Unease in Ontario about planned nuclear waste dump (nobody suggests that they stop making this trash?)
The Plan to Bury All of Canada’s Nuclear Waste in One Northwest Ontario Town
This kind of dump for high-level nuclear waste has not yet been built anywhere in the world.
JANUARY 24, 2022 ON THE MONDAY SHOW BY CANADALAND Since Canada began using nuclear energy in the 1960s, the only solutions for the waste produced have been temporary. It’s now being stored onsite at nuclear plants, in containers that last a century at most.But nuclear waste takes thousands — or tens of thousands — of years to decay.
So in 2002, the federal government created the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) and tasked it with finding a location to dispose of all of Canada’s high-grade nuclear waste.
Ignace, in Northwestern Ontario, was among the communities that volunteered to host a deep geological repository (DGR), and is now one of two sites under consideration. (The other is South Bruce, in the southern part of the province.) To create the DGR, used-up nuclear reactor cores would be placed inside canisters that would then be encased in a special clay that’s been shown to protect from water and cushion from seismic activity. The canisters would then be buried inside a rock 500 metres below ground.The NWMO is confident that the project — valued at $26 billion over the next 150 years — would pose virtually no risk to the local water supply, environment, or people. But a DGR for high-level nuclear waste has not yet been built anywhere in the world.
On this week’s CANADALAND, senior producer Sarah Lawrynuik travels to the area where she grew up, to learn about the divided reaction to the nuclear-waste project and whether the anxieties are justified:The following are edited excerpts from Sarah’s conversations with some of the residents and experts she spoke to…Our water is the most precious thing, I believe, in this country right now. Because so much in the world is polluted. Just so much. And we can’t afford to take that risk. Because no matter what they do to try to make it safe, nuclear waste is not safe and will never be safe.”
— Sylvia Green-Guenette, who lives on the shore of Wabigoon Lake in Dryden. Despite being roughly as close to the proposed site as Ignace, Dryden won’t get a say in whether the project goes ahead………………..
“I think the people who are totally for it are just looking at it through one lens. They’re looking at it through the business lens.…They’re promising a certain amount of jobs — not only for the community, but specifically for Indigenous folk as well. And I think a lot of people can see through that.”
— Maya Oversby, a Métis university student who started attending community meetings about the repository in 2015, when she was 14…………………… https://www.canadaland.com/nuclear-waste-ignace-ontario/
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