Bob Hunter
eye magazine
August 28, 1997

Wouldn’t you know, I happened to be away on a canoe trip along the 60th Parallel, west of Hudson Bay, when Ontario Hydro boss Al Kupcis fell upon his sword and his retirement package, and the truth finally came out that, indeed, just as yours truly has been saying for decades, Canada’s nuke program is a crock of dangerous shit. Trust the bastards to wait until I was out of town before announcing their own doom.

They never did cooperate!

My first thought upon hearing the news about seven nukes being shut down was: I’d sure like to know what Kupcis got paid to take the blame and walk the plank. Here was a guy getting paid half a million dollars a year to run a nuclear-powered electrical utility, and he turns out to be Homer Simpson? Not likely.

Kupcis is no fool. He knew damned well what was going on down there in the shadow of the reactors where the boys were playing computer games (probably while stoned) and management was walking around with no clothes on — and no one blew the whistle!

Except people outside the industry. People not on the juicy payroll. People like Norm Rubin, Tom Adams, John Bennett, Dan McDermott, Dave Martin, Irene Kock (know as Irene Knock by her foes in the Power Workers’ Union). People who have been opposing Hydro’s mad nuclear adventurism for almost as long as the nuke cult has been running loose in Ontario.

Add to those names, by the way, practically the entire environmental movement.

How is it that these scruffy, underpaid neo-Luddites knew what was going on in the depths of the accident-prone nuclear power stations, while the $500,000-a-year execs like Kupcis sailed through life thinking everything was hunky-dory?

Hell, even I knew what a mess places like the Pickering, Bruce and Darlington generating stations were, and by the time stuff filters down to the likes of me, the heavy hitters are usually reaching for their third or fourth fall-back denial.

Kupcis knew. Everybody knew. The only reason the truth didn’t break out into the open sooner was nearly universal, systemic corruption within Hydro. From the union to all levels of management to the CEO’s office, everybody’s silence was bought.

Everybody lied. It is as simple and depressing as that. The most effective coverups are the ones where everybody gets involved and agrees to a mutual blindness. The one-eyed man is deemed mad or a traitor.

For the record, I’d like to note that the first newspaper column I wrote criticizing the vaunted CANDU nuclear reactor’s design was in 1969, in the Vancouver Sun.

If someone back then had told me Canada would still be flogging these fucked-up megamachines to Third World and Communist regimes in the late 1990s, I wouldn’t have believed it. Tells you a lot about the power of entrenched elites, even in a (quasi-) democratic society, doesn’t it?

But here’s the main question, which hasn’t been answered by the ritual resignation of Al Kupcis and the crazy talk of spending billions of dollars more to "save" the remnants of the nuclear hardware: Where was the federal "nuclear watchdog," the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), while the cultists were wanking wildly in Ontario’s generating stations?

Why were the AECB lapdogs merrily pounding out so-called reports that assured the public time and again that everything was just fine, or, if there were problems, not to worry, it would all be taken care of by responsible officials and dedicated workers?

Why didn’t the truth come out until an American expert was brought in? Why were licences, at Pickering in particular, granted year after year despite the protestations of the environmentalists (who were right after all)?

It is not enough that one fat-cat CEO with a pension to die for has resigned. And it will not be enough if a few "misguided" managers are hung out to dry. The entire board of the AECB should be kicked out onto the street with signs saying "Incompetent Bastard" pinned to their backsides.

And what about all those spin doctors and spokespersons who have been revealed as nothing but hucksters of disinformation?

By hey, why get picky? We’ve got the godless nuke swine on the run! That’s what counts.

Bob Hunter is a co-founder of Greenpeace and ecology specialist for CITY-TV.