Those Japanese nuclear buckets could be very scary in Ontario

Toronto Star - October 5, 1999
by Thomas Walkom

Two intriguing and (let us hope) unrelated stories appeared in the newspapers in the last few days.

The first had to do with a privately-owned nuclear firm in Japan called JCO Co. In order to increase productivity and be globally competitive, JCO instructed its workers processing lethal quantities of highly radioactive uranium fuel to simply mix it in stainless steel buckets.

Established safety procedures called for the uranium oxide and nitric acid to be combined by means of an elaborate and time-consuming mechanical filtration system.

But JCO knew such job-destroying red tape would only hinder its abilities to create private-sector efficiencies.

So it issued its workers with buckets and the equivalent of a few wooden spoons instead. They were ordered to dump some uranium oxide into a pailful of nitric acid, swish it all together and - presto - enriched uranium fuel would result.

For a long time, the old bucket method worked. But then last Thursday a few workers poured too much uranium into a bucket and caused what the nuclear industry calls an unfortunate occurrence.

The unfortunate occurrence was a chain reaction, which, in turn, led to an explosion, the severe radiation poisoning of three workers and the release into the surrounding neighbourhood of lethal amounts of radioactive material.

What a mess. Or, as they say in the nuclear industry: Oops.

The second, and one hopes unrelated, story appeared in The Star yesterday. Reporter Stuart Laidlaw revealed that Ontario Hydro is contemplating the sale of all or part of the Bruce nuclear generating plant to private foreign firms.

I know; I know. There is absolutely no indication that JCO or its parent Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. is one of those private foreign firms interested in - to use Hydro's unfortunate word - "partnering" with Bruce. Even if JCO were interested, its old-pail technology would not necessarily be transferable - at least not right away.

As nuclear industry officials explained last week, Canadian reactors such as the Bruce plant on Lake Huron don't use the kind of wet, sloppy, enriched fuel that blew up in Japan. They use safe, bone-dry, natural uranium. And no matter how many wooden spoons you have, you can't mix up bone-dry uranium in an old pail.

So even if JCO/Sumitomo wins the nod to buy Bruce, this argument goes, it is unlikely it will be able to utilize its state-of-the-art methods here.

(The funny thing - actually, the hilarious thing - is that while it's true Canadian nuclear reactors don't now use enriched fuel, they soon will. That's because Canada is involving itself in the international effort to destroy unwanted U.S. and Russian nuclear bombs. The plutonium from these bombs will be mixed with depleted uranium oxide to form a mixed oxide or MOX and shipped to this country to be burned in Canadian reactors. In fact, the first shipments of MOX are due to arrive in Chalk River, north of Ottawa, within the next few weeks.)

Still, there is something ironic about the timing of these two apparently unrelated stories. For while public utilities have not been paragons of virtue in the nuclear field (Chernobyl was state-owned), the record shows that they tend to become even worse as they privatize.

In Britain, for instance, the country's largest nuclear reprocessing plant recently admitted it falsified at least 22 safety checks involved in the manufacture of MOX for Japan.

British Nuclear Fuels, a government firm that owns the Sellafield reprocessing plant, is preparing to sell 50 per cent of itself to the private sector. The move to privatization has been accompanied by what the Guardian newspaper delicately calls "fears of lax safety."

The reason for this is not that privatized firms are somehow less moral. They are not. But private companies have to make a profit; that is the primary rule under which the private sector operates.

In the nuclear business, there are only two ways to do this.

One is to raise the price of the final product, the electricity produced by nuclear plants. But this is as politically unpalatable in Britain or Japan as it is in Ontario.

The other way to make a profit is to cut costs. In the heavily regulated nuclear industry, this usually means cutting corners.

This is why JCO's fission-in-a-bucket explosion last week was no anomaly. It was a perfeclty logical occurrence for a firm trying to make a buck in an industry where, if all safety rules are followed, the costs stay inordinately high. And in that sense, yes, it could happen here - particularly if Ontario Hydro's ``partnering'' plans continue apace.

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