Chris Muir can see the roofline of a storage building that houses radioactive uranium dioxide powder from his backyard in Toronto’s west-end.

The building is part of a nondescript plant on Lansdowne Avenue, north of Dupont Street, where more than half the uranium pellets that fuel Ontario’s nuclear reactors are made each year by BWXT Nuclear Energy Canada.

Muir said he knew the plant was there when he bought his house in 2015, but he is now one of a chorus of community members who are asking the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to deny BWXT’s application to renew its licence for 10 years.

He made up his mind at a public information meeting CNSC staff held near the end of January in the Davenport riding.

“It’s their inability to answer some pretty straightforward questions,” said Muir, sitting in the living room of the house he shares with his wife and two kids. “I was like, ‘What happens if there is an accident there?’” he said. “And the answer was, ‘Well there won’t be.’ That’s when I got really scared.”

The Toronto plant has never had an accident. And the nuclear safety commission said testing shows radiation levels in soil and air around the plant are not only far below allowable levels, but even lower than the radiation in our everyday lives, which comes from a variety of sources including the sun as well as the breakdown of radioactive minerals found naturally in rock and soil.

However, the application to renew the licence, which includes public hearings, is one of the first opportunities many residents will have to ask questions after finding out in 2012 from a Star story that the plant — owned by GE-Hitachi until December of 2016 — was making pellets.

The story was the result of activist Zach Ruiter, a freelance journalist and Trent University graduate, who knocked on doors to alert residents that the plant existed. Ruiter said he felt there was a lack of public awareness and not enough public consultation by the CNSC.

At that time, signs on buildings at the Toronto plant simply said the company’s name — there was no indication that it was a nuclear facility.

The CNSC required GE-Hitachi to have an outreach program, but most community members didn’t know what the plant manufactured despite its presence in the neighbourhood since 1965.

Now, nearly 250 individuals and organizations have registered to intervene either as speakers or in writing during hearings in March, when the commission will hold two-day public sessions in Toronto as well as Peterborough, where BWXT owns another former GE-Hitachi plant. The Peterborough plant consolidates the pellets into fuel bundles for Ontario Power Generation’s Pickering and Darlington nuclear generating stations.

The licence renewal, which CNSC staff have recommended be approved, is for both plants.

“From the CNSC staff perspective, there are no risks,” said Caroline Ducros, director of the safety commission’s nuclear processing facilities division. “The quantities (of uranium) that are leaving the (Toronto) plant are negligible.”

Despite the assurance, Muir said he didn’t feel confident after leaving the CNSC’s public information meeting.

There were a number of unanswered questions, he said, including what happens if the tank full of highly flammable liquid hydrogen — the pellets are baked in a furnace filled with hydrogen — catches fire? What’s the blast radius? Or the company’s emergency plan?

The company says it has an internal emergency response plan for both sites, with guidelines for emergency staff and plant personnel, which is sent to the CNSC.

And that “each BWXT facility has established emergency prevention programs to minimize the risk of fires and other hazardous events, as well as robust response plans that prescribe the actions to be taken to prevent or minimize potential health and environmental hazards,” wrote Natalie Cutler, BWXT’s director of communications and government relations, in an email.

Muir also wondered why, with such an increase in public interest, so few residents knew about the CNSC information meeting, where commission staff and experts, together with BWXT employees, anti-nuclear activists and politicians seemed to outnumber the 15 or so people from the community.

Kevin Lee, a senior regulatory policy officer at the CNSC, which employs 900 staff, said the commission couldn’t afford to notify the public by advertising in newspapers because it was too expensive. The organization relies on social media.

BWXT’s application is not only generating opposition in Toronto, but in Peterborough because of a provision in the new licence that would allow BWXT to move its Toronto pelleting operation anytime during its 10-year period to Peterborough.

Activists there say they are tired of dealing with the legacy waste from the GE-Hitachi plant, which used PCBs, asbestos as well as other chemicals at the Peterborough location, although in manufacturing operations that were unrelated to the nuclear fuel bundling division bought by BWXT.

At its height in the ’60s, the GE plant in Peterborough employed 6,000 people. But the numbers steadily decreased and in 2017 the company laid off 350 employees in its large motor division, where it made motors for cruise ship propellers or to pump oil, among other things. About 50 employees remained in engineering and sales.

“It’s just worrying because there’s alway accidents and fugitive emissions whenever there’s a factory,” said Jane Scott, who became aware of GE’s nuclear division in Peterborough about 10 years ago when her children were students at nearby Prince of Wales elementary school.

“I thought what the heck is a nuclear facility doing across from the school,” Scott said.

Scott co-founded Peterborough’s Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) in April of last year after hearing that BWXT might move the pelleting operation to Peterborough.

“Extreme events happen and people make mistakes, as BWXT has in the past. And GE before that,” Scott said. “So it’s just a no-brainer that this should not be in the heart of our downtown.”

Scott was referring to an incident at BWXT in Peterborough where two workers wore the wrong respirator filters 15 times over a two-year period, from 2015 to 2017, exposing them to airborne beryllium, a highly toxic metal used to join parts of fuel bundles together.

“These employees were assessed and have been returned to normal duties,” said Cutler in an email. “There was no off-site exposure or release of beryllium, and there was no health or safety risk posed to the public or environment.”

In Toronto, Julie Dzerowicz, MP for the Davenport riding, said she has consulted a number of people about the BWXT pelleting plant on Lansdowne and has not heard any information that makes her think it’s a danger.

Canadians typically receive a 1.8 millisievert dose a year of background radiation, which is found naturally in the air, soil, rocks, water, plants and food, according to the CNSC. We are exposed to higher doses when we have x-rays or diagnostic imaging.

The CNSC said the annual public dose from the Toronto plant in 2018 was 0.0004 millisieverts and that epidemiological studies show there are no adverse health effects for any dose below 100 millisieverts.

Dzerowicz said if anyone presents her with evidence that shows she should be concerned for the health and safety of Davenport residents, she “will take urgent and immediate action.”

However, Dzerowicz was adamant residents in her riding be allowed to ask their own questions and requested the CNSC hold hearings in her riding, as opposed to the original location — a hotel near the Yorkdale Shopping Centre where the commission planned to simulcast proceedings from a physical location in Peterborough.

The CNSC complied and the Toronto hearings on March 2 and 3 will be held at Casa do Alentejo at 1130 Dupont St., where Dzerowicz plans to speak as an intervener.

“I’d like to represent what I’ve been hearing from Davenport residents,” she said.

Those concerns include more transparency regarding test results of air and soil samples, more safety audits of the plant by the CNSC and information about the company’s emergency plan.

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BWXT does in-stack air monitoring every day and according to the company’s website, the sample results are verified by an independent laboratory. At the perimeter of the plant, five monitoring stations draw air into a filter and the amount of uranium dioxide captured by the filter is analyzed by a third-party lab.

Soil sampling is done less often — once a year by BWXT and about once every two years by the CNSC — because there has been little change in the concentration of uranium over time, said BWXT president John MacQuarrie.

Wastewater used in the plant to clean floors, equipment and protective clothing is held in storage tanks and treated to remove as much uranium dioxide as possible before it is released into the city’s sewage system.

“We all get radiation in our daily lives. And what our plant contributes to that is insignificant,” MacQuarrie said. “And we operate well below what the regulators consider as safe ... And so we’re quite confident, after many years of the business being operated, that it’s a highly safe operation.”

According to company reports, from 2014 to 2018 BWXT emitted 46.2 grams of uranium dioxide into the air and 3.6 kilograms into the city’s wastewater, levels that are far below the allowable air emissions of 760 grams and water emissions of 9,000 kilograms per year. (The charitable organization Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has entered a submission recommending, among things, that what it calls “absurdly high” annual release limits be reduced.)

Among the experts Dzerowicz consulted was Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, who is contributing to a submission by the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which is intervening at the hearings on behalf of CARN.

Edwards is a former professor of math and science at Montreal’s Vanier College and has done consulting in the past on nuclear issues for government and industry.

He said studies about the effects of exposure to uranium dioxide have been largely inconclusive, mainly because there are few populations that have been exposed to breathing in the powder.

But he said the BWXT plant in Toronto is giving off “a small but significant” amount of radioactive heavy metal powder into the air that if inhaled could go deep into lung tissue and radiate a cell so that over time it could develop into cancer. He said it could take 20 years for any negative effects to appear because uranium releases its radioactive particles very slowly.

“In the case of Peterborough, there is an elementary school right across the street. And the outdoor playground faces onto the BWXT company just across the street,” possibly exposing kids to the powder for years if the pelleting operation is moved there, he said.

“I’m not saying they’re all going to get cancer. They’re not,” Edwards said. “But some of them could very well get cancer. So it’s a life-threatening situation for those few individuals who might suffer the consequences.”

BWXT says emissions from the Toronto facility are about one per cent of the regulatory limit and do not cause any health impacts to the public or the environment.

A group of scientists who live near the Peterborough fuel-bundling plant are also worried about beryllium.

In a letter to the Examiner newspaper, they expressed concern that recent testing by the CNSC showed concentrations of beryllium in local soil samples had increased since 2014.

“The clear increase of Be in soil samples is likely being driven by significant increases in air concentrations, which is particularly worrying because beryllium can be toxic if inhaled,” reads the letter. “More worryingly, the highest values of beryllium in 2019 were found in the samples in the Prince of Wales school.

“Although none of these samples have reached the threshold at which intervention is mandated, the increase alone mandates intervention and further evaluation to ascertain the source.”

Answers to whether that will happen, as well as other questions, may have to wait until commission hearings in March.

A spokesperson for the CNSC said in an email that questions about where the escaping uranium dioxide goes, what the health effects are or details about the emergency plan will have to wait until then.

“Since the Commission is a quasi-judicial administrative tribunal and currently seized with the matter of BWXT licence renewal, the Commission and CNSC staff cannot further address your followup questions,” according to the email, “as these are about substantive issues that are expected to be dealt with in the context of the upcoming hearing.”

Meanwhile, BWXT says it has no immediate plans to consolidate pellet making and fuel bundling in Peterborough.

But Dzerowicz thinks the company will move the operation from her Toronto riding in the next five years.

“What I would say to you is that over time, and my preference is sooner than later, I would love to see the uranium pelleting out of the riding and out of the city to a different location,” said Dzerowicz, explaining that given land values, it’s only natural the plant would move out to allow more housing.

“I’m not suggesting they move to Peterborough,” Dzerowicz said. “I think it needs to be in a safe area.”