Two-year limit on nuclear reviews ‘not realistic’
OTTAWA – Two-thirds of recent environmental assessments by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, including those involving storage of radioactive waste, have taken more than two years to complete, new numbers released by the agency say.
The list of 66 projects shows that only 22 assessments of various projects, including work at mining sites and nuclear laboratories, were completed within two years, the new time limit that the federal government is proposing for environmental reviews through its budget implementation legislation.
Liberal natural resources critic David McGuinty said the list demonstrates the danger surrounding the government’s plan to put a time limit on the review process and the risk regulators wouldn’t be able to adequately assess the impacts of a proposed project.
“There is no analysis or rationale that can be produced by the government to defend the two-year arbitrary timeline,” said McGuinty, who obtained the list after making a request to the commission during parliamentary hearings on resource development in Canada’s north.
“Not only can too long a period (for an assessment) have an impact on economic choices and investment decisions, but too short a period can as well.”
The list, signed by the commission’s president and chief executive officer, Michael Binder, included a one-week review in December 2002 for a project involving the disposal of liquid waste in Peterborough, Ont., as well as an ongoing review that began in January 2006 to review the disposal of radioactive waste in Tiverton, Ont.
McGuinty suggested that project proponents would, in some complex cases, find it hard to do all the necessary work to within two years.
“That’s not realistic,” said McGuinty. “The tests take longer. The evidence takes longer. The analysis takes longer. … Getting it through our shareholders and our corporate board takes longer. It’s an arbitrary timeline. They might as well have thrown a dart on the wall.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has defended the government’s proposed changes, explaining they were meant to ensure that approval decisions are made “within a reasonable time period.”
“It’s still a very thorough assessment, but it is important that we not duplicate our work and that we are able to give certainty to investors about the timelines for decisions,” Harper said Wednesday in the House of Commons, in response to a question from NDP House leader Nathan Cullen.
An internal presentation, prepared by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency for Conservative MPs last September, suggested that changes to the assessment process introduced in recent years are already “preventing process duplication,” Postmedia News reported last week.