Fifty years after Canada’s plutonium mishap in India, is his

[Oscar]

Fifty years after Canada’s plutonium mishap in India, is history repeating itself?

[ https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/05/16/cana ... tself-now/ ]

NB Media Co-op May 16, 2024 OPINION: SUSAN O’DONNELL AND GORDON EDWARDS

EXCERPT: "In the public imagination, nuclear power for electricity and nuclear weapons are entirely separate issues. Because Canada is not a nuclear weapons state, its nuclear power reactors are thought to be unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, and our nuclear technology exports are considered ‘peaceful.’

Yet this week marks the 50-year anniversary of the day when Canada’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear image was shattered. On May 18, 1974, India shocked the world by conducting a test atomic bomb explosion called ‘Smiling Buddha.’ The nuclear explosive was plutonium, obtained from a ‘peaceful’ research reactor—a gift from the Canadian government in 1954.
Plutonium is not found in nature, but nuclear reactors create it as a byproduct. Plutonium was the explosive used in the A-Bomb that the U.S. military dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945, killing 70,000 civilians, half of them on the first day. . . . .

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