March 15, 1999
Toronto Star ScienceThe hard sell of nuclear waste
Public's distrust of Ottawa will hinder planBy Peter Calamai
OTTAWA - They're probably the two hardest words in the English language to sell - nuclear waste.But the federal government has a master plan to market nuclear waste to Canadians and has already started on the task.
According to the communications strategy outlined in a previously secret cabinet document, the government plan will try to:
* Justify continued use of Candu reactors for electricity.
Federal officials concede privately that the marketing challenge is formidable and past experience is hardly encouraging. Between 1987 and 1991, the nuclear industry spent $4 million on a disastrous public relations campaign to boost public support for nuclear power to 50 per cent.* Convince the public that the federal government is still providing leadership on the waste issue, even though it refused to set up a crown corporation to do the job.
* Ensure Canadians that the new national nuclear waste agency now being set up by Ontario Hydro and other power utilities is "stable and trustworthy."
When the campaign began, 17 per cent of Canadians said they favoured more nuclear power plants. When the campaign ended, 14 per cent did.
"Basically, they didn't move public opinion at all after a five-year campaign," says Bill Leiss, the incoming president of the Royal Society of Canada and a recognized world expert on risk management.
Leiss says the nuclear industry, utilities like Ontario Hydro and the federal government all carry a "burden of public distrust"
"The federal government isn't credible as a safety regulator because they're also promoters," says Leiss, a professor at the University of Calgary. "They're hucksters, going around the world trying to sell Candu reactors."
In February, Natural Resources sent two officials on a seven-city tour to ask Canadians how the federal government should keep a tight rein on the new waste agency that's supposed to be independent and arm's-length.
But most ordinary Canadians never even knew the consultations were taking place, despite local newspaper ads and announcements on the department's web site.
"My own view is that we saw very little of the general public," says Peter Brown, the official in charge of the consultations. He said most of the presentations came from special-interest groups.
Irene Kock agrees. She's with the Nuclear Awareness Project in Durham, one of those special interest groups.
"Canadians didn't even know they were being consulted," Kock says.
The main sales job is being turned over to the new national waste agency which will be told to implement the federal communications strategy.
But Leiss says both the nuclear industry and Ontario Hydro first have to overcome deep-seated public distrust of any message they deliver.
"The nuclear industry earned the public's contempt over a long period because of its obvious contempt for the public's perception of the risk involved in nuclear power stations," he says.
A key part of that risk revolves around the high-level radioactive waste left after uranium fuel burns. The waste is dangerous for at least 10,000 years.
The country's 22 Candu reactors have already produced enough spent fuel bundles to fill three hockey rinks to the top of the boards.
For the first 10 years, these bundles remain under heavy water inside the reactor containment buildings. Then they are transferred to warehouses on the site.
Yet the public may not be all that aroused by the mounting waste, according to the cabinet briefing document prepared in October.
Citing a series of opinion surveys, the document says nuclear waste rates low as an environmental priority with the public, possibly because there are so many other environmental concerns.
An all-out publicity effort would help sell the new strategy, the document promised. Key journalists, stakeholders and opinion leaders would be briefed by officials from natural resources, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the federal environment department, the Atomic Energy Control Board, the federal environmental assessment agency and "possibly Ontario Hydro."
In fact, little of that promised marketing took place.
The communications master plan did not get off to a good start and Jeremy McNeil doubts it will ever succeed.
McNeil, a biology professor at Laval University in Quebec, is the winner of a national medal for communicating science in an accessible and positive fashion.
"I don't know how you can put a positive spin on nuclear waste," he says.