Presentation by Mr. David Bender

MR. BENDER: Thank you.

The last 350 years, we in Canada have seen an almost unbelievable number of changes, both in population as well as in lifestyle. Not only that, the rate of change has been near exponential, so that the changes in the last 50 years have been greater than all those in the preceding 300. We have no reason to believe that this pattern is going to alter.

One of the implications of this trend is that vast areas of what we now think of as uninhabited land, the Canadian Shield, will, in the next thousand years, be densely populated. This is important if we're now making decisions that will have consequences for thousands of years to come.

We have all seen what happens when waste is buried and forgotten. I need not remind you of the Love Canal. Just think what it would be like if instead of standard chemicals, it was full of radioactive waste.

We are now wrestling with a problem for which we do not have a sure solution, namely how to dispose of nuclear waste safely. We all know that it's going to remain hazardous for thousands of years to come. Many proposals have been put forward. The current suggested solution, the buried copper vessel, is being presented as a safe solution, and many think it is. Yet, is it?

We know that conditions are going to change in unpredictable ways. That's a given. And I'm talking about on and in the earth, not to mention politically and demographically. Just as we were surprised to find unexpected changes in the ozone layer and global temperatures, there will be surprises waiting for us in the behaviour of the Canadian Shield. Modern science is still very young, and with barely a hundred years of observations it now professes to know all about what the earth will act like for the next 10,000 years.

Despite its know-it-all posture, it is really still in its infancy when it comes to understanding earth sciences. It can no more be sure of what will happen geologically in the north of Canada than it can explain how the woolly Mammoths were eating tropical plants in Siberia when they were flash-frozen so quickly and completely that their meat is still edible today.

What we are currently discussing is whether to bury our problems unsolved, or to keep them present until we know a great deal more. As evidence to my contention that we do not yet have sure-fire answers, let me point out that the government, instead of guaranteeing our protection in the event of a nuclear accident, has taken a cowardly way out by simply limiting the liability of the facility so that it cannot be held responsible.

You only do something like that if you're not sure that the reassurances given by all those experts are believable. And disbelief is not limited to the government. Insurance companies don't believe their assurances, either. Even insurance company -- every insurance company in the world would jump at a chance to insure a company that they knew was a hundred per cent safe. You don't see them jumping.

That tells me that despite all these reassurances that we get from AECL, and all the others who have something to gain from professing to know what they're talking about, that in the end neither government nor industry believes them. And if the insurance companies are afraid to take the risk, so am I.

They know that if an accident were to happen, it could mean the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people could be ended or adversely affected. They would be irresponsible if they entered into such a venture without limited liability. Let's learn from the industry that's paid to take -- paid to assess risk, and not play Russian roulette with our future.

You, the members of this august board, are being asked to gamble with the lives of our children. Maybe you don't have children, so you can be totally dispassionate in whether a mistake now will have dire consequences for the next hundred generations. But if you do have children and would like to see your bloodline continue, as I would, how would you feel about having to come back to your great grandchildren and say to them that you're proud to have been on the committee that authored their deformities, disease, and possibly death?

I say these things because they are the known results of low-level sustained radioactive poisoning. Radioactive cesium and phosphorus gets into our bones. Radioactive iodine collects in our thyroid. Our knowledge in this area is still very incomplete. We are just beginning to explore the paths of bio-accumulation.

When DDT, an insecticide, was introduced and declared safe for household use, we had no idea that it would accumulate in the food chain and eventually annihilate several species of bird populations. In a course I took from Dr. Clark in radiation biology at the U of T, it was pointed out that in a stream south of Chalk River here in Ontario, there are recorded cases of duck eggs that glow in the dark as a result from bio-accumulation of radioactive phosphorous. This phosphorous was extracted from water which was labelled as safe for drinking.

We obviously do not know what we're playing with. Therefore, let me simply point out that no matter how long the list of known hazards is, new research is making it longer every day. We do not, today, even begin to understand all the ways that we may be harming our own species, not to mention every other life form on the planet.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you or sit before you to say that we have opened Pandora's box. We have unleashed an awesome and terrible genie upon our world that we do not know how to re-bottle. Nuclear waste, stored on-site in its current form, provides us with an effective albeit expensive method for monitoring, protecting and controlling its behaviour. Buried in the ground, it is out of sight and out of mind.

I lack confidence in the judgement of the scientific and engineering community that has proposed burial as a solution, because it uses the very same scientific reasoning that gave us thalidomide and contaminated blood. In each case they said they have learned from their mistakes, and that we should now trust them. And again and again we find out all too late that they don't know everything.

And it's not limited to the medical scientists. It is the same with the scientists and engineers of Ontario Hydro, and indirectly AECL. In support of that contention, I would like to introduce now a record of some of the problems that Ontario Hydro has had with the Pickering nuclear power station. None were predicted, and after each one we were assured that we were now safe and had nothing to worry about.

The important thing is despite the fact that some of the best minds in the industry tried to make this project absolutely safe and bug-free, they couldn't do it.

THE CHAIRMAN: You're into the last two minutes of your time, Mr. Bender.

MR. BENDER: Thank you.

Now, if things really get out of hand in a nuclear power station, we can just shut it down. But if things get out of control with buried nuclear waste, you can't just shut it down. That's not an option. That's what, in effect, they tried to do at Chernobyl, and now I hear the temperature is rising. An ominous warning to those who think that they can find a solution to problems associated with nuclear energy only when they arise. Please let common sense reign.

With all due respect to AECL, Ontario Hydro and any other agencies and companies that have a lot to gain financially or politically from burying our nuclear waste, if I were in their position, I wouldn't want to admit that I had started something I didn't know how to stop. If they did admit that they didn't know how they were going to dispose of the waste when they began this whole nuclear energy thing, it would be tantamount to admitting that they still don't know what they're doing. They just keep saying, "Trust us; we'll think of something when we have to."

They have, in effect, created the perfect fuel-efficient car. It can go 50,000 kilometres on one litre of gas, and 500 kilometres an hour. But it has no brakes. I ask you to say no to this plan until the brakes have been developed.

Thank you.

---[Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Bender.

Are there any questions which members of the Panel would like to put to Mr. Bender?

---(No verbal response)

THE CHAIRMAN: If not there, then proponent? Have you any questions, Mr. Dormuth?

---(No verbal response)

THE CHAIRMAN: Any members of the public who would like to put a question to Mr. Bender? Microphone number 2.

DR. RUBIN: Yes, Mr. Bender, it's Norman Rubin from Energy Probe.

I gather from your presentation you have some ideas on security of wastes that you didn't get a chance to flesh out. I wonder if you could go into those.

MR. BENDER: What I'd like to say on that is normally low-level nuclear waste is not considered a hazard politically. It can't be used for making atomic bombs or weapons or nuclear-grade -- or weapons-grade, but that does not preclude the possibility that a group so motivated could not take this waste and disburse it in our water supply, in our air. In other words, this waste could be used as a very powerful tool for political ransom, if it were not carefully protected and it was not positive that other people couldn't get to it.

The other is, of course, as in the case of Love Canal, once buried, forgotten. It's very likely that 100 years from now, 200, 500 years from now, the security of the places where this would be buried would not necessarily be watched as closely as they would in the near future. And thirdly, once buried, we're going to stop doing research with the problem, and we need to find the solutions. It's not enough to bury it. It's still there if we just bury it.

THE CHAIRMAN: Another question from microphone number 2.

MR. CURRY: I'd like to ask Mr. Bender...

THE CHAIRMAN: Give your name first, please, just so the court reporter knows.

MR. CURRY: My name's Doug Curry.

And I just read a publication from the nuclear energy agency that -- and some other publications I read that with the vitrified form, that the nuclear wastes are very safe and that the radioactivity doesn't travel or that it won't contaminate very much from the deep disposal. And I just wonder why Mr. Bender keeps comparing it with Love Canal, which is a lot more accessible to the surface, and with nuclear power plants that are lot more accessible to humans and the surface.

MR. BENDER: Thank you.

THE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Bender?

MR. BENDER: The answer to that is we tend to see things from the myopic perspective of today. What we know today for some reason we believe is all there is to know about these problems. And yet we know that ten years ago we didn't know what we know today, and that problems that we didn't know about ten years ago we're now very cognizant of today.

We do not know, really, anything about either the stability of the Shield, the stability of the methods of retaining nuclear waste, nor anything about the demographic or other major geological conditions that will affect this area for the next thousand, two thousand or three thousand years.

I would like to point out that we thought we had a perfectly safe system in the Pickering reactors when we installed the tubes that they used in solid concrete, knowing they would not wear out in a few years. In fact, they did. Yet the best engineering knowledge at the time we had assured us it wouldn't. I have no reason to believe that our knowledge about any system we have right now is guaranteed to last for another thousand years or so.

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you.

Any further questions from members of the public?

---(No verbal response)

THE CHAIRMAN: If not, thank you very much indeed, Mr. Bender. We have noted carefully what you have to say, and -- both in your presentation and your answers to the questions. Thank you very much, indeed.

MR. BENDER: Thank you.

THE CHAIRMAN: The next presentation I am told will be by three persons who'd like to make a presentation jointly, that's Mr. Clynt King of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, Mr. Darryn Wrightman from Walpole Island, and Mr. Don McGrath on behalf of the United Chiefs and Councils of Manitoulin. And I wonder if they would like to come forward to the presenter's table, please.