Every day I do a search for articles about nuclear in the media and forward the ones that are not in the CNA clippings to the president and the past and future presidents of CNS.   I have also recently started copying them to relevant division chairs.  I add in my thoughts on whether we should respond and if so how.

The picture these stories paint can often be vastly different to that of the CNA clippings that are typically focused on positive stories about its members. 

With a limited resource and the need to peer review any response we might make CNS has had to be very selective about the stories that we respond to, and we only get to deal with a small proportion of them.  I think we would all like to be more involved in responding and that this could make a significant difference to public understanding. 

Increasingly I am going to start sharing that list and my thoughts about it here on this blog where a timely response is easier.  It is my hope that having seen these articles CNS members with appropriate expertise may respond directly.  

Today for example we saw this LETTER: NWMO misrepresents the safety profile of DGRs | Goderich Signal Star

Coming shortly before the South Bruce vote on the DGR, the timing of this article is very unhelpful as is the fact that it comes from an academic in the medical field, representing two of the more trusted groups in our society.

While the narrative and the story it tells makes sense and so could be persuasive to someone that does not know the facts it is woven out of thin air with lots of allusions and implication but few actual facts to dispute.  Its all just opinion stated as though it is fact.  

This total lack of substance makes it hard to respond to effectively.  If there are facts, they can be shown to be wrong, but allusions are like a slippery bar of soap. 

And the number of issues makes it even harder.

On the one hand we could list some of the disputable issues, for example: 

1. The CNSC is no more of an “offshoot” of the nuclear industry than Health Canada is an “offshoot” of the Medical Community so implicitly trusting one while implying the other cannot be trusted makes no sense.
2. Suggesting NWMO do not have the expertise because they do not have “doctors, professors, population health experts and epidemiologists” when very clearly NWMO are using such people to inform their work and are referenced in it.
3. That at the event he describes the physician scaremongered about nuclear weapons, an entirely irrelevant topic, Dr Suzuki stated clearly that he had nothing to contribute, and the legal scholar talked about theoretical legal issues that no one other than lawyers would be interested in and that this could be why NWMO hadn’t invited any of them to speak. The nuclear physicist was actually a retired math teacher mathematician who is routinely corrected by the regulator for saying things that are simply wrong.  If NWMO did allow him to speak they would be guilty of misinformation.

Or we could expose some of the lack of thought that went into his proposed solution pointing out that there is nowhere in Canada that is not close to surface water and that anyway over the period we are talking about that surface water will have moved anyway. (There will have been an ice age before anything could really happen in the DGR). 

Or we could point out that he is lobbying for things to happen that will actually happen anyway as the DGR will be monitored for one hundred years and will continue to be monitored and/ or remediated if it does not perform as expected.  

We could take the technical high road and just ask about how he thinks a leak will occur when used fuel is a solid or we could ask him why he thinks the million years is relevant when it has no bearing on safety whatsoever (and of course it’s wrong as used fuel will still be radioactive after a million years just as the uranium we didn’t dig out of the ground will still be radioactive for this period of time).  

Personally, I would like to point out that the entire tenet of his argument falls at the first hurdle because he accepts that sometimes a Doctor will be allowed to perform a never-done-before surgical procedure as long as “extensive study, testing and reliable confirmation of testing over time has taken place”, and that NWMO have done all those things even if he is not aware that they have done them (an indication of how little research he had done on the subject).  

But here is the challenge.  Point out all of the things that the author got wrong, and we just look like we are having a long whine and will not be taken seriously.  Pick just a few and it implies that the other things he said might be right.  Make a general statement about the inaccuracy of the letter without giving examples and it will not be compelling. 

Nuclear communication is not easy!