nuclear-news

Video. Gordon Edwards on Nuclear Fuel Waste Abandonment (South Bruce)

Canada’s nuclear waste producers want to bury and eventually abandon all of their high-level radioactive waste (used nuclear fuel) in a Deep Geological Repository (DGR). For this purpose they need to find a “willing host community” that will accept the waste. Accordingly, in 2005 the waste producers created a Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) that has given many millions of dollars to a small number of “candidate communities” over the last 14 years, in addition to meeting on a monthly basis with the members of a Citizens’ Liaison Committee (CLC) chosen for each candidate community, in a program called “Learn More”.

The idea is that each community would learn about how safe the management, transport, packaging and burial of this intensely radioactive material will be, so that they are “fully informed” about the proposed project. Now NWMO has narrowed down the original list of 22 candidate communities to just two: one near Revell Lake north of Lake Superior, between the Ontario towns of Ignace and Dryden, and the other near Teeswater, South Bruce, a small farming community a few kilometres west of Lake Huron. 

Unfortunately, NWMO withheld information about the individual radioactive constituents of used nuclear fuel (like radioactive iodine, radioactive caesium, radioactive strontium, and plutonium) and the biomedical dangers they pose. NWMO also erroneously affirmed that the used fuel pellets are solid ceramics that can not leak, which is untrue. Until recently, NWMO neglected to tell the communities that the used fuel will have to be “repackaged” before burial, an elaborate and potentially dangerous operation. In addition NWMO withheld information about the specific risks associated with “reprocessing” – the option of extraction of plutonium from the used fuel before burial, which requires the destruction of the nuclear fuel matrix, thereby releasing a very large quantity of radioactive solids, vapours and gases that are difficult to contain.

The Ignace town council has already signed an agreement with NWMO to proceed, and we are awaiting the decision of Wabigoon Lake First Nation – one of the closest indigenous communities to the Revell Lake site. The citizens of South Bruce will be voting in a referendum near the end of October whether or not to give their approval, after which the nearby Saugeen Ojibway First Nation will render its decision whether or not to support the project. In both cases, the decision of the indigenous peoples will be of great importance. Canada has accepted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a fundamental component of federal decision-making. UNDRIP asserts that no toxic waste shall be stored or disposed of o indigenous lands without the Free, Prior, Informed Consent of those indigenous rights-holders.

October 21, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, wastes