nuclear-news

Burying nuclear waste the best of a bad bunch of options

A reader offers her opinion on what to do with nuclear waste as Saskatchewan considers small modular reactors for its future energy needs.

 https://thestarphoenix.com/opinion/letters/letter-burying-nuclear-waste-the-best-of-a-bad-bunch-of-options

  I share the concern that Dale Dewar expressed in the StarPhoenix of Feb. 20 about the long-term management of Canada’s used nuclear fuel.

However, my conclusion is that, while far from ideal, deep burial is the best of a bunch of bad available options. There are no good options. Even proposals to extract recyclable material from the used fuel will leave behind most of the waste to be somehow disposed of.

Dewar’s suggestion that the wastes should remain permanently on the surface, with a system of rolling stewardship that would be passed on from generation to generation, might work in a world that could be guaranteed to be permanently free of war, terrorism, natural disasters, negligence and political instability.

But that’s not the world we live in. We cannot assume that safe stewardship would be maintained in perpetuity. Leaving the wastes indefinitely on the surface would seem to create far greater risk than deep geological burial would.

Of course, it would have been nice if we had thought about this problem before we started creating these wastes.

February 29, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, wastes