Not Just Medicine

By D'Arcy Hande, The StarPhoenix

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/todays-paper/just+medicine/10933920/story.html

When under scrutiny, the Sylvia Fedoruk Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation and its CEO Neil Alexander like to put on their suits of shining armour as the champions of nuclear medicine.

So Alexander's letter (Appropriate work, March 26) comes as no surprise. But in a StarPhoenix interview in December, he had on his more business-like jousting suit and proclaimed how SFCCNI's research could facilitate building small nuclear reactors for deployment in Saskatchewan. The core funding of $30 million for the centre at its inception in 2011 came from the Saskatchewan government. The centre's original business framework stated: "The province expects nuclear power to be considered in the range of energy options available for baseload generation capacity in the medium and long term after 2020 and that the CCNI will be able to serve as a source of expertise to inform decisions in this area."

More than half the Fedoruk Centre's board of directors has connections to the uranium and nuclear industry.

Alexander states that the centre "has no role in the mining or sale of uranium." However, research and development for the nuclear industry is a different story. A check of projects approved for funding by SFCCNI over the past three years demonstrates that there is inevitably money granted toward research on nuclear reactors and aspects of uranium mining.

Obviously the Uranium Development Partnership agenda of 2009 is still alive and well at the University of Saskatchewan's Fedoruk Centre.

D'Arcy Hande

Saskatoon

© Copyright (c) The StarPhoenix

Jack Jensen's Letter to the Editor, published in the Prince Albert Daily Herald

Letter to the Editor re. maximum exposure limits to radioactivity

September 6, 2011

The Editor,

Forget about the Saskatchewan government/Hitachi-GE memorandum of understanding to develop small nuclear reactors.  What is needed is fundamental research into the allowable exposure to radioactivity, regulations that have not fundamentally changed since 1958 - long before the discovery of DNA.  The nuclear industry has actively attacked such research by Eastern European universities, hence the need for a western university that wants to establish itself amongst pre-eminent universities to take up this research.  The existing  exposure limits were based on radioactivity on the skin, a relatively simple health  problem compared to exposure through inhalation or ingestion.   In the body, ‘hot’ particles created by nuclear fission are treated like their non-radioactive counterparts, radioactive iodine concentrating in the thyroid, strontium in the bones etc.  The ‘hot’ particles then continuously bombard the surrounding tissue, disrupting the DNA, which can lead to cancer. 

A short youtube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEipg81uLw) by Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Associates, illustrates the extent of airborne ‘hot’ particles from the meltdown of the Hitachi-designed Fukushima nuclear reactors.  Air was drawn through filters which were then examined for ‘hot’ particles.  The conclusion was that residents of Tokyo and its suburbs (population 30 million) inhaled an average of 10 ‘hot’ particles per day in April and that residents closer to Fukushima (population 2 million) inhaled  400 ‘hot’ particles per day!  How will this affect the health of these people and their descendants?  Who knows, but someone should be doing this research.

 If you agree that research into and acceptance of radiation exposure limits based on inhalation and ingestion be funded  before money is expended on creating more nuclear wastes, please advise Premier Brad Wall (premier@gov.sk.ca), Innnovation Minster Rob Norris (minister.aeei@gov.sk.ca) and U of S President Peter MacKinnon (peter.mackinnon@usask.ca).

Jack Jensen