STAGE 15: ENERGY PROBE
In April 1997, one of my ex-buddies from Ontario Hydro Technologies told me that he thought that Hydro’s reactors were unsafe, and somebody should do something. By that, he meant "me", and I should contact "Energy Probe". I knew what he wanted, and what to do. After my first job as an independent consultant in Pt. Lepreau’ s feeder pipes looking for stress corrosion cracking (SCC), I had become extremely concerned that feeder pipes (part of the CANDU reactor’s primary circuit) were being totally neglected.
I wrote up a case giving the history of the CANDU system with respect to its failures, and how feeder pipes were the next on the list, and sent it to Norm Rubin in Energy Probe. Norm sounded reasonably impressed, and we met. The next week, Pickering A was having its licensing hearing in Ottawa. Following Norm’s advice, I faxed in the summary of the case, plus my resume and list of published papers. It created a lot of response in Ottawa, but we didn’t get invited to speak. Norm was quite curious to find out how the AECB reacted to an educated activist: not well, as it turned out.
On August 13th, Al Kupcis announced the shutdown of seven nuclear reactors, a write-off of six billion dollars (Can), and his own resignation. I was a bit shell-shocked. I knew that Al was having major problems with my Hydro-gate activities (even though he was not supposed to be involved), but this was incredible. Al also knew what SCC was (being a metallurgist originally), what a major problem SCC could be, and what a mess his nuclear program was in generally. Maybe Al didn’t like the thought of "yours truly" hooking up with one of his major nemesis’s (Norm Rubin). Frankly, I thought the reactors could be fixed up, if only Hydro got its act together.
The feeder pipe case bumped along for several months, culminating in the AECB concluding that feeder pipes could not blow from SCC. Very disappointing: TV was showing pictures of gas pipelines blowing up from SCC (and dramatic they are!). There are a few differences between pipelines and feeder pipes, but quite a lot of similarities as well.
Eventually, I got a letter into the Globe, stating that I thought Hydro’s reactors were anything but safe. (See Globe & Mail, Letters to the Editor, "Accident Likely", by Michael Moles, ~September 4th, 1998.
SCC in feeder pipes is a whole new story, unrelated to Fraud and Corruption. Maybe we’ll have it on the Web, too, one day.
Talking to Energy Probe was very useful for me and for Hydro-gate. Energy Probe weren’t particularly interested in Hydro-gate, for a very clear reason. They live entirely on credibility, and speculative cases like Hydro-gate didn’t suit them at all. Too many "ifs" and "maybe’s". Nonetheless, Energy Probe had lots of good advice, support, and good contacts in the media. We got another publication on the CANDU Owners’ Group funds to AECL - Chalk River, but that is yet another story. Overall, the Energy Probe contact proved very fruitful.