Nuclear power woes are AECL's fault

The news has finally surfaced: AECL's poor practices caused the medical isotope "crisis" and other problems.

In the view of most nuclear experts and informed observers, these AECL failures are the real cause of last month's crisis in isotope production that culminated this week in the Harper government's unprecedented firing of Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission....

... top AECL management was repeatedly hauled on the carpet before the Nuclear Safety Commission and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Control Board, to explain poor operating practices at the Universal reactor, including foot-dragging on implementing safety upgrades ordered by the federal regulator

...new reactors aren't operating because of a series of hard-to-believe blunders by once world-class Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Crown corporation responsible for designing and building them.

I credit Ontario Geofish with pointing out these basic facts months ago.

Canada chastises Safety Commission for wanting safety

The Natural Resources Minister wants to fire the President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for not wanting to run a reactor without backup power. She says, "Just try it, buddy!"

The federal government has threatened to fire the head of Canada's nuclear watchdog over the Chalk River reactor shutdown, and she responded Tuesday by vowing to fight back through the courts.

Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn wrote a letter to Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) president Linda Keen on Dec. 27 in which he questions her judgment and informs her he is considering having her removed from the post.

The letter, which was leaked to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, was written in the wake of last fall's shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor and the global shortage of radioisotopes that resulted from it.

Keen responded on Tuesday with an eight-page letter accusing Lunn of improper interference and threatening to fight in court any attempt to remove her from her job.

Keen's letter... has been posted on the CNSC website along with Lunn's....

Additionally, Keen said she has asked the privacy commissioner and the RCMP to investigate how Lunn's letter was leaked to the media.

Lunn failed to notice that there have been production stoppages before without any "emergency" being publicized, because the isotope producers sell to each other when their plants have to go offline.

Quoting Mark Twain: Our inalienable rights

Mark Twain once said:

It is by the goodness of God that in our coutry we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them.

See also:
- Mark Twain on writing crisply

What caused the I35-W bridge disaster?

Well, it was neglect of needed repairs, of course. But why did the highway department and the state neglect them? Barking Nonsequitur has a plausible chain of events to the bridge disaster. the 2002 report that said rumors of the bridge's deterioration were exaggerated. One of the commenters points out that follow-up reports to that report, issued in 2005 and 2006, used the exact same photographs, so more cracks, if present, would not be noted. In 2007, the bridge collapsed catastrophically, dropping traffic into the river and killing several people.

Stop torture by U.S.

Guess what? "Waterboarding" (half-drowning someone) really is torture.


(Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for the link)
And now that we have that sorted out, what about the Geneva Convention? Or is that just a "scrap of paper" like the U.S. constitution?

Faith-based schools?

The inimitable Q_pheevr has observations on the Canadian Conservative Party's campaign promise to fund more kinds of faith-based schools.

A Kitzmas Karol

The Innoculated Mind has published an article on the anniversary of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision, making Dec. 20 Kitzmas Day. It's called "A Kitzmas Karol". (You can jump straight to the poem, here.)

Canadian government falls for AECL's manipulation

...and orders the Chalk River reactor to start up against the advice of nuclear experts who say it's not safe.

As someone commented on CBC radio tonight, there was no media hoopla when AECL had a labour conflict and the reactor was shut down. Canada can buy its isotopes from other producers; they have agreements already in place in case this kind of thing happens, which it does, occasionally. The U.S., a much bigger consumer of Chalk River's isotopes, is not panicking. This is purely the AECL wanting to get back to selling the stuff itself - after lying about putting in the emergency backup system.

You can read about it in several successive articles on Ontario geofish: "Earthquakes and medical isotopes," for instance.

Gov't rushes to override safety rules for nuclear reactor

Prime Minister Harper, who apparently has a direct line to God, has assured Parliament that there will be no nuclear accident.

Citing an urgent need for medical isotopes, and ignoring the fact that the AECL lied when saying that emergency power for cooling pumps had been installed, the political parties of Canada will remove the reactor from regulatory oversight and force it back into production.

"There will be no nuclear accidents," said Prime Minister Stephen Harper, responding to heckles from Opposition members.

The replacement plant is six years behind schedule. Didn't anybody notice before last month?


The NRC's National Research Universal (NRU) reactor in Chalk River, Ont. is the world's biggest producer of medical isotopes. (Photo: National Research Council of Canada)

New Orleans flood control money went for Iraq war

The Bush Administration siphoned off New Orleans flood control money for the Iraq war.

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
--Sidney Blumenthal, 2001

Reuters: An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater

Also check out the Durango Bill geology page.

Isotopes over nuclear safety

Harold at Ontario geofish has an alarming report: the Canadian government is choosing isotopes over nuclear safety. Harold says:

The government has now put a lot of pressure on the CNSC to paper over their difficulties and get the reactor running again. This, despite the fact that AECL did a Conrad Black over required seismic safety upgrades...

This bottom line is that this is an old clapped-out reactor in a very active seismic zone.

AECL vs. Canadian Society of Nuclear Medicine

Harold Asmis at Ontario Geofish points out that Atomic Energy Canada Limited has been operating a reactor without a licence... and now we're going to be short of radioactive isotopes for treating cancer patients.

Bush, the Abominable "No" Man

Graydon Carter has written an editorial letter about George W. Bush for Vanity Fair. It's called "The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11." Carter writes,

... a new book by former British foreign secretary Lord Owen may supply a clue. In The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair, and the Intoxication of Power, Owen recalls the time in 2002 when the commander in chief collapsed while sitting on a sofa watching a football game. (Official cause: he���d choked on a pretzel.) The presidential head hit a table on the way to the floor, he suffered an abrasion on the left side of his face, and a blood sample was rushed to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Owen says he was told by a British doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins that lab technicians there found that the blood contained significant amounts of alcohol���this in the body of a man who claims he hasn���t had a drop in more than 20 years.

Japan cancels human rights

A blog of note, Vegetable Japan, is declaring a Day of Mourning for the death of human rights in Japan. Foreign residents in and visitors to Japan are being fingerprinted, harassed, intimidated, and made to feel unwelcome.

With the institution of the fingerprinting, photographing and questioning of non-Japanese visitors entering Japan, and even of residents and permanent residents every time they come back from a visit abroad, I declare that the last vestige of human rights here is dead.

In "Terrorism or Tyranny?" she continues the story. The government's excuse is that fingerprinting will catch dangerous criminals. But Japanese residents do not have to give their fingerprints. She points out that all the acts of terrorism committed in Japan so far have been committed by Japanese citizens. I guess no True Japanese would be a dangerous criminal. She adds,

It's lazy police work. The police won't actually have to do anything when there's a crime committed, except scan through their computer database and try to find someone to arrest. Whether that person may have been somewhere perfectly innocently or not probably won't be considered, because once they have the "evidence" they will go into typical mode here, arrest the suspect and then question them for up to 23 days with no recourse to a lawyer, using tactics of sleep deprivation and psychological intimidation until they confess.

Finally, she asks us to read and sign an online petition:

If you want to send the Japanese government a message that it is not all right to fingerprint only non-Japanese arriving and living in Japan, please sign the online petition against it.

Here's the link: Abolition of fingerprinting for non-Japanese.

Of course, human rights died in the U.S. some time earlier, when they threw out the law of habeas corpus (ya gotta have evidence to make a case) and began torturing political prisoners.

Australian Liberals lose election; Labor gains power

Australia's Liberal party, which is conservative politically, has decisively lost the national election after 11 years in power, in the wake of a certain restlessness in the electorate and a last-minute scandal about faked political flyers. Even the Prime Minister, John Howard, lost his seat. The Labor party, lead by a former diplimat, will have a comfortable majority.

Australian Liberals distribute faked flyer

Two days before an election while they trail in the polls, some members of Australia's ruling Liberal Party have been caught distributing fake flyers. These nasty Liberal notices are purported to come from a non-existent Islamic organization and urge Australians to vote for the Labour Party, which will be soft on terrorists who blew up a bar in Bali, killing 200 people. Many of those people were Australians. I don't imagine that many people are sympathetic with the murderers. The Liberals were caught delivering the fake notices to homes in a key electoral riding.


In an era of plausible deniability, the Liberal Party said that it had suspended a couple of unidentified Liberals for an unauthorized prank. Sure--if it works you might win the riding; and if it doesn't work, you can claim that it wasn't your idea. I guess they deserve to lose the election.

Ontario's election results

Blue is Conservative, Red is Liberal, and Orange is NDP. The darker the colour, the stronger the win. To save space, Ontario is shown in two sections at different scales. Northern Ontario is really larger.


When people are eager to contribute and there's good moderation, Wikepedia can be effective. I searched the standard news links in vain for a map of Ontario's election results this morning; then I turned to the English-language version of Wikipedia. There was a nice, clear map created and contributed by an editor. There were also tabulations of the results, a list of strategic targets for each party, poll results, campaigns, public opinion surveys, strategies, and links to previous elections and party Web sites. Cool!

Happy birthday, Stetson Kennedy!

From Terra Sigillata, here's a note about Stetson Kennedy, who helped to lesson the power of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. south.

Alberto Gonzales secretly endorsed torture

Dear goodness, when are they going to learn?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 ��� When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ���abhorrent��� in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales���s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Richard Dawkins interview with Avi Lewis

Richard Dawkins passed through Toronto recently and recorded an interview with Avi Lewis, discussing Dawkins' book The God Delusion.