Mr. Speaker, just of interest, I was in Oslo, Norway when Chernobyl went up. We were kept in an underground bunker for an extra day at our NATO meeting because of that. It obviously was a terrible event.
My hon. colleague raises some valid points but he tends to focus on a doomsday scenario. However, in his last response he alluded to some reasonable limits, the $650 million being a reasonable limit, which is in accordance with most of the other people we deal with.
I would like to get the member's appreciation of the reasonableness of those limits based on the standards that are applied to nuclear facilities in Canada. It reads, “The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has concluded the process and mitigating systems required in the design of Canadian nuclear power plants rendered accident scenario with any significant release into the environment to be unreasonable”.
The Three Mile Island accident cost the U.S. $42 million, about $100 million in current Canadian dollars. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has also said that a worst case scenario accident would range from $1 million to $100 million based on the kind of standards we are talking about with Canadian technology.
I am wondering if my hon. colleague would comment on the protection provided by Canadian technology and how that marries up with some reasonable limits of liability.