This letter to the editor was published in the Hill Times on June 16, 2025 (Subscribe to the Hill Times)

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A March 2025 report  by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) flagged a serious problem in Canada’s nuclear governance regime. Canada has not incorporated the fundamental safety principle of justification into its legal framework, despite being urged to do so by an international peer review team in 2019.

The IAEA principle of justification in nuclear safety requires that any practice involving human exposures to ionizing radiation be justified during the licensing process for a facility. It must be demonstrated that the overall benefits of the project to individuals and society, outweigh the potential health detriments of the radiation exposures it will cause.

Justification is necessary because there is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear reactors and radioactive waste. Ionizing radiation causes cancers of all kinds, many other chronic diseases and damage to the human gene pool. Human-made nuclear waste will remain hazardous and radioactive for millions of years.

Canada’s failure to justify nuclear projects is a serious deficiency that urgently needs to be addressed given the Government of Canada’s professed interest in funding and expanding nuclear electricity generation in Canada. We need to ask: can we justify creating more and more radioactive waste that future generations will have to deal with even though they will receive zero benefit from the activities that created it.

Other serious deficiencies were flagged by the IAEA experts in 2019. For example, Canada allows pregnant nuclear workers to be exposed to a radiation dose four times larger than is tolerated by IAEA standards. This issue remains unaddressed five years later.

These problems are just the tip of the iceberg. An environmental petition to the Auditor General of Canada in 2019 described many problems with Canada’s nuclear governance regime suggesting it compares unfavourably with more robust regimes in other OECD countries.  See Hill Times letters to the editor: “Who will fix Canada’s nuclear governance gaps?” and “Reforms needed at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission,” for more details.

Lynn Jones, Ottawa (Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area)