The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor With his blue jeans and chafed elbows, Pat McNamara doesn't look like a nuclear expert. Nor, despite authoring three books and numerous articles on the subject, does he claim to be one. But when it comes to the potential of buried nuclear waste in Creighton, the controversial activist feels obliged to speak out. 'You will not find anybody in the nuclear industry who will take me on in a debate,' McNamara told a sparsely attended public forum last week at the Creighton Community Hall. Creighton could one day be in the running to host an underground repository that would store used (and still radioactive) nuclear fuel rods from Canada's nuclear plants. At the moment, town council is merely learning more about the concept. The rods would go into steel casings and copper containers, which would be lowered into boreholes drilled into rock and surrounded by bentonite clay. The boreholes would then be capped and sealed with concrete. Give off helium gas It sounds safe enough to many laypeople, but McNamara said the rods will be giving off 'large quantities of helium gas' that 'will build up so much that the canisters themselves will explode in 800 to 1,000 years.' 'They have no idea what kind of damage that will do,' said McNamara, who resides in Lund, B.C. 'If that starts blowing up underground, no one knows the problems (that will result).' McNamara cited Dr. Chris Busby as his source for the claim. Busby, a British scientist and author, has a loyal following but is widely seen as controversial. Helium concerns aside, McNamara fears the steel and copper used to contain the fuel rods may not stand the test of time. 'These fuel rods are still really hot physically _ like burn hot _ but they're also still incredibly, incredibly radioactive,' he said. 'So that heat and the radioactivity is... deteriorating these materials all the time, and it deteriorates the rock around the outside (of the containers).' If the rods come free and enough of them come into contact with each other, McNamara said, the result could be a 'criticality accident' that unleashes a surge of radiation. 'The materials that they're using (for the containers), we don't know how long they're going to last,' he said. 'The oldest copper artifact that we have still intact is about 2,000 years old. And that's just in the ground in good conditions. How long is copper going to last when it's underground containing 300 different radioactive (substances per rod)?' McNamara drew some nods of approval from the 11 members of his audience, some of whom said they appreciated hearing his side of the nuclear waste debate gripping Creighton. Mike Krizanc of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, the agency searching for a repository site, was not at the forum. But Krizanc, communication manager for the arm's-length NWMO, did have a lot to say in response. See 'NWMO...' on pg.6 Continued from pg.1 He dismissed McNamara's claims as simply not grounded in fact, starting with the notion that a helium build-up would 'explode' the rod containers. 'Over time, like many, many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps a million years, there would be small amounts of helium that would be released in the canister as the used fuel deteriorates,' Krizanc said. 'But...there would not be any kind of pressure that would be near enough to rupture these containers. It just is not chemically possible for it to rupture the containers, let alone explode.' As for the makeup of the containers, Krizanc said there are in fact intact copper artifacts that are many thousands of years old. 'In the UK, for instance, there's a carbon deposit there that is very old _Êin terms of geological time, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years in fact,' he said. 'And it's protected by copper and it's intact, and there's no deterioration.' Krizanc said it is also important to understand 'that at depth, there's no oxygen down there' underground. 'There's nothing for it to deteriorate (the containers),' he said. 'So it's a preposterous statement that copper can't or won't stand up to the conditions in a repository over time.' McNamara disagrees, but he does not want the public to simply take everything he himself says at face value. Instead, he urges residents to make up their own minds after learning all they can about nuclear waste from all sources. Well, maybe not all sources. Throughout McNamara's two-and-a-half-hour presentation, it was obvious that he gravely distrusts the Canadian government on nuclear matters. He said he began researching the nuclear industry while still in his hometown of Port Hope, Ont., a community that produces uranium fuel for nuclear power plants. McNamara said elevated levels of radiation were detected at the playground of his daughter's school _ and he alleges Ottawa covered things up. 'The one lesson I've learned right from day one is the Canadian government will lie through its teeth about dangers of nuclear energy, nuclear waste, anything to do with nuclear,' he told last week's forum. 'They have so many liabilities dating back 80 years right now that if they admit any liability they'll never get out of court.' A carpenter by trade, McNamara has become a go-to man for opponents of nuclear waste storage, though he does not belong to any formal activist group. The Committee for Future Generations, which opposes nuclear waste storage in Saskatchewan, brought him to northern Saskatchewan. That region is home to three communities engaged in a process with NWMO _ Creighton, Pinehouse and English River First Nation. McNamara said a common argument for storing used fuel rods in Saskatchewan is that the province produces a significant quantity of uranium. But 'it's important to realize that it's not uranium anymore that they want to bring back here,' he stressed. 'It's not uranium anymore. It's 300 different radioactive materials inside of these things that are dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.' Krizanc of the NWMO said McNamara has never requested a meeting with, or made any 'direct contact' with, the agency. He said NWMO is interested in 'constructive dialogue' on nuclear issues _ not 'in a debate that involves throwing around information that's not based on fact.'
