MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, ENVIRONMENT REPORTER, The Globe and Mail
March 23, 2006
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved a shipment to Iran last year by a Canadian company of about 70,000 glow-in-the-dark lights containing tritium, a radioactive gas that can also be used as a component in hydrogen bombs.
The amount of tritium approved by the nuclear regulator for shipment to the volatile Middle Eastern country was about 10 per cent of the quantity considered necessary for making one nuclear weapon, although the company selling the lights, SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc., said it sent less than it was allowed.
Read more…
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, The Globe and Mail -
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Nuclear watchdog may ask atomic agency to monitor Ontario company’s tritium use
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the body that tries to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, should inspect SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc., a Canadian company that uses radioactive tritium, according to an internal report by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
The recommendation will be reviewed by the commission, Canada’s nuclear watchdog, at a licence hearing for SRB next week. If approved, it would place the Pembroke, Ont., company in the same league in terms of inspections as facilities that have stockpiles of fissile material that could be converted into atomic weapons. 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…
In his recent letter to Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission on behalf of the Tritium Awareness Project, Dr. Gordon Edwards points out that the CNSC should remove from its web site this statement:
Radiation doses of 100 mSv [millisieverts] and more have shown increases in cancer incidence but there is no evidence of health effects at doses below about 100 mSv.
Frequently Asked Questions : Tritium
http://www.cnscccsn.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/factsheets/tritium_studies_faq.cfm
In his letter to CNSC President Michael Binder, Dr. Edwards says “The statement is scientifically incorrect and misleading. It suggests that a safe threshold of radiation exposure exists – a conclusion at odds with the widespread scientific consensus as found in many documents published by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the US National Research Council (NRC), and the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP).
On March 6, 2009, Ottawa Centre Member of Parliament, Paul Dewar tabled a motion in the House of Commons that seeks to end tritium dumping into the Ottawa River and reduce the Canadian drinking water limit for tritium.
Here is the press release from Dewar’s office:
OTTAWA – NDP MP [New Democratic Party Member of Parliament] Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre) is calling for a reduction in the amount of tritium — a cancer-causing radioactive form of hydrogen — in drinking water.
Dewar’s effort comes as Tritium Awareness Project announced that 28 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium has been released at the Chalk River nuclear facility into the Ottawa River, the source of drinking water in Ottawa.
“I am extremely concerned about the high levels of tritium in the water we drink” said Dewar. “There is a host of health risks posed by exposure to high levels of tritium in water”. Studies in lab animals have shown that high levels of tritium exposure can cause a number of health problems from miscarriages and birth defects to permanent genetic damage and cancer.
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Gordon Edwards has written to CNSC President Michael Binder to point out CNSC failure to provide accurate, scientific information to the public about tritium. The letter challenges Mr. Binder to remove inaccurate statements from the CNSC website and urges an end to CNSC-sanctioned tritium dumping in the Ottawa River.
Here is an excerpt from the TAP letter:
“On behalf of the Tritium Awareness Project, I urge the CNSC to discontinue the practice of allowing AECL to dilute and release tritium-contaminated water into the Ottawa River. This practice is unjustified, as it does no good and only harms the population that drinks the water.
Regulatory limits must not be regarded as a license to pollute.”
For the complete letter, continue reading: 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.
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Here in Pembroke, Ontario, we have a tritium light factory (SRB Tecnhologies Inc.) right inside the city, just steps away from a residential subdivision. For seven years we tried to get the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to make the company do some environmental monitoring, to no avail. In 1999 we decided to take matters into our own hands. We collected two vegetation samples from the neighbourhood, one of rhubarb and one of aspen leaves. We sent them to the University of Waterloo for analysis.
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