I would like to confirm that, yes, I was involved. When I was working with the utilities at that time, I was the chair of the group, and I was fully aware of all the amendments to the then Atomic Energy Control Regulations and the changes that were made...that ultimately became the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. So I'm familiar with the puts and takes around that. There was then even a desire to begin to broaden, if you wish, the concepts around risks and benefits and how we ought to manage this in a way that provides a fuller picture.
In those discussions at that time, the commission, or the AECB, did not want this particular stipulation put into the act, as it were, but they said, how about if we write a policy that would get to the intent of what the desire here was, that you will do a reasonable balancing of the issues at hand. Therefore, the policy two-for-two that has been written was really part of that sort of trade-off, that the commission would write a policy and subject its decisions to the consideration of the costs and benefits in its decision-making process.
I am not close to that any longer. I understand that there is not much credence given to it. It's not pursued with the degree of rigour and completeness that I would wish, hence my suggestion that perhaps this unfortunate situation has taught us a lesson. If there was something firmly embedded within the act that forced that kind of determination, it would bring much clearer thinking to the fore in terms of how you make complex decisions, how you deal with uncertainty, how you look at both sides of the equation on risk and so on, and you would get the kind of decision that Parliament made in a real hurry, which is to me very surprising: that implicitly, without doing the calculations, they managed to get to it, which the commission couldn't,because they said it's one or the other licence condition.
So that's the reason I'm proposing that something to this effect be put into the act, in the hope that it would force a deeper, more mature, more reasonable, and stronger process.