A2 - Sunday, January 22, 1984 - North Shore News LET US CONTINUE with the curious tale of Canadian uranium that is shipped to the U.S.S.R., where there is every likelihood that some of it is turned into nuclear weapons aimed at the West. ell me this journey is sane where Canadian: officials ad- mit they have absolutely no control over ‘‘end use,’’ meaning that is is probably If you don’t find it peculiar that we may someday be nuk- ed by bombs containing fuel Originally mined in Saskat- chewan, I most certainly do. From Cuff Lake Saskat- chewan, uranium is shipped by train in the form of **yellowcake’’, or UF6, to Port Hope, Ontario, where it is converted into a gas, UF6, and. from there lugged in pressurized cannisters .on flatbed trucks to cither “St. John, Halifax or Montreal. Anywhere after Port Hope, there could be an acci- dent, by the way. If one of the pressurized cannisters was to be ruptured, the leak- ing UF6 gas could form a toxic white cloud as lethal as chlorine which could spread, under certain circumstances, over an area of'a square mile or more. From one of the three possible Eastern Canadian ports, the UF6 is loaded on to a freighter and taken to Le Havre, France. At Le Havre, the uranium is transferred to ESTATE ADMINISTRATION another ship which takes it to the Baltic port of Riga, Latvia. ' At Riga, the cannisters are loaded on to a Soviet train, according to a contract work- ed out with Techsnabexport, the state-owned Soviet monopoly which has been quietly expanding into the commercial fuel enrichment field for several years... From Riga, our Canadian ‘uranium rattles along the Volga River to an aging en- richment plant somewhere in the Ural mountains, east of Moscow. Why the Urals? Why, for that matter, are the Russians involved in the Western nuclear fuel processing cycle at all? According to Greenpeace’s Pat Moore, Soviet enrichment plants reached a stage of overcapacity in 1976. ‘‘By then,”’ he says, ‘“They didn’t need the amount of capacity they had for weapons pro- duction and reactor electrici- ty production, so they decid- WILL PLANNING Royal Trust since 1899 strictly. personal ‘ : ed to enter the world market in enrichment and to bid for contracts on Western ura- nium.”” Moore finds it odd — so do I — that Canaua,a member of NATO and NORAD does not even know the actual location of the Soviet facility where Cana- dian uranium is enriched. The Canadian Atomic Energy Commission admits that, in 1980, 840 tons of refined uranium went to the Soviet Union for enrichment. Although none of the Cana- dian uranium is sold directly to the Soviets, who have plenty of their own, the nuclear industry in the U.S.S.R. definitely benefits from these contracts. With The put quick cash e* Card i fing: oe ereunal the Lewwor ices at your fingerti e At the economic level, the West is giving the Soviets business. They have excessive capacity which would other- wise be wasted. We are finan- cially propping up _ their nuclear industry, the very in- dustry which creates all those Day After weapons that are aimed at us! The export permits which allow our uranium to find its way into Russia only stipulate that an equivalent amount of enriched uranium come back out. But while it is in the Soviet reactor, it is mixed up with Russian uranium that is also being processed in the plant. In the U.S.S.R. there is no distinction between the weapons program and the can SCIv- ; by Bob ‘Hunter Atoms for Peace program — which is mainly propaganda anyway. So it is certain that Canadian uranium ends up if ~ the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union. According to Moore, the reason the Soviets are able to land such enrichment con- tracts is because ‘“‘they are able to do it cheap, and their environmental safeguards may nat be too terrific.’’ The journey isn’t over at that point. In its enriched form, the uranium is shipped to the U.S., of all places (Afghanistan and Reagan notwithstanding), changed into another chemical, passed along to West Germany, us- ed, then shipped in the form of plutonium to France ‘converted by the Erench into nuclear weapons of their own while Canada looks the other way. co Quickly now. Assure me that this is all somehow sane. For the record A REPORT on West Van council (‘Pubs stripped from Dundarave’’) in the Jan. 18 News mistakenly stated that council decided to alter the Community - Plan. This should have read instead ‘‘its policy plan”’. Two other errors inadver- tantly crept into the story. One survey of Dundarave residents was appreciably above ‘‘the 60 per cent level required for a neighborhood pub’’. And no ‘‘Sager pub application’’ is presently before council. The Sagers’ current application is for a teahouse-restaurant. : Pacific Northwest and California, around the clock! If you should make a mistake- relax. VanCity’s Exchange Card is your passport to the The Machine gives you a money services you want, when and where you second chance: tells you when to try want them. Day or night it lets you do most of the again or how to make a correction. things you now do in a VanCity branch. Withdraw What if you lose your Ex: e Card? cash. Make deposits. Make payments on your That's no big deal either. Your VanCity American Express Gold Card, Personaline and Exchange comes complete with a secret Creditline accounts, or to B.C. Tel and B.C. Hydro. What's more, it lets you do all these things at over 20 Exchange Machines in Vancouver and the Lower code you choose yourself. 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