nuclear-news

Canadian nuclear site question would become ‘how’ not ‘whether’ under new law

Officials have previously said the project to bury nuclear waste in Northwestern Ontario is not a “done deal,” but that would change if it becomes a nationally-significant project.

Matt Prokopchuk, July 2, 2026, https://www.nwonewswatch.com/local-news/nuclear-site-question-could-become-how-not-whether-under-new-law-12501083

REVELL LAKE — If a proposed underground facility to store nuclear waste is made a project of national interest, it’s virtually guaranteed to get federal approval.

The Major Projects Office will decide whether it gets listed under the Building Canada Act as project of national interest, with that decision scheduled for the fall.

Should that happen, “the focus of the federal review would shift from ‘whether’ the project should proceed to ‘how’ it should proceed,” Privy Council Office spokesperson Pierre-Alain Bujold said in an email.

TThat would be a significant change from what the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, who has been leading the integrated study of the deep geological repository, told residents at public meetings about the proposed Revell Lake-area site to store high-level spent fuel from Canada’s nuclear power plants.

“It’s not a done deal that the project will happen,” an IAAC official said at an April 22 meeting in Melgund, an unorganized community about 12 kilometres away from the proposed site, citing the years-long ongoing impact assessment that is scheduled to end around 2030 with a final report and decision by appropriate senior ministers.

The repository’s proponent is the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, or NWMO, a government-mandated not-for-profit funded by the nuclear industry and tasked with the long-term management of Canada’s nuclear waste.

That distinction between “whether” a project gets greenlit versus “how” is important, said Brennain Lloyd, a project coordinator with environmental group Northwatch and a volunteer with We the Nuclear Free North.
“Meaning that it is absolutely a done deal, which really, really, really strongly demonstrates that they don’t understand that the NWMO project is still a concept,” she said. “It’s in the development stage, it’s full of uncertainty.”
The Impact Assessment Agency declined to comment, directing questions to the Major Projects Office.

Bujold said, if the project gets listed, it means all its federal approvals required under a slate of acts of parliament and federal regulations would be “granted through a consolidated federal process.” That review concludes with a “conditions document” which “is the legal equivalent of all required permits, decisions or authorizations under the applicable federal statutes,” Bujold added.

“Once a project is listed, no other Governor in Council decisions are needed,” he said, adding that the federal sign-off is still subject to “applicable” Indigenous treaty-based processes and consultations.

This allows for greater coordination, reduced delays and more certainty for proponents and investors, while protecting the environment and respecting Indigenous rights.”

If the deep geological repository gets deemed a nationally-significant project, the ongoing impact assessment process would continue, Bujold said, where it would “inform” that final conditions document.

“The proponent would be required to comply with those conditions as the project proceeds through construction and operation.”

Lloyd and other anti-nuclear advocates have pointed to the hundreds of public comments already submitted during the current impact assessment’s consultation phases, with many expressing concern or outright opposition citing long-term safety and the issue of site-to-site transportation, among other things.

Transportation along highways and rail was not included in the NWMO’s initial project description, with the Impact Assessment Agency saying it was a “common concern” raised by many.

A summary of draft guidelines posted by the assessment agency earlier in 2026 calls on the NWMO to provide more information on that front, including that its work “must assess potential adverse effects of project-related transportation on the applicable valued components within an area surrounding the project site, along with the intersections along Highway 17 that will be required for site access.”

The Building Canada Act is not about bypassing approvals,” Bujold said.

He said the necessary licences the waste repository would require from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission are still separate; those don’t start getting issued until after Ottawa’s approval.

If federal approval becomes a sure thing, Lloyd said she’s concerned the Nuclear Safety Commission’s work would amount to “simply tinkering with the deal.”

July 8, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

This EU state’s anti-Russian crusade has become a strategic dead end

Poland wanted to use Ukraine against Russia, now Kiev is using Poland

2 Jul, 2026 20:09By Timofey Bordachev, Program Director of the Valdai Club, https://www.rt.com/russia/642505-eu-states-anti-russian-crusade/

The situation in which Poland now finds itself is a good example of how even a relatively successful country can drive itself into a foreign policy impasse through the narrowness of its own thinking.

Poland is not, by modern standards, an inept state and its economy is growing, its institutions function and it occupies an important place in European affairs. Yet its foreign policy has been reduced to a single organizing principle: opposition to Russia. Warsaw has designated Moscow as its ideal adversary and has subordinated almost every other aspect of its external activity to the goal of harming Russia by any means available.

This applies first and foremost to Poland’s relationship with the Kiev regime. It would be naïve to believe that Polish politicians have ever held many illusions about the nature of the authorities in Ukraine and nor have they traditionally had warm feelings towards their Ukrainian neighbors. On the contrary, the Polish elite’s attitude to Ukraine has long been shaped by contempt and historical suspicion and this view has been formed over centuries and, it must be admitted, has not emerged without reason.

Nevertheless, in recent years Warsaw has made itself Kiev’s most energetic advocate in Europe as it’s supplied Ukraine with vast quantities of weapons and has turned its own territory into the main logistical hub for Western military aid. At the same time, the Polish authorities have done everything possible to destroy channels of dialogue with Moscow and Minsk, casting Poland as Russia’s most irreconcilable opponent, even by the standards of the wider West.Among all the countries that matter in European politics, Poland chose the most radical course during the current military and political crisis. The logic was simple, if Ukraine could be used against Russia, then Ukraine had to be supported, whatever the cost.

The problem is that Warsaw convinced itself of something that was never realistic in that it imagined that Ukraine could serve as a powerful Polish instrument for containing Russia while remaining manageable and responsive to Polish requests. Some in Poland also appear to have believed that Kiev was fighting for a European choice and that its desire to join NATO and the European Union would make it more accommodating.

Both assumptions were wrong and the Ukrainian authorities have behaved towards their Polish patrons in exactly the way one should have expected. They have taken what was offered, demanded more, and then publicly insulted and humiliated those who helped them. The recent exchange of awards and diplomatic gestures is only the most visible symptom of a deeper problem after Poland imagined a relationship that couldn’t exist and then built a strategy around this chimera.

As a result, Polish foreign policy now looks absurd as Warsaw has invested enormous political and emotional capital in Ukraine, only to find that Kiev feels no need to show gratitude. Worse still for Poland, there is no obvious way out because a serious confrontation with Kiev would undermine the whole anti-Russian structure of Polish policy, while continuing as before means accepting repeated humiliation.

This is not an accident and it flows from the central fixation of Polish foreign policy, Russia as the sole true object of Warsaw’s interest in the world.

That fixation has deep historical roots as for Poland, Russia isn’t merely a neighboring power, but a source of complexes and envy on a scale rarely found in modern European politics. Russia deprived Poland of any chance of becoming the leader of the Slavic world and later, the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union shaped the conditions under which modern Polish political culture developed. The struggle against Russian domination became one of the defining themes of Polish public life.

In effect, opposition to Russia helped create modern Polish identity, but it left the political elite with little ability to look at the world through any other prism. The result is the mindset of a sizeable European nation whose foreign policy imagination has room for almost nothing except the struggle against its great eastern neighbor.

The career of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the American political thinker of Polish origin, embodied this drama. He wrote a series of striking works on international relations, but almost everything in them was subordinated to the Russian question, which meant his intellectual universe was large in appearance, but in practice revolved around one object.

After the end of the Cold War, Poland’s entry into the Western world only reinforced this pattern. Warsaw could no longer openly pursue its traditional suspicions of Germany because NATO and the European Union confined those instincts within institutional limits. It’s true that Poland’s current rearmament program has a potential anti-German dimension, but it also reflects a desire to become Washington’s most important continental ally as Britain and France weaken. However, in the medium term, Poland’s hands are tied in the West by American interests in preserving NATO and the EU.

That leaves Russia and here the Polish elite feels entirely at home as, for two centuries, it has trained itself to think of little else. Now, however, reality is intruding because Kiev is behaving as Kiev was always likely to behave, taking Polish support for granted, glorifying figures whom many Poles regard as war criminals, and treating Warsaw not as a patron but as a useful subordinate.

Still, the current crisis is unlikely to produce a military clash between Poland and Ukraine, or even a genuine political break. Nor will it lead to a significant reduction in Polish support for Kiev and we can already see the dispute being presented as an internal Polish quarrel, a by-product of rivalry within Warsaw’s ruling elite. In this version, the problem isn’t Kiev’s conduct but Poland’s own domestic politics and this is convenient.

It allows Polish politicians to avoid confronting the failure of their strategy. After a few rounds of public argument, they will probably try to push the matter aside and return to business as usual. To do otherwise would mean admitting that Poland has no coherent foreign policy beyond its hostility to Russia.

Kiev understands this perfectly and it has no reason to make concessions because Poland has backed itself into a corner. Warsaw cannot withdraw support from Ukraine without damaging the central myth of its own policy and therefore Kiev can continue to insult and ignore Polish sensitivities, confident that the aid will keep coming.

This is the deeper humiliation as Poland, unable to formulate a foreign policy that is not anti-Russian, inevitably becomes an instrument of other people’s interests. For many years these were primarily American and British interests, but now Poland also finds itself serving the interests of the Kiev regime, a government entirely dependent on outside support but still capable of dictating the emotional terms of its relationship with Warsaw.

All this is especially strange because Poland has no urgent need to behave this way given it’s one of the few major European countries whose economy is still growing at a steady pace, roughly 3.3 to 3.6 percent a year. A more self-confident country might have used this position to consolidate, enrich itself and avoid unnecessary geopolitical adventures.

But Poland can’t do that. A relatively large country must have a foreign policy and since Warsaw has no foreign policy idea except opposition to Russia, it will continue to move in circles.

That’s the trap Poland has built for itself. It imagined that Ukraine could be used as a weapon against Russia, but instead, it’s discovered that those who define themselves only by hostility to Moscow are easily used by others.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.

July 8, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment