STOP PLUTONIUM FUEL IMPORTS NOW

September 2000

BACKGROUND

Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) has put forward a plan that envisages tonnes of weapons plutonium from the United States and Russia imported into Canada over a period of 25 years. The weapons plutonium, in the form of mixed oxide fuel bundles (a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide referred to as MOX), would be used in CANDU reactors.

In April 1996, without any public consultation or parliamentary debate, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien declared that Canada supported the plan in principle. Despite numerous critical assessments of the weapons plutonium fuel concept, including the recommendation of a parliamentary committee that the plan be scrapped, the federal government announced on September 2, 1999 that Canada had agreed to import plutonium fuel from U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles (120 grams from each country) for the purposes of a ìtest burnî (the first of up to three) in a nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ontario.

The government also announced on September 2, 1999, that two Ontario cities had been selected to serve as ëtransit pointsí for the shipment of plutonium fuel to Chalk River. (Following the announcement city officials in Sault Ste. Marie ó the transit point for U.S. weapons plutonium fuel, and Cornwall, Ontario ó the port of entry for Russian weapons plutonium fuel, stated that the government failed to warn them ahead of time that their cities had been selected.) To date, the Atomic Energy Control Board, the body charged with regulating the nuclear industry in Canada, has refused to undertake an environmental assessment of the test burn.

On January 14, 2000, American weapons plutonium fuel clandestinely crossed the U.S.- Canada border by land transport to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. On the Canadian side it was secretly flown (the mayor and other city officials in Sault Ste. Marie were not informed) by helicopter to Chalk River.

The possibility of transporting MOX plutonium from the U.S. by aircraft was never discussed in any of the AECL plans submitted to Transport Canada and made public in September 1999. (With regard to the test burn, American law prohibits the air transport of MOX plutonium over U.S. territory because of the risks involved in the event of a crash. Even the lead U.S. agency responsible for promoting the plutonium test burn project, the Department of Energy, explicitly rejected the option of transporting MOX plutonium to Canada by air.) The decision in Canada to move from land transport to air was likely made to avoid blockades and protests expected in many communities along the land transport route from Sault Ste. Marie to Chalk River.

In April 2000 following the air transport of American MOX within Canada an official with the U.S. Department of Energy was quoted in the media as stating that five times more weapons-grade plutonium would be shipped from Russia to Canada than had been previously identified by the Canadian government (approximately 600 grams vs. 120 grams).

At the time it was assumed that Russian MOX would be transported to Canada by land and sea. In November of 1999, Transport Canada had approved AECL's plan to transport the US weapons plutonium fuel by truck, and the Russian weapons plutonium fuel by land and sea, stating not once but five times that the plutonium would not be flown for safety reasons.

However, in July 2000 the federal government announced that MOX plutonium from Russia would be transported to Canada (and within Canada) by aircraft. They also announced an initial 28 day comment period (subsequently extended into September 2000) for a revised transportation plan submitted to Transport Canada. Note: CNP's related action alert provides additional information on the July 2000 transport plan.

(CNP groups and others believe that the July 2000 comment period was established as a result of a lawsuit launched in June 2000 by a coalition of First Nations and environment groups over the lack of public consultations in connection with the move from land to air transport. The lawsuit was withdrawn following the federal governmentís announcement of the comment period.)

There is widespread opposition to the use of weapons plutonium fuel. Over the past four years, a number of Canadian public-interest groups, including Energy Probe, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, Nuclear Awareness Project, Concerned Citizens of Manitoba, Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Sierra Club of Canada, have written to members of the federal cabinet to express their concerns about plutonium fuel imports. At the international level, 171 environmental, peace and medical organizations issued a statement in January of 1997 condemning the U.S. decision to allow the use of plutonium fuel in commercial nuclear reactors.

In December 1998, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT) found the federal governmentís plutonium import plan to be ìtotally unfeasibleî. In its report entitled, ìCanada and the Nuclear Challenge: Reducing the Political Value of Nuclear Weapons for the Twenty First Centuryî the committee (a majority of whom are members of the governing Liberal Party) recommended that the plan be scrapped. In March 1999 it was disclosed that in spite of this recommendation, Jean Chrétien informed Bill Clinton that he still supported the plan. One month later (in April 1999) the Chrétien government publicly rejected the committeeís recommendation.

Since April 1999, a growing number of individuals and organizations have expressed opposition to the federal governmentís plutonium fuel plans. First Nations communities along with hundreds of municipalities, including 167 municipalities in Quebec, have passed resolutions against the importation and transport of weapons plutonium fuel (MOX) in Canada. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has also passed a resolution against the project, as well as the Conference of Great Lakes Mayors. Firefighters and Police associations have recommended that the project not go forward.

HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP

We need your help to send a strong message to federal, provincial and municipal leaders that the plutonium fuel test at Chalk River as well as the larger plan should be scrapped.

1) Write to your municipal, provincial and federal representatives and urge them to take steps to cancel the plutonium fuel import plan. (Contact information is provided below for federal and provincial politicians. Call your city or town hall for municipal contact information.)

Tell them:
 

• the test should not proceed and that you are opposed to the entire plutonium fuel project. The test cannot be separated from the full-scale program--one leads to the other.

 
• plutonium should be treated as a dangerous waste product to be immobilized and guarded. It should not be commercialized. Immobilization would not require transporting plutonium over long distances. Canada can send specialists to help Russia and the US to deal with their plutonium problems, but we should not be bringing the problems here.

 
• plutonium is a highly dangerous material and the consequences of a severe transportation accident could be significant. AECLís transportation plans for the plutonium fuel shipment include a scenario involving an "event that leads to the MOX fuel shipping package breaking open, in a severe fire, and releasing plutonium dioxide particles into the air.. . . The public is assumed to be near enough to the accident to breathe air contaminated with plutonium dioxide." AECL also states that: "The potentially exposed population consists of all persons located under the plume footprint out to a downwind distance of 80 km." This contradicts the claim made by Ralph Goodale, the Minister of Natural Resources, that the plutonium fuel "can't ignite or burn".

 
• plutonium is the most carefully guarded material on earth because it can be used to make atomic bombs. The US National Academy of Sciences says that plutonium fuel should be guarded as carefully as intact nuclear weapons. Canada does not have the expertise to do so. Although the shipments will be accompanied by a security team and tracked by satellite, AECLís transportation plans do not address the threat of criminals attempting to highjack the shipment.

• using plutonium as reactor fuel does not destroy the plutonium: over fifty percent of the original amount of weapons plutonium remains in the spent nuclear fuel and must be guarded for tens of thousands of years.

 
• the plutonium fuel import scheme will not contribute to nuclear disarmament. Rather, it is about propping up Canada's declining nuclear industry. Instead of embarking upon this initiative which will aggravate Canada's nuclear waste problems, Canada should phase out nuclear power.

• the federal government should adopt the recommendation of an all-party parliamentary committee (Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, December 1998) that the plutonium fuel plan be scrapped (in spite of this, the Chrétien cabinet rejected the committee's advice in April 1999).

• Canada should be pushing for a global ban on plutonium production and use. Instead, by going along with AECLís scheme, Canada is fostering global traffic in plutonium which will increase the risk of nuclear terrorism, nuclear accidents, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

2) At the municipal level, encourage your representatives to pass resolutions against the weapons plutonium fuel scheme as many communities in Ontario, Quebec and elsewhere have done.

We can provide you with background materials and help with your outreach work. Copies of your letters should be forwarded to CNP. Please see additional contact information and a description on the transportation routes below. For further information: www.cnp.ca and www.ccnr.org.

Keep CNP posted on your initiatives. Together we can stop this wrong-headed plan to import weapons plutonium.

Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
cnp@web.net

CONTACT INFORMATION FOR CANADIAN FEDERAL AND PROVINCIAL POLITICIANS FOLLOWS

CONTACT INFORMATION

Listed below is contact information for federal and provincial politicians.

1) You can write to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, Natural Resources Minister Ralph Goodale , other ministers and all federal MPs postage-free at the following address:

House of Commons
Ottawa Ontario
K1A 0A6

2) You can directly fax or telephone the offices of Jean Chrétien, Lloyd Axworthy and Ralph Goodale:

Jean Chrétien; telephone, 613-992-4211; fax, 613-941-6900
Lloyd Axworthy; telephone, 613-995-0153; fax, 613-947-4442
Ralph Goodale; telephone, 613-996-3843; fax, 613-992-5098

3) You can mail, e-mail, call or send a fax to Premier Mike Harris:

Hon. Michael Harris
Premier of Ontario
Legislative Building
Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario
M7A 1A1

Telephone: 416-325-1941
Fax: 416-325-7578
e-mail: webprem@gov.on.ca

4) You can mail, e-mail, call or send a fax to Premier Lucien Bouchard:

Monsieur Lucien Bouchard
Premier ministre du Québec
Cabinet du Premier ministre
885 Grande Allée Est 3e étage
Québec (Québec)
G1A 1A2

Tel (418) 643-5321
Fax (418) 643-3924
e-mail: premier.ministre@cex.gouv.qc.ca

(You can find e-mail, telephone and related information for other members of the Quebec National Assembly on the web at http://www.assnat.qc.ca/eng/membres/deputes_lst.html)

5) A complete e-mail listing of federal MPs and Ontario MPPs is available by contacting the Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout at cnp@web.net.

Related Information

September 2000, CNP Action Alert: Say No to Russian Plutonium Imports

August 3, 2000 media release : Citizens Groups Demand Truth from Federal Government on Plutonium Airlift Plan

June 28, 2000 media release: Citizen's groups take federal government to court over plutonium issue

CNP Backgrounder on the plutonium fuel (MOX) plan

CELA Legal Opinion (February 16, 2000)

CNP Backgrounder on issues related to plutonium fuel transport by air

Excerpts from AECL and U.S. DoE documents on MOX and air transport

September 1999 Map of Transport Routes
 
 

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Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout, 2000