Ex Canada official: Nuclear Reactor was unsafe!
contact January 30th, 2008
From USAToday:
The fired head of Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission on Tuesday defended a decision to keep a reactor shut down for nearly a month, creating a critical shortage of radioactive isotopes used to diagnose cancer patients, and causing delays to thousands of cancer patients around the world.
Former commission president Linda Keen said the agency was following the law when it refused to approve the restart of the reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. When the government ordered operations to resume last month, the risk of a nuclear accident was 1,000 times greater than acceptable, she said.“Ignoring safety requirements is simply not an option,” Keen said. “Safe enough is not good enough.”
The reactor supplies half the world’s radioactive isotopes. Thousands of patients around the globe faced delays in crucial medical tests because of the shutdown.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said last month there was no risk of a meltdown with the start-up, and his government blamed Keen for refusing to quickly resolve the impasse.
The 50-year-old reactor was shut down Nov. 18 for maintenance. It was scheduled to resume operations on Nov. 23, but the commission ordered an indefinite stoppage after discovering the reactor had been running without the emergency power system connected to two cooling pumps.
The Canadian government scrambled to pass legislation allowing the company to bypass the nuclear safety watchdog. The reactor reopened on Dec. 16…
- information , news , outside of toronto
- Comments(0)