Inside the 'suitably opaque' response to a toxic sewage spill at Chalk River nuclear lab

When a nuclear research facility was directed to stop polluting the Ottawa River with toxic sewage earlier this year, at least one official seemed pleased with the non-transparency of the facility's public messaging.

"This is suitably opaque," wrote Jennifer Fry in an April 24 email to Jeremy Latta, director of communications and government reporting at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a Crown corporation.

The two AECL officials were discussing a planned public communiqué from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to be released that day. AECL owns the Chalk River nuclear research campus near Deep River, Ont., about 150 kilometres upstream from Ottawa, but outsources site management to private sector corporate consortium CNL.

Chalk River's sewage plant began failing toxicity tests on Feb. 21, meaning the treated wastewater, or effluent, was confirmed toxic to fish. (One hundred per cent of the rainbow trout directly subjected to the effluent died over a four-day period, records show. A death rate over 50 per cent fails the test.)

And so on April 23, after two months of this toxic water going into the Ottawa River, Environment Canada stepped in, prompting both CNL's communiqué and AECL's assessment of it.

"Reads fine to me, not major risks," Latta had written, "and who knows if it gets traction."

Those emails are among more than 100 pages of internal communications released by AECL under access-to-information law, which are raising questions about transparency around the pollution incident.

CBC News requested an interview with an AECL spokesperson to discuss the corporation's handling of the incident based on a review of the records, and Latta agreed to speak last week.

Latta defended the response, maintaining there was no deliberate effort to hide information. He brushed off Fry's comment as one person's opinion.

"I'm not going to sit here and say that everything was perfect and that CNL's communications were perfect, because clearly they weren't," he said by phone.

"Can we do a better job of explaining things in a way that is more relevant to folks? Absolutely."

Hopefully there isn't a next time, but the organizations aim to do better if there is, he added.

"There's certainly learning to come from this. But I would certainly, as well, not say that there's any effort at opacity."

Some local stakeholders disagree. The documents confirm AECL and CNL knew early on that a similar event occurred at the same location in 2022, and CNL had been unable to identify the cause.

This is something Chief Lance Haymond of Kebaowek First Nation, an Algonquin community upstream in Quebec, would have liked to have known at the time. But he says he wasn't told, and he feels he can't trust AECL and CNL.

"We have absolutely no confidence in the fact that, if there is a major incident, they will disclose it to us," said Haymond, a vocal opponent of CNL's plan to build a radioactive waste dump at Chalk River.

"It just really speaks to the challenge in the relationship where they profess to want to have better communications, and said they would make the effort. Time and time again, there's incidents which demonstrate that that's not happening."

An email from April says the main lead at that point in the investigation was the biological research facility. This facility conducts radiological research using live biological specimens and cell cultures, including rodents and animal tissue-based research, according to CNL's website.

In a statement, CNL said it was unable to ultimately identify the root cause but that the failure wasn't linked to radioactive contamination. CNL does recognize two contributing factors: detergents or cleaners used on site and water from the steam condensate return lines from the on-campus heating system.

Haymond isn't confident problems won't recur if the organizations were unable to identify the root cause twice in two years and given the questions around the biological research facility, he said he hopes CNL will release publicly its final report from the probe, though the organization declined to do so at this time.

Regulator contradicted assessment of harm

Records show Environment Canada's assessment of the potential for environmental harm differed considerably from AECL and CNL's.

AECL and CNL said the spill posed no threat to the environment, yet fishery officer Ian Rumbolt believed "detriment to fish habitat or fish or to the use by humans of fish may reasonably be expected to result from the occurrence."

The last half of this phrase was bolded in the draft copy of his Fisheries Act direction he sent CNL. Latta, asked why the nuclear organizations were so confident about the lack of harm when the fishery officer clearly wasn't, said "both things can be true." 

The organizations felt that the daily volume of wastewater being discharged into the Ottawa River, officially estimated at an average of 683 cubic metres per day, was small enough not to harm the environment, and there was no observed fish kill to report.

"It doesn't mean that we viewed that that was acceptable. It was not acceptable and it was a violation of the Fisheries Act and it needed to be fixed, and it was fixed," Latta said.

"But there's a difference between what's a violation — and in no way am I trivializing a violation — and the effect that it has in the river."

When they don't share that information in a more transparent way, I think it erodes the trust that they're trying to gain from the public.- Larissa Holman, Ottawa Riverkeeper

Larissa Holman, director of science and policy at Ottawa Riverkeeper, a charity that advocates to protect the watershed, said harm can happen in many ways.

"Overall impacts from an industry on the environment should not be measured in whether it kills fish immediately or not," she said.

Like Haymond, Holman said she was surprised to learn that this had happened before in 2022. She warned that a 'trust-us' mentality about risk at Chalk River could erode public trust.

"A few sentences about something being 'non-compliant' is not going to provide that reassurance to the public. They're basically insinuating that we should trust their judgment on things," she said.

While AECL and CNL do good things to protect the environment, from time to time things do go wrong, she said, "And when they don't share that information in a more transparent way, I think it erodes the trust that they're trying to gain from the public."

Latta said AECL values transparent information over any other consideration if a more serious threat to the public or environment were to arise.

Declined to answer questions

Aware of the potential public interest, AECL and CNL proactively wrote media lines confirming they had continued releasing the toxic water to the river — "we do continue to release effluent to the Ottawa River," went one — yet ultimately did not provide this information to the media, the documents also show.

Public relations officials seemed bothered by the fact that CBC News had submitted 20 written questions after CNL declined an interview, according to records.

"20 questions?!" asked Emilie Adams, a communications official with Natural Resources Canada, in an instant message.

"Yeah it's a bit much," replied Latta.

Adams was tracking potential public relations risks around this, emails obtained separately from Natural Resources Canada show.

"Besides the issue of the effluent itself, there is enhanced scrutiny related to radioactive waste from nuclear facilities," she wrote on March 26.

She elaborated on her concerns in the chat with Latta: "Sometimes groups will reflect on all of these and use them as examples why rad[ioactive] waste can't be trusted."

CNL ultimately didn't answer many of CBC's questions directly at the time, including one explicitly asking whether the effluent was going into the Ottawa River.

Asked for this story why it had declined to release that information, CNL said, "As no change was made to the operation of the facility, no change was announced."

"In alignment with standard practice of similar facilities across Canada, the sanitary sewage treatment facility was not shut down during the investigation."