Nuke on the Fritz

I don't often write about political affairs, and this entry about Canadian politics may only interest a select few so I will keep it short. It concerns the peculiar behaviour of the current federal government toward nuclear affairs.

A little over a year and a half ago, the then head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Linda Keen, was fired. She had recently ordered the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor for safety related reasons. The reactor is operated by a crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada, wholly owned by the government of Canada. At that time, the reactor produced a quarter of the world's supply of radioactive medical isotopes. There are only a handful of producers of this material in the world, a worrying thought in itself. It is standard operating procedure to shut reactors down for maintenance from time to time, but that shutdown at Chalk River had been ordered by the Safety Commission. They are an arm's length regulatory body of the government and shutting things down when they are deemed unsafe is their job. After ordering the shutdown, Keen began to receive pressure from the sitting government to revoke the shutdown. The government said that they were doing this to avert a shortage of isotopes, that their priority was cancer patients. Various industry experts said that there was plenty of worldwide supply, that other reactor sites would ramp up to pick up the slack, also normal operating procedure, but the calm voices of experts were drowned out. Keen resisted political interference, was threatened with dismissal, refused to cry uncle, and was sent packing. The new head of the Commission did what the politicians wanted and the reactor was brought back up online. See this article from the Toronto Star for a summary of the shenanigans.

I remember thinking at the time that it was not such a good idea that the decisions of nuclear engineers be overruled by politicians. They can't possibly know better. In an odd turn a few months later, the government expressed the opinion that they should not be in the business of making radioactive isotopes at all, but rather that it may be better if the company was privatized. It was peculiar timing to say such a thing. Since the reactor's problems were widely known, partly because of the public firing of Keen, it seemed like the wrong time to be talking about selling AECL to private interests. Shouldn't you try to sell stuff when its value is high? Shortly after that, I remember reading that the government was showing a reluctance to invest any money in the maintenance the old reactor at Chalk River. A new replacement design that had been put forward by AECL was also not favoured.

Then in late spring of this year (2009), AECL was forced to shut down the reactor after all because of a heavy water leak. Initially, they planned to shut it down for a month, but later estimated that repairs would take till the end of the year. This seemed to confirm that Linda Keen had been correct in ordering a overhaul of the reactor, but I did not read any media interviews with her. Soon after that, I saw a headline that Prime Minister Harper was unhappy with the slowness of repairs.

This is an bizarre sequence of events, to say the least. Your own safety engineer tells you that the reactor needs fixing so you fire her. Then, you refuse to put any resources into maintenance of the reactor, which was hitherto SO important to cancer patients that they preferred to risk keeping it operating rather than shutting it down. If the reactor is that important, doesn't that mean you should keep it in tip top condition? At the same time as all that is going on, the government talked about selling the nuclear isotope business to private interests. Then when the reactor actually breaks, the same government complains about the slowness of repairs.

That's a lot of mixed messages. Aside from the apparent mismanagement of the maintenance coupled with political interference in what is supposed to be an arm's length enterprise, I am mystified by the notion of privatization of an asset when its value is down. That seems like bad business, although it could be good for potential buyers.