Richard Foot
National Post
November 25, 1999

Efforts to reopen Canada’s oldest nuclear power plant — shut down for two years — aren’t receiving enough scrutiny because the federal government refuses to put the project through a full environmental assessment hearing, say groups of citizens who live near the plant.

Community groups want the government to impose a full series of public hearings and not what they call a "whitewash" review of plans by Ontario Power Generation to resume operations at its Pickering A nuclear facility, east of Toronto.

Without a proper assessment, says Irene Kock of the Durham Nuclear Awareness group, "the risk of a catastrophic accident increases. This is the oldest plant we have, and there must be a very clear need established before it is allowed to restart."

The four Pickering reactors have been shut down since December, 1997 because of massive efficiency problems and safety concerns. Ontario Hydro, the provincial Crown corporation that once owned them, has been working for nearly two years to overhaul the management and the infrastructure of its debt-ridden nuclear plants. Its restructured successor, the Ontario Power Generation company, wants to open the four Pickering reactors by 2001.

Ontario Power Generation had asked the Atomic Energy Control Board, the federal agency that regulates the nuclear industry, to allow it to proceed on reopening without an environmental assessment. The AECB said a review was required by federal law.

What upsets Ms. Kock and others is that the AECB has only demanded a shortened form of assessment called a "screening."

This means AECB officials will themselves review an assessment report submitted by the power company before deciding whether the reactors can reopen. A full assessment would require the federal environment minister to appoint an independent panel of experts to review the company’s report and consider the input of other groups at extensive public hearings.

"What we’re faced with now in this screening is absolutely no independent forum in which to raise our concerns," says Ms. Kock. "A full assessment also provides intervenor funding, so we’d be able to hire experts to review Ontario Power Generation’s evidence. Now, we have no resources to bring experts on some of these very complicated issues."

Those issues include how the power company has improved the structure and integrity of the 30-year-old reactors, how it will mitigate the pollutants and nuclear waste produced at the plant, and what economic justification there is for reopening.

Others, such as Norm Rubin of Energy Probe, say they simply don’t trust AECB staff to treat the assessment as objectively as an independent panel would.

"Every time anything in the nuclear industry is reviewed by independent people, the results are quite different from the results we get when the review is done by the guardians of the status quo."

Not so, says Sunni Loratelli, a spokeswoman for the AECB, who says the agency has full discretion under the law to decide what kind of an assessment to impose.

The public can make submissions on the project to the AECB. Ontario Power Generation has also scheduled public meetings.