Antinuclear

Effective opposition in Canada to hosting nuclear waste dumps

environmental groups, including Sierra Club Canada, have raised significant concerns about the transportation of liquid nuclear waste from Chalk River Laboratories near Ottawa to a U.S. government site in South Carolina.

Coincidence or success? Nuclear waste facility drops towns after protest, rabble.ca

BY  STEVE CORNWELL APRIL 8, 2015 Anti-nuclear organizers note a coincidence: towns with resistance to the construction of nuclear waste facilities are often declared “geoscientifically unsuitable” and struck from the list of potential hosts.

On March 3, the towns of Creighton, Saskatchewan and Schreiber, Ontario were dropped from considerationby the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) to host a facility for highly radioactive used nuclear fuel.

Since 2010 the NWMO has been actively seeking a location to build what it calls a ‘long-term management site’ for the storage of used nuclear fuel. While there were originally 22 communities on the NWMO’s list of potential hosts, only nine remain, all in Ontario, as candidates for a high-level waste site for used nuclear fuel.

While community activists celebrate being dropped from the lists, concerns about nuclear waste transportation remain. Local politicians are also quick to note a potential economic loss for their communities.

‘Geological complexities’ arise when there’s opposition

In the announcement to remove Schreiber and Creighton, the NWMO cited what it called “geological complexities” as the reason it decided to remove the towns from contention for the waste site. However, this reasoning doesn’t add up for Joe Kutcher, a member of the group Citizens Concerned About Nuclear Waste in Schreiber.

“I don’t think you can determine that Schreiber is not geologically suitable based on the studies the NWMO did,” said Kutcher.

“We had an event with [nuclear expert] Dr. Gordon Edwards, then a big piece in The Globe and Mail came out, and then Schreiber was no longer ‘geologically suitable.'”

Brennain Lloyd of Northwatch, a group dedicated to defending the interests of communities in northern Ontario, similarly hinted that it’s more than a coincidence that the NWMO finds towns with a dedicated resistance to the project as ‘geologically’ unsuitable.

“The NWMO will not acknowledge this, and they almost always say it’s for geoscientific reasons, but it’s not a coincidence that the communities that have been dropped are all places where community dissent about the project reaches a certain volume level,” said Lloyd.

The NWMO has identified what it calls a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) as its preferred method of storing the highly radioactive fuel waste. The general idea behind such a design is that the rock formation that the repository is constructed in will aide containment of the waste.

As such, part of the search for a community has to do with the quality of rock formation wherever the purposed DGR would go. However, Lloyd thinks that for all the talk of geophysical features what the NWMO is looking for more than anything else is a community to say yes, regardless of the quality of the rock.

“The industry has been talking about the rock for decades, but its just window dressing,” says Lloyd………..

While each future shipment of radioactive waste to the NWMO’s site poses threats of human and environmental contamination, more pressing waste transportation schemes have raised the alarm of environmentalist and citizens groups.

Following significant opposition in 2013, plans to send radioactive steam generators from Tiverton, Ontario through the Great Lakes en route to recycling facilities in Sweden were deferred. More recently, environmental groups, including Sierra Club Canada, have raised significant concerns about the transportation of liquid nuclear waste from Chalk River Laboratories near Ottawa to a U.S. government site in South Carolina.

The proposal is currently under review, and armed trucks carrying the waste could hit Ontario roads as early as this spring.

Steve Cornwell is interested in social movements, science and technology. Steve has worked on energy issues with Greenpeace Canada, Environmental Defense, Safe and Green Energy Peterborough, and SumOfUs.org. Find him on Twitter @steve_cornwell http://rabble.ca/news/2015/04/coincidence-or-success-nuclear-waste-facility-drops-towns-after-protest

April 10, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized