TRITIUM - In the Ottawa River!

[Oscar]

TRITIUM – November 2006

Compiled by Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, Regroupement pour la surveillance du nuclaire, c.p. 236 Station Snowdon Montreal H3X 3T4 internet: http://ccnr.org� t�l/fax: (514) 489 5118

Here's a copy of the press release that went with yesterday morning’s press conference on Parliament Hill re: dumping of tritium into the Ottawa River.

Plan to dump radioactive tritium into Ottawa River recommended by staff at Canada’s nuclear agency November 21, 2006

(Ottawa, Ontario) Ottawa’s tap water will soon get an extra hit of a radioactive waste material – tritium – from SRB Technologies in Pembroke, unless the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) rejects the recommend-ations of its staff. On the weekend, CNSC staff released what nuclear watchdog groups are calling its “worst recommendations ever” in preparation for the November 27th hearing on SRB’s application for a renewed license.

Tritium is a hazardous waste byproduct from CANDU reactors. SRB uses it to manufacture glow-in-the-dark exit signs. But the company has been unable to monitor and control its emissions. Each year, it releases more tritium than any of Canada’s nuclear power stations. Indeed, in two years out of the past eight, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, SRB released more tritium than all of Canada’s nuclear power stations combined.

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen which persists in the environment for decades. It is readily incorporated into biological tissues of all kinds. It can cause cancer, genetic mutations, malformed fetuses and other health problems. SRB has severely contaminated the environment and groundwater in the City of Pembroke with tritium. The levels are thousands of times higher than background – far in excess of Canada’s drinking water guideline. Contamination levels in Pembroke are so high that it will take a century for them to return to background levels.

Despite this dismal record, and the legal obligation to limit risks “to the health and safety of persons and the environment”, CNSC staff are recommending that the licence for the polluting SRB plant be renewed.

Moreover, CNSC staff are endorsing an SRB proposal to collect radioactive stack drippings and contaminated groundwater and run them through the Pembroke sewer system directly into the Ottawa River -- a source of drinking water for millions of Canadians in Quebec and Ontario.

Scientific bodies have shown that there is no safe level of exposure to radioactive materials and urge that all unnecessary exposures be avoided.
According to Dr. Ole Hendrickson, Researcher for Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County, CNSC staff’s recommendations are irrational and clearly not based on science. “Despite SRB’s abysmal compliance history, CNSC staff are now recommending a new 18-month license, lifting all restrictions under which the company has been operating for the past 11 months, and giving a green light to dump radioactive tritium into the Ottawa River”

A brief for the upcoming licensing hearing prepared by Ottawa Riverkeeper, Meredith Brown, emphasizes the need to protect water resources. “It is simply unacceptable to use the Ottawa River as a sewer for disposal of nuclear waste” Brown stated. “This is a real blast from the past, when dilution was considered the solution to pollution.”

Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, said “The Commission is getting bad advice from its staff. The people responsible for these recommendations should be fired.” Edwards stated that granting SRB a new license would be a betrayal of the public trust and a violation of the law that established the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in the first place.

Contacts: Gordon Edwards, (514) 839 7214 (cell), ccnr@web.ca
Lynn Jones, (613) 735-4876 / (613) 735-6444, ljones@nrtco.net
Marc Chénier, (514) 527-2712, mchenier@videotron.ca
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Ole Hendrickson put together a number of super-good one-pagers on tritium that I also worked on: Dr. Edwards.

WHAT IS TRITIUM

Tritium is a radioactive, heavy isotope of hydrogen, with a half-life of 12.3 years. The nucleus of a tritium atom has one proton and two neutrons, making it three times heavier than a normal hydrogen atom, which has only one proton in its nucleus.

Each tritium atom eventually disintegrates by giving off a beta particle, becoming a non-radioactive helium atom. In living tissue, the beta particle causes cellular damage which may result in cancer, malformed fetuses, or genetic damage. Hence human exposure to tritium oxide (HTO, also known as “tritiated water”) poses health risks.

Tritium is largely a man-made substance produced by nuclear reactors (especially CANDU reactors) and by the explosion of nuclear weapons (especially H-bombs). Some tritium is created naturally as a result of cosmic radiation from outer space.

The natural background of tritium from cosmic radiation is around 3 kilograms spread around the globe. The total global inventory of man-made tritium in the atmosphere peaked in the mid-1970s at several hundred kilograms as a result of H-bomb testing.

Nuclear reactors are now the major source of tritium in the environment. CANDU reactors create much more tritium than other reactor types – about 3 kg [or 1 billion billion becquerels] per year. To limit radiation doses to CANDU workers a tritium removal facility was opened at Darlington, Ontario, in 1990.

At the Darlington Tritium Removal Facility tritium oxide (HTO) is extracted and converted into elemental tritium (HT). It is stored in stainless steel containers in a concrete vault. Most of the annual production of about 2.5 kg [or 900 million billion becquerels] (Drake 1996) is in storage. Some is sold for use in “glow-in-the-dark” devices such as exit signs or military equipment, or for conversion to biomedical tracers. The cost of Darlington tritium is around $25,000 US per gram. Total annual demand is about 150 grams.

Tritium is inserted into glass tubes to make glow-in-the-dark devices. Tritium’s beta particles strike a phosphorescent coating on the inside of the tube, making it glow. One exit sign contains about 12 tubes -- 2.5 milligrams [or 900 billion becquerels] of tritium in total.
Elemental tritium is also used in nuclear weapons - about 2-4 grams per weapon. Tritium reservoirs in warheads must be replenished roughly every eight years.

The U.S. closed its last weapons tritium production reactor in 1988. It operates a tritium recycling facility in South Carolina for the military. Tritium reservoirs from warheads are shipped to the facility, emptied of old tritium, and recharged with recycled tritium. Tritium from a new U.S. production facility would cost about $100,000 per gram.

The U.K.’s weapons tritium production facility (the Chapelcross Processing Plant), which operated from 1980 until 2005, is also now closed.

Although published information is scarce, the Darlington tritium inventory is likely to be several dozen kg, roughly equal to the total tritium inventory in U.S. nuclear weapons.

Very large amounts of tritium would be required if fusion reactors were ever developed – roughly 50 kg for every 1000 MW of energy produced.
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TRITIUM TRAIL

The tritium trail starts with CANDU reactors. When non-radioactive heavy water is irradiated, radioactive tritium is created. Tritium is a serious workplace hazard. It is a radioactive form of hydrogen – and the principal pollutant from CANDU power plants.

To reduce the CANDU workplace hazard, Ontario Power Generation trucks its tritium-contaminated heavy water to a special facility: the Darlington Tritium Removal Facility.

The tritium facility began operating in 1990. Efforts were made to defray the cost by selling the tritium. This was controversial, since the main use for tritium worldwide (more than 90 % of the total) is as a nuclear explosive material in weapons programs.

On the open market, tritium is valued at about $25,000 (U.S.) per gram. On average, each nuclear weapon uses about 4 grams or $100,000 worth of tritium.

Since it began operating, the Darlington Tritium Removal Facility has produced about 2 kilograms per year, or 30 kilos of tritium altogether – enough for 7,500 nuclear weapons.

From Darlington, the tritium is shipped to AECL’s Chalk River Laboratories. AECL is equipped to handle large amounts of tritium; it re-packages the tritium into smaller containers and ships them to processors such as SRB Technologies in Pembroke.

SRB regularly receives 2.5-g tritium consignments from AECL. It fills tubes with tritium and exports glow-in-the dark tritium-containing products all around the world.

SRB’s U.S. (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) and U.K. (Slough, Berkshire) affiliates, which no longer carry out tritium-processing operations, are major destinations. The shipments are trucked from Pembroke to Ottawa and flown from the Ottawa airport.

SRB imports tritium-filled devices from other countries for tritium reclamation. In 1994-1995 the U.S. Dept of Energy transferred hundreds of grams of waste tritium to Pembroke from weapons facilities. No permits or shipping documents accompanied these transfers.

SRB has a permit to import tritium from a top secret nuclear weapons facility in Russia, PA Mayak. A recent import permit, obtained through Access to Information, allows SRB to import up to 1.03 kg of waste tritium from China (see details in press kit).

Crushed glass wastes from SRB’s reclamation activities are highly radioactive and contain large amounts of tritium. SRB ships these wastes to AECL’s Chalk River Labs.

In 2000-2005 SRB discharged more than 150 grams of tritium from its stacks during tube-filling and reclamation operations. At $25,000 US per gram (Darlington price), this represents a spill of $3,750,000 worth of tritium into the local environment.

SRB also discharges waste tritium into the Pembroke sewer from where it enters the Ottawa River and the drinking water of downstream communities including Ottawa.

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Medical or “health” effects of tritium and Canada’s lax standards

November 2006

Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are the basic building blocks of organic matter – what all living things are made of.

Tritium, as a RADIOACTIVE form of hydrogen, combines with oxygen to form radioactive water (tritiated water) which enters freely into all living things.

Tritium, as a RADIOACTIVE form of hydrogen, becomes incorporated into organic matter as “organically-bound tritium” (OBT). In this form, it can remain within living organism for months or years.

There is evidence that tritium ADHERES TO genetic material (DNA molecules), where its radioactivity poses special risks of CAUSING cancer and genetic damage.

Exposure to tritium HAS BEEN SHOWN TO cause miscarriages, birth defects, permanent genetic damage and a host of other health problems IN LABORATORY ANIMALS.

International standards originally regulated all radioisotopes based on their energy. These standards allowed exposure to very high levels of tritium because its beta particle is less energetic than other forms of ATOMIC radiation. However, the biological harm caused by tritium exposure is up to 15 times greater than would be expected from its energy alone.

Most jurisdictions have gone beyond current international standards, and are tightening standards for acceptable levels of tritium based on scientific evidence of its risks. For example, the European Union standard for tritium in drinking water is 100 becquerels per liter, and in California a limit of 15 becquerels per liter is being considered.

Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has acted to limit tritium exposure. Ottawa has only set a voluntary guideline of 7000 becquerels per liter for drinking water; that level is used as a regulatory standard in Ontario.

A scientific advisory committee (ACES) to the Government of Ontario recommended in 1994 that the Ontario standard be reduced to 100 Bq/L immediately, and then to 20 Bq/L after five years; this is 350 times more stringent than current Ontario regulations.

Toronto City Council, at the urging of the city’s Medical Officer of Health, passed a resolution in July 2006, endorsing this (ACES) recommendation to dramatically tighten the tritium standards for drinking water.
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Problems with tritium exit signs and the need for a ban

There are specific HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL hazards associated with the widespread global distribution of tritium-filled “glow-in-the-dark” devices such as exit signs, manufactured by SRB.

The contents of a single exit sign, if converted to the oxide form and inhaled, would represent a lethal dose of radiation.

A 1993 U.K. study found that the radiation hazard of older exit signs increases greatly as tritium is converted to the oxide form. Breakage of tubes in these signs can expose humans (and animals) to high radiation doses.

Several recent incidents of exit sign breakage in the U.S. have forced the evacuation of homes and hospitals and expensive decontamination operations.

If waste tubes are discarded, dumped and broken in landfills, tritium can leach out and contaminate the groundwater.

A 2000 Scottish study found high levels of tritium in leachate from 11 landfills that could be traced to discarded exit signs from SRB in Pembroke, even though regulations were supposedly in place to prevent this from happening.

Unlike Canada, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. allows tritium lights to be discarded in ordinary landfills. Both countries require that they be placed in radioactive waste disposal facilities or returned to the manufacturer.
SRB in Pembroke is the only manufacturer in the world that accepts the return of waste tritium lights, increasing the hazards to the local population.

Several jurisdictions have banned the use of tritium exit signs.
Natural Resources Canada recommends against the use of tritium exit signs since they are not bright enough for the intended purpose and better alternatives (such as LEDs) exist.

Canada is allowing SRB Technologies to pollute the Pembroke environment in order to market a radioactive waste material (tritium) which is routinely created as an unwanted hazardous byproduct in CANDU reactors.

These hazardous products are spreading tritium pollution around the world.

A responsible action for the Canadian government would be to ban the civilian use (and manufacture for civilian use) of tritium exit signs, as well mas the marketing of radioactive waste materials such as tritium.
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Severe tritium contamination in Pembroke

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. It comes in two forms: radioactive gas and radioactive water.

Tritium is hazardous to humans and other forms of life. It causes cancer, permanent and irreversible developmental diseases, and genetic damage. It also can cause a host of other problems.

SRB Technologies (Canada) Ltd. (SRBT) on Boundary Road in Pembroke releases very large quantities of tritium as part of its routine operations. SRB is licensed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The company has been operating since 1991. In its 15-year operating history, SRBT has frequently failed to comply with regulations. 1

Since the late 1990’s, SRB has been emitting more tritium than any of Canada's nuclear generating stations which are surrounded by large “buffer” or “exclusion” zones (areas where the public is not permitted to live or work to reduce radiation exposures). SRB has even been putting out more tritium than nuclear power plants and weapons factories in the United States including the Savannah River Site, a U.S. Department of Energy nuclear weapons facility in South Carolina that has a 32-km diameter exclusion zone and employs 12,000 people.

Tritium levels in the environment near SRB are hundreds to thousands of times background and are increasing. “Background” refers to the amount of tritium normally present in the environment. Background levels of tritium are very low, almost undetectable. Levels of tritium contamination in Pembroke soil, vegetation, and groundwater are hundreds to thousands of times “background”. Well water is also contaminated. The most contaminated well found to date has 30 times the recommended limit in the European Union and 138 times the limit recommended by Ontario’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Standards in 1994.

A recent scientific review in Great Britain2 found that the nuclear industry underestimates tritium’s hazards by a factor of 15 and allows extremely large quantities of tritium to be released into the environment. For example, nuclear industry models assume that the hazard of 20 million tritium atoms is the same as that posed by one atom of radon gas. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission adopts these outdated models and does not have a health department or any biomedical expertise for assessing and minimizing radiation risks.

SRB does not have an approved decommissioning plan (a plan for cleaning up and decontaminating the site of its operations when they cease) and has not posted a financial guarantee for decommissioning although (money to pay for the cleanup). As a Class 1 nuclear facility, it is required to have a decommissioning plan and to post a financial guarantee under the Canadian Nuclear Safety and Control Act. It has had five years to do so since the new Act came into force, and has failed to comply. Yet it receives radioactive waste in the form of used tritium devices.

References

See http://www.renc.igs.net/~cmichener/ccrc ... backg.html for details.
Committee Examining the Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters, Report 9-1, Tritium: Properties, Metabolism and Dosimetry, April, 2003.
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The misguided plan to dump tritium in the Ottawa River

SRB Technologies has so severely contaminated the air, surface water, soil and groundwater around its plant that even Canada’s extremely permissive standard for tritium in groundwater has been violated by a large margin.

The most highly contaminated groundwater in the vicinity of SRB is 19 times the maximum permissible tritium concentration allowed under the Canadian standard.

SRB has contaminated the environment by pumping out astronomical quantities of airborne tritium. (see attached chart by CNSC staff scientist Steve Mihok, obtained through Access to Information)

In two years out of the last eight, SRB emitted more tritium oxide (radioactive water) to the air in Pembroke than all of the nuclear power plants in Canada combined.

Tritiated water vapour dripping off SRB’s stacks was recently found to be extremely contaminated. (up to 7,000 times higher than Canada’s lax drinking water standard)

SRB recently proposed to “clean up” by building a roof around its stacks, collecting the contaminated stack drippings, and flushing this radioactive water along with con-taminated groundwater into the Pembroke sewer system and so into the Ottawa River.

The Ottawa River is already contaminated with tritium from SRB, which routinely discharges tritium to Pembroke’s sewer system, and from leaking radioactive waste sites and irradiated fuel bays at Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River Labs (upstream).

Millions of Canadians in downstream communities take their drinking water from the Ottawa River, including residents of Ottawa; SRB’s proposal would increase the health risks for these people by dumping its radioactive tritium wastes routinely into the River.

Tritium is a long-lived radioactive toxin that has been targeted for ZERO discharge by the International Joint Commission on Great Lakes Water Quality.

SRB’s proposal would further contaminate the aquatic and terrestrial food chains.

Bottom line: SRB should not be allowed to use the Ottawa River as a sewer for disposal of its radioactive wastes.

Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President,
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
Regroupement pour la surveillance du nuclaire,
c.p. 236 Station Snowdon Montreal H3X 3T4
internet: http://ccnr.org� t�l/fax: (514) 489 5118