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May 15, 2009
Audience Questions Answered
By Kevin McMahon
One of the many great things about making documentaries is all the people we get to meet while filming and at screenings.
When we were shooting WATERLIFE we met hundreds of people all around the Great Lakes – though we were only able to include a few of their stories in the final film.
Last week, when the film premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto we met many more –film enthusiasts, interested citizens and passionate environmentalists. The film prompted many questions and, again, time constraints meant we were only able to deal with a few of them – and superficially at that.
So over the next months, as WATERLIFE rolls out in Canada and the United States, I’m going to use this forum to introduce some of the people whose stories didn’t make the film and try to address some of the questions that the film is raising.
This week, some questions asked at screenings:
What Then Must We Do?
Amid its celebration of the beauty of the Great Lakes and its examination of some of the challenges they face, WATERLIFE gives a sense of what needs to be done to preserve our water for future generations. But no film can adequately deal with such a complex subject and the first question that comes up at screenings is: “how can we help?”
The WATERLIFE team is partnering with environmental groups all around the lakes that have specific answers to specific problems – and we will be posting more information about their work in the coming weeks.
But a general answer to the situation is that we need to encourage our governments to do much, much more to repair the old and often crumbling water infrastructure around the lakes and to improve – and enforce! – environmental regulations which have been constantly eroded in the last two decades. There are thousands of municipalities on the lakes, as well as eight states --
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York – and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
But the most powerful actors, of course, are the federal governments of Canada and the United States. It’s fair to say that neither has put any significant resources into improving the quality of the lakes for many years. The scientists we spoke with while filming WATERLIFE estimated that it will take tens of billions of dollars just to clean up the legacy toxins in the lakes – but freeing up that kind of cash seemed much more impossible when we were filming, a year ago, than it does now. Funny how an economic meltdown can change things!
Now, the new Obama administration is promising to pump $475 million this year into Great Lakes restoration. The money would be used, as follows:
• $146 million to clean up toxic substances and Areas of Concern.
• $60 million to prevent or remove aquatic invasive species.
• $97 million to improve near-shore health and pollution prevention.
• $105 million for habitat and wildlife protection and restoration.
• $65 million to evaluate and monitor progress.
While both parties in the Congress have supported the funding in principle it has yet to be passed. Near as I can tell, there is nothing similar being even vaguely contemplated by the Canadian government.
Where Is All The Water Going?
Great Lakes cottagers, especially those on the upper lakes, have watched for years as their water level inexorably dropped but there has been controversy over why this was happening.
A study commissioned by the Georgian Bay Association pointed toward an increased flow out through the St. Clair River. It was thought that dredging by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers might have created conditions that were constantly eroding the channel.
Others, including most of the environmentalists we spoke with, believed the real culprit was global warming. People who live on the lakes are well aware that the winter ice cover has been gradually shrinking, allowing for ever greater evaporation.
The International Joint Commission – the (once-mighty, now neutered) body established by the two federal governments to deal with cross-border water issues – has been working on a study to get to the bottom of the problem. It recently released a preliminary report that was unequivocal, saying:
“Climate is the main driver of the lake level relationships between lakes and over time. There has been a persistent decline in net total supply of water to Lake Superior and Lake Michigan-Huron over the past two decades that has resulted in declining lake levels and a change in the relationship to Lake Erie.”
What’s With The Glow-in-the-dark Water?
A criticism of WATERLIFE, voiced at a Hot Docs screening by a Toronto peace activist, was that it fails to deal with tritium pollution in Lakes Ontario and Huron. Quite right. For all the environmental terrors the film shows, there were a number that we had to leave out. (As I told that audience, I would have preferred a four-hour movie, but I doubt many of them would.) I first heard this criticism from our collaborator Gord Downie, who narrates the film, is a Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and has been involved with the issue of radioactive poisoning on the lakes for a while. The situation is bad enough that we are thinking about doing a new film focusing on it. Perhaps it should be an homage to The Simpson’s – whose depiction of the nuclear industry is a pretty fair reflection of what goes on at the nuclear plants on the Great Lakes.
Take, for example, the level of tritium in our water. Tritium is a form of radioactive hydrogen, which is measured in units of becquerels/litre. (A Becquerel is an international unit of measurement of the activity of a radioactive nuclide.)
Tritium is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere and falls to the earth via rainfall at levels ranging from 0.05 Bq/L to 9 Bq/L. But it also enters our waters thanks to manmade sources such as nuclear weapons tests, nuclear reactors, and glow-in-the-dark sign manufacturers.
With a half-life of 12 years, tritium is classified by the U-S EPA as a human carcinogen. According to many scientists, tritium is also a mutagen – it causes genetic mutations -- and a teratogen (from the Greek, meaning monster) which causes malformation of fetuses. It is suspected in promoting hereditary defects and implicated in contributing to childhood leukemia and Down’s Syndrome. The International Joint Commission classifies tritium as a persistent toxic substance, and a candidate for zero discharge.
Candu reactors, Canada’s pride, are said to be the worst in the world for their production of tritium because the reactors use “heavy water” as both a moderator and a coolant. Tritium is produced in large quantities in irradiated heavy water during the nuclear fission process.
Ontario Power Generation currently operates 10 Candu reactors on the shoreline of Lake Ontario at the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations. Bruce Nuclear has eight Candus reactors at the Bruce nuclear complex on the Lake Huron shoreline. These plants dump tritium into the lakes on a regular basis during routine operations and on many occasions through “unplanned emissions”. Canadian federal regulators allow discharges of tritium well in excess of national safe drinking water standards, based on the idea that it will be diluted by the lake water. However, water treatment systems are not able to remove tritium from our water -- what goes into the lake, goes into our homes.
Lake Ontario Waterkeeper recently looked at the history of tritium standards in Ontario, in the light of the provincial government’s declared intention to heavily rely on nuclear power for its future energy needs.
The Ministry of the Environment undertook a major review of Ontario’s drinking water standards in 1993. At that time, the Ontario Drinking Water Objective for Tritium was
changed from 40,000 Bq/L to 7000 Bq/L. In 2006, the City of Toronto called upon the Ministry of the Environment to revise the Ontario Drinking Water objective for tritium down to 100 Bq/L in the short term, with a goal of reaching 20 Bq/L within ?ve years. LOW recommends that the drinking water standard for Tritium should be between 10 and 20 Bq/L
The Ontario government has refused to act on these recommendations, leaving Ontario with one of the weakest tritium pollution standards in the world. Of all the countries that regulate tritium, only Russia and Australia have weaker standards. Most other countries, including France, the U.K., and the United States have clean water objectives that are between ten and seventy times more protective than ours.
As LOW quite straightforwardly puts it: “The current drinking water standard for tritium is failing to protect the Great Lakes”
