Hundreds of people have been giving their views on a project that could see Canada’s nuclear waste buried deep underground in northwestern Ontario — and one of the main concerns is how these materials would get there safely.
An area near the Township of Ignace and Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, roughly 250 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, is being eyed to house the country’s first deep geological repository.
The $26-billion project, proposed by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), would span 160 years and provide permanent storage for about 5.9 million bundles of used nuclear fuel, according to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC).
“It’s always been an Achilles heel of the nuclear power industry about how to safely deal with this highly radioactive waste that stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years,” said Jacqueline Wilson, a staff lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA).
“The timeframe is hard to fathom.”
Final approval for the repository to proceed is a long way off. As part of the process, the IAAC has spent the past month collecting public feedback on the initial project description — a more than 1,200-page document that outlines the purpose and scope of the project.
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Once the initial public comment period closes on Wednesday, the IAAC will prepare a summary of issues, which will inform the next phase of the assessment process that the agency is conducting alongside the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
For their part, several environmental groups have criticized the fact transportation is not part of the initial project description.
“It’s good to see many commenters pointing out that the assessment would be incomplete without a comprehensive examination of how NWMO proposes to transport, transfer and treat the high-level radioactive waste accumulated in southern Ontario and Eastern Canada,” Wendy O’Connor, a volunteer with Nuclear Free Thunder Bay and We the Nuclear Free North, said in a Jan. 26 news release.
Vince Ponka, Indigenous and regional communications manager with the NWMO, said while the project is the first of its kind in Canada, the transportation of nuclear waste isn’t new.
“The shipping of radioactive materials, including used nuclear fuel, is something that has already happened in Canada for more than 50 years and is already strictly regulated by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Transport Canada,” Ponka said.
The container used to transport spent nuclear fuel for this project must meet strict guidelines to withstand, as Ponka put it, “the worst possible road accident we could imagine.”
There would also be a 24/7 command centre to track shipments as well as a lead security vehicle that would travel ahead to signal extra caution to other motorists, he said.
According to Ponka, what’s being proposed is between two and three shipments of nuclear waste a day over a 50-year period. It would only be transported during good weather and not over the winter months.
The first shipment of nuclear waste isn’t expected to occur until 2043, he added.
M. V. Ramana is a University of British Columbia professor who’s studied the challenges of nuclear waste disposal around the world.
Canada’s nuclear waste is typically stored at the power plants where it’s generated, he said.
While radioactive materials from experimental reactors and small reactors are sometimes moved from one site to another, “that kind of material is far less radioactive and has far less quantity of radioactivity associated with it than the spent fuel from nuclear power plants.”
Canada has never seen this much nuclear waste being transported this often, nor with such high levels of radioactivity, Ramana said.
“The amount of material that has to be transported is much, much larger, right? And the distances,” Ramana said. “It will be several thousand kilometres across multiple provinces.”
In his view, for transportation not to be included in the impact assessment process would be “a glaring omission.”
Candida Cianci, director of the review panel division at the IAAC, said it’s important for people to keep in mind that the impact assessment is still in the planning phase.
The purpose of this phase is to make sure there’s meaningful public engagement and determine what key issues the assessment will focus on, she said.
“These comment periods are going to help inform the scope of the assessment, but we’re not at that stage yet.”
When it comes to transportation “[we] don’t want to have that perception that it is being excluded at this point in time because we do have to make that determination later in the planning phase.”
A number of environmental organizations, as well as the federal New Democratic Party, have called for the initial consultation window to be extended, a decision that lies with the NWMO.
Cianci said the next step is for the agency to determine whether a full impact assessment is needed; if so, another public comment period is expected to be launched this spring.
Wilson said the impact assessment process is about making an informed decision about a high-stakes project with long-term consequences.
“That’s a very good idea in this case to do a rigorous, broad, fulsome analysis because we’re talking about highly radioactive waste,” said the staff lawyer with CELA.
“It’s one of the largest environmental decisions that we will ever make in this country.”
