fertilizer for an afternoon could receive as much radiation dose as a chest X-ray.
Dr. Boreham also explained that spent nuclear fuel is extremely lethal when it comes out of a nuclear reactor, but in practice, it is effectively shielded using substances like concrete, lead, or water, and it loses 99.9 per cent of its radioactivity in the first 10 years. Spent fuel would be at least 30 years old before being moved to a DGR, and by 200 years, it has lost most of its potency. At that point, a person standing one meter away from an unshielded fuel bundle would receive about the same radiation dose as a two-second chest X-ray.
In brief, these two specialists did not take sides on whether a DGR should be built, or whether it should be built in South Bruce. That is for our residents to decide. What they did was effectively debunk the idea that a DGR would ever pose a risk to the land or water in South Bruce, or that radiation from a DGR would ever cause a health risk.
Sincerely,
Tony Zettel
Mildmay
