The Bloc Québécois is calling for an immediate halt to the transfer of radioactive waste to Chalk River, on the shores of the drinking water source for millions of Quebecers

Anne Caroline Desplanques, Journal de Montréal, October 20, 2025, https://www.journaldemontreal.com/auteur/anne-caroline-desplanques

The request sent to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, follows a series of reports by our Investigative Bureau, which had rare access to the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) site where the waste is stored.

In the past year, the laboratories received 62.8 tonnes of irradiated uranium fuel from the Gentilly-1 nuclear generating station in Bécancour. This high-risk material is stored in a dozen gigantic reinforced concrete silos in the middle of the forest, along the Ottawa River.

The least contaminated materials are stored nearby, in containers stacked on top of each other.

More silos and containers need to be added as CNL also wants to dismantle two other federal nuclear power plants, in Ontario and Manitoba, and bring the waste back to Chalk River, they told us.

Risk of environmental disaster

“This is probably one of the worst possible and worst imaginable places to decide to store nuclear waste,” says the Bloc Québécois, which fears “an ecological and environmental disaster.”

CNL says the storage is only temporary: the high-level radioactive waste is ultimately to be placed in a geological repository more than 650 metres deep, supposed to open by 2050 in northwestern Ontario.

But for Lance Haymond, chief of the Kebaowek First Nation, whose traditional territory includes CNL, the opening of the geological repository remains hypothetical, as construction has not even begun yet.

The repository project is expected to cost $26 billion. Chief Haymond is concerned that the federal government will not be able to afford such a bill in these times of budget restraint and therefore may abandon the silos in Chalk River.

Long legal battle ahead

As for less contaminated waste accumulated in other containers, CNL wants to bury it directly on site one kilometre from the river. But the Kebaoweks has blocked the project in court.

They won the battle in the first instance, but the war continues since Ottawa has taken the case to the Court of Appeal. The hearings began in early October. Lance Haymond, supported by the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador and the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, promises to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

The conflict is therefore likely to drag on for years. In the meantime, and whatever the courts ultimately decide, the accumulation of garbage in Chalk River must stop, argues the Bloc Québécois.