A2 - Wednesday, February 10, 1982 - North Shore News

Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

I SEE that Trudeau & Co. have decided to start traf- ficking in Candu reactors again.

The reason is clear. Sale of Candus to Mexico in- volves billions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs for scientists.

It helps solve the unemployment problem in Ontario and Quebec by creating demand (for manufactured goods which can't otherwise be sold at home or abroad.

Well, isn’t that great?

Pardon me if I don't ap- plaud or join the rush to pro- claim the “inevitability” of nuclear power.

Just as a business deal, the Candu scam standson shakey ground.

Here we are. loaning several billions of dollars to Mexico, at six per cent in- terest spread over 25 years, to sweeten the pot.

As Jack Davis points out, “the long-run cost to us will be horrendous”.

The rest of us are paying 184 per cent on our mortg-

ges, while Ottawa spoons oul money so that American branch plant manufacturers in Southern Ontario will be able to keep a few more Johnny Canucks on the

payroll.

In case anyone still doesn’t know, the nuclear industry 1s capital - intensive and very low on labour requirements.

Let’s not be utter fools. Let’s see things for what they are. The connection between high-ups in the Liberal Party — Senator Jack Austin comes immediately to mind —- and the nuclear in- dustry in Canada are surely well-known.

It’s an old-boy network — the same guys who blew $10 million in bribes to Argenti- nian and South Korea of- ficials to try to flog the Can- du reactors that are now be- ing offered to Mexico, Kuwait and Egypt, with in- centives like multi-billion

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The Candu reaction

doliar low-interest loans.

Egypt!

Yes, folks, Canada is try- ing to sell the basic matenal out of which atomic bombs are fashioned to Egypt.

Canada has decided -- or, at least, the powerbrokers around Trudeau have decid- ed — that it is time to flog the

world’s most efficient plutonium-making machine in the Mid-East.

Whether a Candu reactor will ever get built in Egypt without being bombed by the Israelis or sabotaged by Islamic or left-wing fanatics of one breed or another is the first question.

But it is the second ques- tion that really staggers the imagination. Can you think of anything more insane than handing The Bomb over to any country in the Mid-East?

Lest you try to avoid the implications of this, keep in mind the first and most stnk- ing characteristic of a Canadian-buult nuclear reac- tor:

It produces more

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plutonium than any other kind of reactor in the world.

Plutonium is the prime in- gredient for nuclear weapons.

As for the value of treaties signed by a country to whom one has just sold the bullet for an atomic gun, we already have the example of India behind us.

Do we need another?

I'm frankly astonished at how tamely the mass media has reacted to this madness. All this sanctimonious blather about “safeguards” is worth absolutely nothing more than any other piece of paper. Wrap your fish in it.

But the capability of building nuclear weapons 1s serious. To hand it over to a country poised on the edge of the worst political fault line in the world is the wildest stupidity I've ever heard.

It’s criminal.

Just to keep things in perspective, it takes a quarter of a million years for plutonium, once manufac- tured, to lose its power to destroy organic life.

Plutonium doesn't occur in nature, you know. This is man-made poison ~- ab- solutely the deadliest poison ever to have appeared on the face of the earth.

It will take 10,000 genera- tions before plutonium created todgy in the bowels of a Candu reactor dies.

Believe it or not, the geniuses who run Canada’s nuclear industry haven't figured out a way to get rid of this awesome killer isotope once they'd brought it into existence.

It's precisely like a geni that is let out of the bottle without anyone having the faintest clue where a cork or

cap might be. And now — I really can scarcely believe this -

Trudeau is unleashing this geni in the midst of the planet's most volatile political powderkeg, the Mid-East.

But let me give the last word to Nobel laureate physicist Hannes Alfven:

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“Fission energy is safe on- ly if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of transports, if no reactor fuel processing plant. or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerrilla activity and no revolution ar war -. even a “conventional” one — takes place in these regions.

“No acts ef God can be permitted.”

Oh. In case you were wondering about that deal with Mexico, as I calculate it, Canadian taxpayers will be subsidizing the sale to the tune of $3.43 billion. _

That's right.

10 arm.-9 p.m.