A Need For Change

[Texto em inglês extraido do www.centreflow.ca]

Canadian Nuclear Association Annual Conference Report 3

It’s common practice to present conference speakers with a token gift for their efforts. Brad Wall, a 10-year veteran of the Saskatchewan legislature and Premier since November 2007, enjoys these perquisites.

When he mentioned Saskatchewan’s beef industry to one audience, he was rewarded by the industry with some beef jerky and a stockman’s tie. When he told another audience that Saskatchewan accounts for 25 percent of the world’s mustard production, the growers sent him a mustard-coloured tie and pocket square and an assortment of mustards and seeds.

So when he spoke at the Canadian Nuclear Association’s recent annual conference, he joked that he was particularly mindful of his audience. His expectation that “any gifts that I may receive I can actually store at my house” elicited hearty laughter.

From there on, however, Wall was all business. ”By any measure, Saskatchewan is to uranium what Saudi Arabia is to oil,” he said, adding that a significant percentage of homes in the United States can trace their electricity back to his province’s uranium.

(pictured above: McArthur River Mine, northern Saskatchewan). While the industry spends more than $188 million on salaries, wages and benefits in a sector where half of its workers are First Nations or Metis, which Wall believes is unique in North America, simply mining uranium was “not good enough” and he wants to change that.

He pointed out that in July 1949, Dr. Harold Johns of the University of Saskatchewan, visited the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories near Ottawa to get the country’s first therapeutic cobalt wafer. Installed in a “cobalt bomb” at the university hospital’s new cancer wing, it was used to treat a 40-year-old woman with advanced cancer in November 1951. The patient lived to be 90.

“Just as 1949 was a year of discovery, 2009 can be the beginning of a new era in sustainable nuclear energy development or the next medical application or development in science” Wall said.