Environmentalists and municipalities vow to keep fighting against radioactive steam generator shipment on the Great Lakes

A ship between the downtowns of Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario show how narrow the Detroit River is.The Windsor Star reports that Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, for one, will keep on resisting the shipment of radioactive waste on the Great Lakes, despite the Canadian Nuclear Safety (sic) Commission's rubberstamp last Friday of plans by Bruce Power to transport 16 school bus sized radioactive steam generators, each weighing 100 tons, on a single boat from Lake Huron, through the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River, Lake Erie, the Welland Canal, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Ocean to Sweden for so-called "recycling." The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Cities Initiative has determined that -- under Canadian federal law -- a sinking of the shipment, and breaching of just a small number of plutonium-contaminated steam generators, particularly in a river, could release enough radioactivity to necessitate radiological emergency measures, such as shut down of adjacent drinking water intakes. As shown by the photo at the left (provided by Citizens Environment Alliance), the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor is not only narrow (Detroit's name comes from the French word détroit, meaning strait, after all!), it is also shallow. A radioactive release in such a location would not be much diluted by the small volume of water in the river, increasing the accident's risks to people and the environment. The Cities Initiative has made this point repeatedly to CNSC, which has duly ignored it.