Fifty years after Canada’s plutonium mishap in India, is history repeating itself?

On May 18, 1974, India shocked the world by conducting a test atomic bomb explosion of plutonium, obtained from a ‘peaceful’ research reactor that was gifted by the Canadian government in 1954.

In 2021, U.S. non-proliferation experts sent an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressing concern that Canada ‘will undermine the global nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime’ following a funding decision for a company working on technology to extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Opinion

BY SUSAN O’DONNELL AND GORDON EDWARDS

May 15, 2024

In the public imagination, nuclear power for electricity and nuclear weapons are entirely separate issues. Because Canada is not a nuclear weapons state, its nuclear power reactors are thought to be unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, and our nuclear technology exports...

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