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Holding in the deep: what Canada wants to do with its decades-long pile-up of nuclear waste

no country in the world has solved the conundrum of how to permanently dispose of waste that will stay toxic for 400,000 years. And after decades of trying hard to figure it out, Canada doesn’t seem especially close to a solution. 

This is the legacy that we are leaving for our children, our grandchildren, great grandchildren, or great, great grandchildren,”

“ it would be irresponsible and morally wrong to commit future generations to a technology that produces such dangerous material, unless there is at least one proven safe method of dealing with it,”

Canada plans to store spent nuclear fuel deep, deep underground near the Great Lakes. That is, if an industry group can find a community willing to play host,  The Narwahl, By Emma McIntosh Jan. 19, 2022,   The final resting place of Canada’s most radioactive nuclear waste could be a cave about as deep below the surface as the CN Tower is tall.

If it happens, the chamber and its network of tunnels will be drilled into bedrock in the Great Lakes basin. Pellets of spent nuclear fuel — coated in ceramic material, loaded into bundles of metal tubes the size of fireplace logs, then placed into a metal container encased in clay made from volcanic ash — will be stacked in the underground chamber sealed with concrete 10 to 12 metres thick. Though the radioactive pellets will have spent several years cooling down in pools and concrete canisters, they will still emit so much energy that their presence will heat up the space where they sit for 30 to 60 years. The warmth will linger for anywhere from a few centuries to a few millennia.

But none of this will become reality unless the industry-backed Nuclear Waste Management Organization can find a willing host. Two Ontario towns are in the running: South Bruce, located about two hours’ drive northwest of Toronto near Lake Huron, and Ignace, roughly 200 kilometres north of Lake Superior, not far from the Manitoba border. The municipalities, along with 10 First Nations and two Métis councils, are awaiting the completion of dozens of studies as they mull whether the economic benefits of such a project outweigh the risks.

“We have to make sure that there isn’t an environmental risk for us, or it’s a relatively remote risk,” said Dave Rushton, a project manager for the Municipality of South Bruce.

If anyone thinks they’re informed today, I kind of question it. We’re not fully informed because we haven’t got this information yet.”   

……….   no country in the world has solved the conundrum of how to permanently dispose of waste that will stay toxic for 400,000 years. And after decades of trying hard to figure it out, Canada doesn’t seem especially close to a solution. 

“This is the legacy that we are leaving for our children, our grandchildren, great grandchildren, or great, great grandchildren,” said Bzauniibiikwe, whose English name is Joanne Keeshig. She’s Wolf Clan from Neyaashiinigmiing, also known as Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, which is located near the South Bruce proposal.

“Seven generations from now, this will not be resolved unless we start seriously taking a look at what can be done.” Modelling suggests underground nuclear waste disposal is safe. But no country has tried it yet…………….

High-level waste, meanwhile, is the responsibility of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, a non-profit established by Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Corporation, and Hydro-Québec. In the 60 or so years that Canada has produced nuclear power, it has never had a place to dispose of spent fuel. As of 2020, the country’s nuclear power utilities had produced about three million fire log-sized bundles of it — enough to fill eight hockey arenas from the ice to the top of the boards — and that number grows by about 90,000 each year. In the absence of a place to leave it permanently, producers are currently keeping high-level waste in temporary storage near the reactors. By 2100, when the federal government says it expects all of the country’s existing nuclear plants to be decommissioned, industry projects it will be holding onto nearly 5.6 million bundles.

Accumulating nuclear waste has raised red flags for a long time. In 1978, the Ontario government commissioned a report titled “A Race Against Time,” which concluded the waste was proving trickier to handle than experts initially thought and suggested a potential moratorium on new nuclear plants if the industry didn’t progress within eight years. 

Another report from the United Kingdom the same year came to a similar but stronger conclusion, said Gordon Edwards, a mathematician who has long critiqued the nuclear industry as the president of the not-for-profit Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. 

“One of their main conclusions was that we are agreed that it would be irresponsible and morally wrong to commit future generations to a technology that produces such dangerous material, unless there is at least one proven safe method of dealing with it,” Edwards said.

“The problem with radioactivity is you can’t shut it off … You have to somehow keep it out of the environment.” 

Federal and provincial governments never issued a moratorium: construction on the Darlington plant in Bowmanville, Ont., which had been approved in 1977, began in the ‘80s. The Bruce and Pickering plants, meanwhile, continued to get new reactors. 

These days, the federal government is pushing to advance new nuclear technology, called small modular nuclear reactors (commonly known as SMRs), which some argue could be a climate mitigation tool. The technology is less efficient than larger reactors and produces more waste. Two of these new reactors might be built in the near future — the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which oversees the industry, is considering an application for one at the Chalk River Laboratories research site in Deep River, Ont., and Ontario Power Generation has announced its intent to build another at Darlington. 

In 2002, Parliament did pass legislation requiring the industry to band together and deal with its waste and later that year, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization was formed. Twenty years on, it still hasn’t figured out what to do with high-level radioactive waste. Keeping it above ground, as is done now, leaves it vulnerable to natural disasters, or human ones like terrorism and war. 

“It’s a question of ethics,” said Brian Ikeda, an associate professor at Ontario Tech University who studies the management of radioactive waste and has a contract to do upcoming work for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization.

“Do you want to leave this stuff — which you don’t like and you think is really dangerous — and have your grandchildren figure out what to do with it? Because that’s what’s actually going to happen … we could be putting those people at huge risk by having this material out.”

As such, a consensus has emerged among global experts that the best way forward is to dispose of spent fuel far underground, a concept called a deep geological repository. But putting nuclear waste underground isn’t simple. 

The waste — which in worst-case scenarios could poison groundwater or soil — must be packaged securely enough to withstand a future ice age, which could bring massive glaciers three kilometres thick, heavy enough to affect underground geology. It must be placed in rock that is stable and won’t shift for 400,000 years, the length of time the Nuclear Waste Management Organization believes the waste would remain radioactive enough to be harmful if leaked. It must be climate change proof. 

It must also account for the many unknowns of future generations, who might not know how to  actively maintain the storage site, but on the other hand will hopefully be able to monitor it. It must be buried so deep that, if our languages disappear or the information about what’s sealed within is somehow lost, our descendants would be unlikely to disturb the buried chamber and expose themselves to the unimaginable risk inside.

Another challenge is the simple fact of entropy: everything breaks down over time. No matter what type of container holds the nuclear waste, its material will corrode over the course of many thousands of years, Ikeda said. The trick is to buy as much time as possible. …………………………………………….
Finding a nuclear waste disposal site in Ontario will require First Nations consent and buy-in from local towns…………………………………………………………   https://thenarwhal.ca/nuclear-waste-ignace-bruce/

January 20, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, wastes | 1 Comment

New radioactive waste plan poses ‘Milennia of Risk” for Ottawa River communities

New Radioactive Waste Plan Poses ‘Millennia of Risk’ for Ottawa River Communities    https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/01/16/new-radioactive-waste-plan-poses-millennia-of-risk-for-ottawa-river-communities/January 16, 2022 : Ole Hendricksen  Canada’s first-ever radioactive waste disposal facility may be headed for disaster.

Canada’s nuclear regulator is about to hold wholly-inadequate hearings on building a controversial 60-foot-high mound for one million cubic metres of radioactive and hazardous wastes, with the potential to leak for millennia into the Ottawa River—a drinking water source for millions of Canadians in Ottawa, Gatineau, Montreal, and other downstream communities

Euphemistically called a “Near Surface Disposal Facility”, or NSDF, the mound would be on unceded Algonquin territory, on a hillside adjacent to a lake and wetlands that drain into the Ottawa River a kilometre away. An environmental impact statement (EIS) ordered by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) says that without mitigation practices, “leakage of leachate or other releases of substances may affect surface water quality at downstream locations,” but then goes on to say that these changes are not expected to have significant impact on human health or aquatic biodiversity.

The EIS lists a number of possible threats to the mound’s integrity, including earthquakes, floods, fires, tornadoes, malfunctions, and accidents. At each count, the (EIS) concludes that the risks are “not significant” thanks to the facility’s proposed design features, monitoring plans, and mitigation strategies like treating effluents.

A CAPTURED REGULATOR

The CNSC has never refused to grant a licence, according to a memo obtained by the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. The Expert Panel on Reform of Environmental Assessment noted in its final report that CNSC is widely seen as a captured regulator that promotes the projects it is supposed to regulate.

The surface-level nuclear mound idea was put forward by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL). In 2015, ownership of CNL was transferred from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) to SNC-Lavalin and Texas-based Fluor and Jacobs through a 10-year, multi-billion-dollar AECL contract issued by the Harper government.

The mound is central to CNL’s strategy to reduce AECL’s C$16-billion nuclear waste clean-up liability as quickly and cheaply as possible. This federal nuclear liability has grown despite billion-dollar annual appropriations to AECL, which AECL hands over to CNL’s multinational owners.

The CNSC has signalled its approval of the NSDF by scheduling a two-part licencing hearing for February 22 and May 31,2022. A licencing document and an Environmental Assessment report will be released on January 24. CNSC’s licencing document will likely say the NSDF project is consistent with requirements of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act. CNSC’s EA report will likely repeat the assertion that the NSDF project “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects”, or that the significant adverse environmental effects it is likely to cause are justified in the circumstances.

The CNSC initially also promised a public hearing and a public comment period on its EA report, but later eliminated them. Public participation in CNSC licencing hearings is a mere formality.

MISREPRESENTING THE RISK

There are many problems with the proposed project.

The NSDF location was chosen without a proper siting process, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says siting is a “fundamentally important activity in the disposal of radioactive waste.” Proximity to contaminated structures awaiting demolition at AECL’s Chalk River Laboratories—not environmental protection—seems to have been the priority.

Use of the term “NSDF” misrepresents the proposed facility. The EIS says it would be an above-ground mound “similar to a municipal landfill.” The IAEA says landfills are suitable only for very low level waste that has “very limited concentrations of long-lived radionuclides,” and that a “disposal facility at or near the surface makes it susceptible to processes and events that will degrade its containment and isolation capacity over much shorter periods of time.”

The waste inventory in the EISshows 23 of 31 radionuclides with half-lives exceeding 1,600 years, including man-made reactor products such as americium, neptunium, plutonium, and technetium. Much of this waste dates back to the Cold War era when Chalk River Laboratories produced materials for U.S. nuclear weapons. AECL’s NRX reactor experienced a partial meltdown in 1952. An above-ground mound is simply not capable of containing and isolating wastes like these for the duration of their radiological hazard.

The EIS says the mound would experience degradation as a result of “normal evolution”. That means mixed radioactive and hazardous industrial wastes (arsenic, beryllium, mercury, benzene, dioxins, PCBs, etc.) would leak into the Ottawa River, essentially forever. Future generations might be tempted to scavenge for scrap metal in the mound—an estimated 33 tonnes of aluminum, 178 tonnes of lead, 3,520 tonnes of copper, and 10,442 tonnes of iron.

SURFACE STORAGE FOR DANGEROUS RADIATION

Cobalt-60 would emit the highest amounts of radiation by far during the first 50 years of operation (99% of the total). CNL proposes to allow unlimited quantities of this powerful “short-lived” gamma-emitter in certain “packaged” wastes. Cobalt-60 is used in high-activity gamma irradiation sources for food sterilization and cancer treatment. Owing to cobalt-60’s 5.3-year half-life, these devices are no longer useful after 20 years but remain highly radioactive. They are sent back to Canada and stored at Chalk River.

CNL wants to put these “disused sources” in the mound, even though the IAEA requires their disposal at depths “of at least tens of metres”. And more are coming from around the world: a 2021 federal report says Canada supplies “approximately 95% of the global demand”.

The EIS does not mention that such commercial industry wastes would go in the NSDF. Nor does it discuss the worker safety and environmental risks created by cobalt-60 and the hundreds of tonnes of lead required to shield it.

Overall, the EIS contains minimal information on the wastes that would go into the mound. It refers to waste “packages” that could range in size up to intermodal shipping containers. Some packages supposedly would be “leachate controlled”, but no evidence or details are provided that they would withstand the heavy equipment (bulldozers, rollers) used to compact the mound.

Because the mound’s contents would be exposed to wind, rain, and snow during a 50-year operating phase, the project includes a water treatment plant to remove leachate contaminants. Tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, would not be removed. Partly treated leachate would be discharged into wetlands or into nearby Perch Lake through a pipeline. Both are already contaminated by groundwater plumes from existing leaking waste areas.

Despite assertions that the NSDF project would remediate “historically contaminated lands”, remediation plans are not included. Available data indicate that the leaking waste areas already contain far more radionuclides than a “licenced inventory” would allow in the NSDF.

A former AECL staff member says CNL does not rigorously track its wastes and has inadequate waste characterization and waste segregation procedures. This raises concerns about CNL’s capacity (and willingness) to adhere to the licenced inventory.

A FINANCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER

The CNSC’s mandate does not include cost-effectiveness. The $750-million cost estimate in the EIS lacks credibility. Canada has no experience with permanent radioactive waste disposal. Why build such an expensive facility that would do little to reduce the federal nuclear liability, would not conform to international safety standards, and would pollute the Ottawa River?

January 20, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, wastes | Leave a comment