The former head of Canada's nuclear watchdog will talk publicly for the first time about her version of the events that led up to the closure of the AECL Chalk River reactor in late November and December.

Linda Keen, who was dismissed late last week as president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, will testify on Tuesday, January 29 at a parliamentary committee.

The House of Commons committee on natural resources has confirmed Keen will definitely show up.

Keen was supposed to testify on January 16. But she was dismissed from her job as head of the Nuclear Safety Commission at 10:00 o'clock the night before by an order in council, essentially an order of cabinet.

Keen sent a last minute e-mail to the committee only hours before she was to appear saying she needed time to collect her thoughts on what had become a politically charged issue.

Critics have accused the government of firing Keen "in the dark of night" to muzzle her.

The government has accused Keen of being too hard line in her insistence that the AECL hook up power to two safety pumps that cool the reactor before she allowed it to operate.

The reactor was shutdown for nearly a month, and caused a shortage of medical isotopes before the government introduced a law that ordered it to reopen.

There is widespread political interest in Keen's version of what happened during the crisis. She has accused Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn of meddling in the work of her independent agency and has maintained all along that she was only doing her job by ensuring the safety of the nuclear reactor.