We should be in the streets shouting, swinging clenched fists over our heads, to force the federal Conservative government to move the reactor away from Chalk River, Ontario. It sits on an active earth fault line, in a high intensity earthquake zone.
This is what we are told:
McGee, the vice-president of Atomic Energy Canada Limited, also reassured the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, that the upgraded pumps at the reactor can withstand tremors of up to a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale.
The following is from the US Geological Survey:
Timiskaming, Quebec, Canada
1935 November 1 UTC
Magnitude 6.2
Heavy damage occurred in the Timiskaming area, Canada. In the United States, chimneys and plaster sustained minor damage at Cortland, New York, about 50 kilometers south of Syracuse. Felt in eastern Maine, south to Washington, D.C., and west to Wisconsin, including 17 States and three Canadian Provinces.
Timiskaming is "just north" of Chalk River.
On January 9th, 2008 the CBC reported:
Since the reactor was restarted on Dec. 16, said Brian McGee, AECL's senior vice-president and chief nuclear officer for the Chalk River Laboratories,
there have been two minor earthquakes in the region.
On Dec. 20, a 3.0-magnitude tremor, centred 13 kilometres east of Pembroke, was felt. Two days later, a 3.6-magnitude quake struck 22 kilometres northeast of Deep River. (Comment mine: 3.6 is a pretty good bump!)
One of the biggest worries about global warming has been its potential to affect the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, a vast storehouse of frozen water that would inundate the world's coastal regions if it were to melt because of a warming climate.
The southern continent contains enough ice to raise ocean levels by about 60 metres (200 feet), a deluge that would put every major coastal city in the world deep under water and uproot hundreds of millions of people.
Also, most alarming of all, with the melting of...
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