Material dangers

It's unfortunately inevitable that a governing party which doesn't care about competence and is outright hostile toward honest communication will see that attitude spill over into nonpartisan parts of the public sector. And today, the Globe and Mail reports on just how thoroughly Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. has absorbed the Cons' governing philosophy:

Staff working for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. lost a metal part they removed from a reactor at the Bruce nuclear power station in April, and didn't tell anyone until an employee from the station found it in June when it triggered the alarm on his radiation monitor...

Critics say the incident highlights a serious loophole in Canada's nuclear regulations. AECL is a contractor at the site, refurbishing the aging Bruce 1 station, and isn't immediately required to divulge when it loses track of highly radioactive materials pulled from reactors.

The missing part - a piece of metal about 10 centimetres in size - came to light only because a worker inadvertently received a radiation dose, which is considered such a serious incident that it must be reported to regulators either "immediately" or by the end of the next business day...

The missing piece was emitting high amounts of radiation, and would have given any worker holding it the maximum yearly allowed dose of this form of energy - feared because it can cause cancer - in only a few minutes...

The regulatory report filed by Bruce on June 24 indicates that AECL "became aware on April 23" that the piece was missing, but "they failed to notify" the station's radiation protection department. "The increased hazard would have existed from that time," it said...

Dale Coffin, a spokesman for Crown-owned AECL, played down the events, saying no one was harmed over the two-month period that the piece was missing because workers weren't in the area. Once it was found, the location, in the reactor vault, was safely cordoned off. "There is no requirement on our behalf to notify the CNSC because nobody was in there working," Mr. Coffin said.

This news follows on the heels of the news this week that AECL's regulatory reporting in the wake of the Chalk River fiasco focused entirely on meaningless communications issues rather than any explanation for failing to comply with the law. And from its response to today's revelations, there's no indication that AECL's priorities are doing anything but getting worse with time.

After all, AECL's statement is based solely on trying to minimize the incident. From my standpoint, any remotely responsible entity in AECL's position should be concerned with making sure similar problems haven't happened elsewhere and won't happen in the future. But AECL's response doesn't even hint at any interest in figuring out how the part was lost in the first place.

And the communications side only looks even worse for AECL. While the Globe and Mail's article points out a regulatory loophole which theoretically doesn't require that AECL inform the CNSC about incidents such as this one, that focus seems to me to miss the point entirely.

Regardless of what type of reporting is required by current regulations, anybody responsible for managing something as potentially dangerous as nuclear technology should recognize the need to mention a potential hazard. And whether AECL was completely unaware that it had lost the part or simply suppressed the information, the effect was to needlessly jeopardize the health of workers at the plant (not to mention others if the part had managed to find its way out of the facility).

Sadly, AECL looks to be more concerned with keeping a potential problem hidden as long as possible than with ensuring that its operations don't cause potentially serious harm to others. And for Canadians who don't want to see something far more serious suppressed until it's too late, it's long past time to replace the Harper regime with a government which doesn't encourage the practice.