Author: CREDNB

(La version française suit)

From the SMRs Education Task Force: Bulletin number 15 • March 2025

Toxic radioactive waste is expensive to clean up. Canada’s contract to clean up its legacy waste is worth billions for a three-company consortium: Canada’s AtkinsRéalis and Texas-based Fluor and Jacobs. The two American companies run nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and U.K. in addition to their Canadian nuclear interests.

Parliament’s payment to the consortium last year was $1.3 billion. The annual payments have risen each year of the 10-year contract that will end in September 2025. The consortium operates “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories” (CNL) in a “Government-owned, Contractor-operated” (GoCo) arrangement with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL).

The U.K. abandoned GoCo contracts because of exorbitant costs and poor value for money. Under Canada’s GoCo contract, AECL owns lands, buildings, and radioactive waste, and the three-company consortium operates AECL’s sites.

When the Harper government issued the 10-year GoCo contract during the 2015 federal election period, they said AECL lacked the ability to clean up Canada’s multi-billion radioactive waste liability dating to World War II and needed “private sector rigour.” From their billion-dollar annual payout, the three partner corporations take $237 million for “contractual expenses.” The salaries of 44 senior CNL managers, mostly Americans, average over $500,000 each.

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Les entreprises américaines profitent des déchets radioactifs du Canada

De le groupe de travail sur l’éducation relative aux PRM : Bulletin numéro 15 • Mars 2025

Les déchets radioactifs toxiques sont coûteux à nettoyer. Le contrat du Canada pournettoyer ses déchets qui s’accumulent vaut des milliards pour un consortium de troisentreprises : AtkinsRéalis du Canada et Fluor and Jacobs, basées au Texas. Les deuxsociétés américaines exploitent des installations d’armement nucléaire aux États-Uniset au Royaume-Uni, en plus de leurs intérêts nucléaires canadiens.Le paiement du Parlement au consortium l’an dernier s’est élevé à 1,3 milliard dedollars. Les paiements annuels ont augmenté chaque année du contrat de 10 ans quise terminera en septembre 2025.

Le consortium exploite les « Laboratoires nucléaires canadiens » (LNC) dans le cadred’une entente avec Énergie atomique du Canada limitée (EACL) dite « GoCo(Government-owned, Contractor-operated » qui signifie que le gouvernement possèdel’organisme, mais que le consortium le gère.

Le Royaume-Uni a abandonné les contrats de GoCo en raison des coûts exorbitants etdu faible rapport qualité-prix. En vertu du contrat de GoCo du Canada, EACL estpropriétaire des terres, des bâtiments et des déchets radioactifs, et le consortium detrois sociétés exploite les sites d’EACL.

Lorsque le gouvernement Harper a publié le contrat de 10 ans pour la GoCo pendant lapériode des élections fédérales de 2015, il a déclaré qu’EACL n’avait pas la capacité denettoyer les déchets radioactifs du Canada qui représentent des milliards de dollars etqui datent de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et qu’elle devait faire preuve de « rigueur dusecteur privé ».

Sur leur versement annuel de 1 milliard de dollars, les trois sociétés partenairesprennent 237 millions de dollars pour des « dépenses contractuelles ». Les salaires de44 cadres supérieurs des LNC, pour la plupart américains, excèdent en moyenne500 000 $ chacun.

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CRED-NB is an active member of Climate Action Network – Canada. A fellow network member, the Climate Emergency Unit, has started a new podcast called Break In Case of Emergency. So far it’s BC focused but we think they will have a lot of relevant information to share, especially since they have a Canadian perspective.

The podcast features urgent conversations about the crisis that connects us all. As global temperatures soar and communities face devastating climate disasters, they share conversations with frontline activists and organizers about what a true emergency response looks like—beyond government inaction, corporate greenwashing, and climate denial. Through critical analysis, storytelling, and radical imagination, they examine the systems of power that are blocking climate action and explore what’s required to build a movement for a just, livable planet.

Try a listen at https://www.climateemergencyunit.ca/podcast

By Jim Emberger – Special to Brunswick News – Published February 20, 2025

Threatening times, with rapidly changing events, inevitably produce two things. Public and media attention becomes focused on the turmoil and pace of immediate concerns, and longstanding issues, regardless of importance, are set aside.

Secondly, some corporate or financial interests will attempt to use the distraction to push profiteering schemes, especially unpopular ones.  This is sometimes known as “disaster capitalism.”

We see this today as Canada’s fossil fuel producers, and their political and media allies, respond to Donald Trump’s tariff threats by re-introducing the ideas of the Energy East bitumen pipeline and various shale gas/LNG projects.

These projects are now cloaked in patriotism, with their proponents cynically counting on the public’s anxiety and patriotic fervour to cloud its memory of the legitimate economic and environmental grounds for rejecting the projects originally.

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Jim Emberger is the spokesperson for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance (NBASGA). NBASGA is a CRED-NB Champion.

CRED-NB is a member of the SMR Information Task force that publishes regular bulletins send to federal and provincial legislators. This month the topic is reaching net zero without any new nuclear energy.

The nuclear industry claims that we cannot reach net zero emissions without nuclear because “base load” energy is required to provide reliable electricity “when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.” This is false. A recent study by the David Suzuki Foundation shows that Canada can reach net zero without any new nuclear energy.

Many countries have taken advantage of the advances in technology and the plummeting price of wind and solar energy and are on their way to a largely renewable energy grid. In 2022, almost 100% of the total electricity produced in ten countries, and between 50 and 100% in 64 countries, was from renewable energy: wind, water and solar.

Germany is a leader in Europe for both solar and wind generation growth. In the first nine months of 2024, renewable energy (largely from wind and solar) accounted for 59% of power generation. By April Germany had exceeded its target of total solar capacity for the entire year.

Many other countries are proving that we do not need nuclear energy to reach net zero, and Canada should be following their lead.

Read the full bulletin HERE.

CRED-NB is a member of Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac) and we signed and shared a statement about how we should respond to tariffs. Now CAN-Rac has organized a webinar, Beyond the Shock Doctrine: Conversation on Tariffs, Climate and Solidarity, Wed. Feb. 12 @ 8 PM Atlantic.

Hosted by Climate Action Network Canada and the UBC Centre for Climate Justice, this conversation will feature Naomi Klein, Co-Director of the Centre for Climate Justice, Syed Hussan, Executive Director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, and Lubicon Cree advocate Melina Laboucan-Massimo, founder and Executive Director of Sacred Earth Solar.

Join this important conversation by registering here. Spots are limited!

CRED-NB is a member of Climate Action Network Canada. Today we joined with groups across the country to issue a statement: Ahead of Trump’s tariffs, civil society groups call for a response that puts people first and builds resilience.

Trump’s first weeks in office have been marked by appalling decisions across numerous fronts—from exiting the Paris Agreement, to mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and arrests, to attacking trans rights—as well as by the looming spectre of punitive tariffs.

Protecting Canadians during a second Trump administration and its wake will require bold measures from our federal and provincial leaders. But the response from some Canadian politicians so far has been alarming: we have seen increased militarism at the border and scapegoating migrants, backpedalling on climate commitments, and cynical ploys to entrench fossil fuel dependence. Read the full statement HERE.

William ‘Eric’ Altvater’s article was published by The Hill Times and the NB Media Co-op which is open access, HERE

If you missed it, Eric took the beautiful photos of the Bay of Fundy included in the recent report co-published by the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group and the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University, “Indigenous Views on Nuclear Energy and Radioactive Waste.”
https://cedar-project.org/indigenous/

CRED-NB is co-hosting a webinar and book launch, The Scientists Who Alerted us to the Dangers of Radiation, with the authors Dr. Ian Fairlie and Cindy Folkers.

Thur. Jan. 16, noon – 2 p.m. Atlantic
Register: HERE. 

This book reveals that the harmful effects of radiation exposure – especially from the nuclear sector and especially to children – are more pervasive and worse than thought. These have been known for decades but suppressed by politically-motivated censorship and overt disparagement/persecution.

Anyone who ever wondered about radiation or its close relative, radioactivity, should read the book and attend this webinar. It’s timely because several governments are pushing hard for more public exposures to radiation via nuclear power. It explains radiation in easy-to-grasp language which clarifies its dangers and risks.

Webinar co-hosted by: Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA), Nuclear Waste Watch, Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB), and the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR).

NB Power seems determined to build at least two experimental reactors at the Point Lepreau nuclear site, but their chosen designs are running into big problems.

One possible alternative is the reactor design Ontario Power Generation (OPG) hopes to build at the Darlington nuclear site on Lake Ontario. OPG is promoting it as a “small, modular” nuclear reactor.

Consider a building that soars 35 metres upwards and extends 38 metres below ground. That’s 10 stories up, 11 stories down. At 73 metres, that’s almost as tall as Brunswick Square in Saint John, or Assumption Place in Moncton, the tallest buildings in New Brunswick. Would you call such a structure small? Read the article by Dr. Gordon Edwards, published in the NB Media Co-op, HERE.