nuclear-news

Opposed by more than 140 Great Lakes centres, including Toronto and Chicago, the 680-m-deep disposal site could be years away even if a construction permit is granted. OPG still needs approval of the local first nation and would have to go through more lengthy review to operate and fill the site, where low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste — not spent nuclear fuel rods — would be stashed more than a kilometre from Lake Huron, in ancient rock in the shadow of one of the world’s largest nuclear plants.

But that’s not the only thing to thrust nukes back onto public radar in Ontario: .Late next year, an overhaul of Ontario’s newest nuclear plant, Darlington, east of Toronto, is set to begin. Already more than 20 years old, Darlington is now at mid-life. OPG says the refurbishment will cost under $10 billion and create 2,000 direct jobs and half as many indirect jobs. It will add 30 years to the plant’s life.

A generation of Ontarians who watched the old Ontario Hydro binge on costly nuclear projects, often with monstrous over-runs, can be forgiven if they’re nail-biting. Yesterday’s mega-projects, which made taxpayers run for the hills, are today sold as “infrastructure” projects we’ve been conditioned to think of only as good. Barring an explosion in oil prices, and new oilsands mines, Darlington will become a construction site like few others in Canada starting in fall 2016.

Whether you support nuclear power misses the point: Ontario is a nuclear power in energy, and that demands public attention.

With 20 reactors, including two in safe storage, Ontario’s nuclear muscle dwarfs almost everything in the U.S. Only Illinois and Pennsylvania come close to Ontario, whose nuclear backbone provides about 60% of its energy needs.

And, yet, even in Southwestern Ontario, where the province first tested nuclear at Douglas Point in the 1960s, atomic energy is often out of mind even though it supports thousands of area jobs.

Southwestern Ontarians, their region Ground Zero for big fights on wind farms, can tell you about highrise-sized turbines. But fewer know the Bruce nuclear plant has the world’s largest operating capacity, or that it’s where OPG wants to sink its deep-burial waste disposal site.

For nuclear in Ontario, the lights are on but too few of us are home. That will soon change. http://www.woodstocksentinelreview.com/2015/03/16/burying-nuclear-waste-big-issue-for-ontario-now

greg.vanmoorsel@sunmedia.ca

“If I piled any quantity of shit out there and left it with no disposal plan, I’d be shut down and condemned within weeks. And here’s an industry with the capacity for global devastation, with no permanent plan for their garbage, the most dangerous stuff on Earth, and they’re allowed to keep producing it indefinitely.”

There is in fact a plan for that waste. A federally mandated body, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), wants to bury it in what the nuclear industry calls a Deep Geological Repository, or DGR. First, though, the organization must complete its quest—in effect, a competition, although the NWMO doesn’t see it that way—to find a municipality that will serve as a “willing host” for the repository. Among the contenders for the distinction are the municipalities of Huron-Kinloss, South Bruce and Central Huron, all of them close neighbours to Fran and Tony McQuail.

If it doesn’t seem like a competition any municipality would want to win, consider that spending on the project will likely run as high as $24 billion. And, the construction phase aside, the jobs involved are not the sort that will last only until another, perhaps cheaper, location is found. According to the NWMO’s plan, 400,000 years or more will pass between the point at which the waste is buried and the happy day when any sort of safety sticker is likely to be affixed to the vast toxic grave.

One morning in October, 1957, the principal of Keyes Public School in Deep River, Ontario, came into our Grade 5 classroom and declared that we, the children of the town, had “nothing to be afraid of.” We were to pay no attention to rumours that the reactors at nearby Chalk River would be among the Soviet Union’s first targets should the Cold War suddenly heat up.

Because we had older siblings ever willing to heighten our appreciation of reality, we already knew that if the reactors got hit, the explosion would be the equivalent of a thousand, maybe a million, H-bombs. We knew, too, that Deep River was located exactly seven miles from the reactors because that was the minimum distance at which human life would be spared if the plant ever got hit.

Mercifully, the missiles never came. And the plant never blew.

Others did: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), Fukushima (2011).

Most of the reactor stories we heard as kids turned out to be fables. Yet more than half a century later, they remain bristling little allegories not just of the risks of splitting the atom but of the doggedness of those who continue to tell us we have “nothing to fear” from an industry that in 1945 said hello to humanity by incinerating 80,000 citizens of Hiroshima…….http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/inside-the-race-for-canadas-nuclear-waste/article23178848/