Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System

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It almost seems as if there is a cultural fog around the nuclear industry in Canada.
It is as if, because uranium requires "special handling," PR people ran in and made sure anything "hot" was not reported, causing the containment wall that should rightly be around uranium to instead spring up around the industry instead, allowing important events to remain somehow shrouded in irony and underreported.
In 2006, nuclear capacity worldwide was at its highest. To some, this appeared to be a "nuclear revival." In researching for this review, I found that Jim Harding, in a letter to the Edmonton Journal had remarked," in the midst of this supposed revival, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) projects that by 2030 there will be only 447 to 679 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity worldwide. This is only 40 to 60 percent of what was predicted to exist by 1990, the last time there was industry-animated hype about a nuclear boom in the 1980s."1
Harding was right. Despite energetic building in the nuclear sector, worldwide total nuclear capacity has remained lower than that 2006 level ever since.2 World electricity for nuclear power generation holds at 10.2 in 2019 while solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power generation climb past 6.6%.
Canada's Deadly Secret was written in 2007, an interesting time in history, because it was a ray of truth in the middle of what we find looking back was considerable hype.
What I found memorable in the book was Harding's descriptions of Saskatchewan, "currently the largest uranium-producing region of the world," which he explains is undervaluing and drastically "sidestepping Aboriginal rights" in order to mine radioactive uranium on First Nations land. The huge pits and the sheer magnitude of radioactive tailings are heart-stirring..." Harding describes how "the deep scars and radioactive waste left on the land" is not the whole story. His book pursues the trail to "long-living toxic nuclear wastes like plutonium, a substance never before seen on planet earth..." as well as "the fissionable material that ended up in thousands of nuclear warheads (and) the DU left from the enrichment processes going into the uranium bullets now being questioned by the United Nations but used nonetheless by the US or NATO in its four most recent wars, and used in the casings of H-bombs ready to play their part in any number of possible genocides brewing in the war-rooms of nuclear weapons powers." This says Harding is the fuller implication of uranium mining in Saskatchewan and therefore, a larger responsibility of Canadians who cannot pretend not to know or care.
Radioactivity is scientifically interesting, it has created some important advances. That's fine. However, many would love to downplay the legacy of problems rife in Canada's nuclear industry. Throughout this time, rather than the shiny, clean presentation of the nuclear industry we see from advertisements, the nuclear industry has often been functioning very much like any other large, polluting industry, only the cumulative results are considerably more dire. As a result, some people make it their life's mission to take this industry to task. Jim Harding has been an anti-nuclear activist since the 1950s, and his dedication to battling the myth of the "good" nuclear industry is an impressive one. Along the way, he has gotten to know the industry very intimately. After all, because nuclear waste stays active and extremely dangerous to human life for thousands of years, it is the duty of all of us to know about and reinforce every mechanism that carefully monitors uranium. It is being pulled out of the earth during our lifetimes, while future generations will wonder who fought to ensure that uranium mining and the distribution of radioactive material is not made to seem like a small or irrelevant event. It seems our duty to earth's creatures thousands of years in the future to know about and generally ensure responsible policies towards the handling of this highly problematic aspect of nuclear material. More so as it is being touted as a "clean" energy alternative in an age when there are so many other truly clean alternative energy sources that do not bear the terrible aspect of a toxic legacy that future generations must bear.
Here Harding really hits the mark with scathing criticism of nuclear power's attempt to greenwash its toxic production process and general danger. There are some very convincing arguments without the support of Harding's expertise why nuclear power is not the way forward as we phase out coal. Around the world, nations are storing hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste, with no real plan on what to do with it. Nuclear plants are being shut down around the world, and the ones that are being built are going up at a very high price in carbon emissions. Caldicott remarks, "Canada's Deadly Secret exposes not just the 'environmental ticket' being used by the nuclear industry to try a comeback. It also explores the deadly corporate planning processes that reveal the growing partnership between the oil and the nuclear industries. The proposed twinning of nuclear power to help extract the greenhouse-gas-laden heavy oil in Western Canada's tar sands is quite extraordinary. Harding convincingly argues that sustainable development must be non-nuclear."

1.THE EDMONTON JOURNAL
2.https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx

Harding, J. (2008). Canada's deadly secret: Saskatchewan uranium and the Global Nuclear System. Fernwood.

Biosecurity: The Socio-politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases

Biosecurity The Socio-Politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases Ed. By Andrew Dobson, Keizer Barker and Sarah L. Taylor

The editors are professors and scholars in a variety of disciplines, from natural science to politics and political geography to resource management. This book introduces the ideas behind the science of Biosecurity. Biosecurity involves governance in response to concerns in protecting human health, biological organisms, and agriculture from pest and disease.
In the US the term generally invokes concerns involving bioterrorism whereas in numerous island states as well as New Zealand and Australia it involves an environmental conservation ethic, while in Britain and Europe it generally indicates concerns over agricultural security and pests and diseases.
These are quite different definitions. The categories do overlap a great deal, however, "as invasive plants spread plant pathogens," as well, "invasive animals introduce disease to agricultural domestic animals" and when laboratory security is breached, it is "dealt with as a bioterrorism event."
Biosurveillance, "the production, analysis, and circulation of information on potential invasive events or epidemics," forms the most crucial and ongoing aspect of biosecurity.
There were a few cool things about this book. I didn't realize biosecurity was so hotly debated with so many spin-off topics, rather than simply implemented. And the final part of the book was particularly thought-provoking, as it talked about climate change and how, despite every effort, different species are joining and at times replacing current ones. For a layperson, the idea of inevitability was a troubling idea, because I would like biosecurity to be strictly controlled. Part 2 was the most reassuring on this front, describing how we are continually finessing the system.
Interesting book usefully divided into four interdisciplinary parts.
Part 1 "Framing Biosecurity " establishes why we might need biosecurity, part 2, "Implementing Biosecurity" looks at the different frameworks that underpin biosecurity practices. Part 3, "Biosecurity and Geopolitics" looks at the international dimensions of the issue and part 4 addresses Biosecurity "from the point of view of the human/nonhuman relationship" as well as examining the implications of climate change.
I found another useful point in Part 1, chapter three, where contributor Bruce Braun points out that "we should be talking about biosecurities (plural) rather than biosecurity (singular) since the managing of biological risk takes many different forms in many different contexts." He also remarks that "biosecurity must be read as an ethical issue, not merely a technical or logistic one." I saw the merit in this assertion, as it involves, among other things, sorting life into desirable and undesirable forms worthy of protection within a boundaried area.
Part 2, the reassuring section of the book, compares governance approaches and also asks an ethical question, "too risky for whom or what?" The author Andrew Donaldson prefers New Zealand's approach, where the "practice is regarded as a subset of national security" using an "integrated approach" of monitoring, licensing and strict border control. He compares this with the UK, which among other things emphasizes animal over plant health, making it not as strong in dealing with plant-related challenges.
In Part Three, Addressing Biosecurity and Geopolitics, Clive Potter presents the idea that "risk assessment is a political tool," designed "to depoliticize the biosecurity issue and to render disputes amenable to purely technocratic solutions."
The question is layered as other chapters point out that biosecurity and risk assessment varies from place to place, and it is of high concern that such inconsistencies in various agencies affect the pathways of species.
The final section and conclusion address the future of biosecurity. It raises the point that future growth in international trade and travel will "cause invasions no matter how stringent containment policies are" not to mention other actions such as rewilding as "the very process of making life secure can generate new insecurities."
The book concludes with an assessment of future risks and uncertainties in the context of climate change and globalization. This final section takes on a difficult topic, as climate change alters the landscape considerably. They address the fear of an alien future and the more dramatic impacts of climate change. While a greater understanding of the ecology of infectious disease is needed to protect vulnerable populations, new technology is assisting them in rising to the task. Advances in the field of monitoring a new age of remote sensors are also taking a role, as is digital spatial mapping. Climate change has become the ultimate catalyst to increase efforts in preventing the influx of diseases. However, as this book was written pre-COVID, I will assume that much has been built upon this incentive. Near the wrap-up, to my surprise, the authors actually presented the opinion that rather than focusing on stopping invasive species, the future of our ecosystems may actually depend on the arrival of new species adapting to new places. Invasive species, in certain controlled cases, may have the potential to increase resilience and thereby maintain ecosystems in the long run. A bit of a grim read at moments but interesting and worth the investment.

Dobson, A. P., Barker, K., & Taylor, S. L. (2013). Biosecurity: The socio-politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases. Routledge.