COMMENT: Canada and US FAIL on radionuclides

TELL CANADIAN AND UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AGENCIES THAT RADIONUCLIDES SHOULD BE DESIGNATED AS A CHEMICAL OF MUTUAL CONCERN UNDER THE GREAT LAKES WATER QUALITY AGREEMENT  

Seeking Your Voice and Participation on Monday July 14, 2025 (10 AM Eastern/9 AM Central): 

Dear Friends & Colleagues:

We are seeking your participation in an important meeting to be held on Monday July 14, 2025 between non-governmental organizations and the United States’ Great Lakes Office of the Environmental Protection Agency, Canada’s Clean Water Agency-Environment and Climate Change Canada, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. At this meeting, we will discuss the governments’ recommendation that radionuclides fail to meet the criteria to be considered a candidate chemical of mutual concern (CMC) under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Your organization may have been one of the 110 organizations that supported the original NGO nomination of radionuclides as a candidate CMC to our federal agencies under the GLWQA in 2016 and again submitted in 2022. The groups who signed on to our brief to designate radionuclides as a CMC made the following conclusion:

Given that radionuclides are persistent toxic substances, given a situation where there is a substantial number of facilities that are sources of radionuclides to the Lakes, and given the relatively closed characteristics of the Great Lakes system, which means radionuclides build up in the system, it is essential to designate radionuclides as a Chemical of Mutual Concern so that the data and science needed will be generated and so that preventive actions can be taken to protect the Lakes from threats from radionuclides. 

At the request of the NGO nominators of radionuclides, the US and Canadian agencies have agreed to host a meeting of the nominators to discuss its proposal on radionuclides before they make a decision. This is an important and next to final opportunity to urge our federal governments to take steps to revise its recommendations and instead take steps to advance work on radionuclides in the Great Lakes.

This two-hour meeting will involve presentations by the federal agencies on their recommendation and presentations by NGOs on key issues for consideration of radionuclides in the Great Lakes.  The final hour of the meeting will provide time for participants to make comments or ask questions.

Please join us at this meeting. We need your presence (virtual) and your voice to show our governments that radionuclides should be designated under the GLWQA for binational strategies.

Please register with us if you plan to attend the meeting on Monday July 14^th between 10AM  – 12 noon eastern,  9 AM – 11 central time by filling in the registration form at https://forms.gle/mXWF2MN4N7DgKqi38. Even if you can’t make it that day, please fill in the poll to let us know that you want to continue being involved in this issue.

Following the meeting, we will be preparing a formal submission in response to our governments’ recommendation to not designate radionuclides as a CMC. We hope you will review and add your support to that submission, which must be transmitted to the decision makers in mid-September, 2025.

If you have any questions or comments, contact John Jackson, (Toxics Free Great Lakes Binational Network and Great Lakes Ecoregion Network) ([email protected]), or Fe de Leon, (Canadian Environmental Law Association) ([email protected]).