Cornies: Our need for power, and the nuclear waste it leaves behind

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In the end, the result of the vote in South Bruce this week was nearly an even split.

Of course it was. There’s hardly an important public issue these days that doesn’t result in a stark divide.

But the result of the South Bruce referendum on whether to offer itself as a “willing host” for a deep geological repository (DGR) for Canada’s high-level nuclear waste is binding on its seven-member council.

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The unofficial tally: 51.2 per cent in favour (1,604 votes), 48.8 per cent against (1,526 votes). Voter turnout was 69.3 per cent, enough to forestall any notion of a do-over.

Now, attention will turn to the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, whose consent also is required before the federal Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) can consider South Bruce a live option. And the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, in response to this week’s vote, declined to fix a firm date for its own referendum, saying it “will not ask [its] members to make a willingness decision until full consultation and engagement has occurred.”

When the process of finding a suitable location for the deep burial of Canada’s most hazardous nuclear waste began more than a decade ago, NWMO elicited interest from 22 sites across the country. Now, all but two have dropped out.

The Saugeen Ojibway-South Bruce site, home to the towns of Teeswater, Mildmay and Formosa, just south of Walkerton, is one. The Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace Township site, between Dryden and Thunder Bay, is the other.

In Ignace, 77 per cent of those who voted in July expressed an openness to hosting the $26-billion site. The Wabigoon nation has yet to complete its “willingness” process.

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In both locations, job creation and economic spinoffs are the anticipated benefits of hosting a DGR. Tending to the country’s nuclear waste is, necessarily, a commitment longer than our longest family trees.

The NWMO, naturally, frames the endeavour as reasonably safe and well-considered, even if it isn’t theoretically foolproof. Durable containers, sealing materials and low-permeable host rock, hundreds of metres below the surface, will ensure spent nuclear fuel won’t get into surface waters or threaten human health, it says.

Environmentalists and other experts disagree. In late October, Southampton, Ont., surgeon Paul Moroz wrote the NWMO is in no position to call its plans “settled science.”

“No one should accept placing never-before-tested DGR technology into populated farmland and cattle country near the Great Lakes, the biggest collection of fresh water in the world,” Moroz wrote. “The risks over the course of thousands of years of possible radiation leakage, even a small one, is simply too much for a never-tested technology.”

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Other experts, such as Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, are warning about the dangers of the necessary reprocessing and repacking of spent fuel on site before burial, as well as the inherent hazards of transporting the material from nuclear reactors to the DGR, wherever it may be located.

To bring the spent fuel to the repository, Edwards says, “they’re going to put [the fuel bundles] into storage containers, ship them over roads” before repackaging. Ontario has “no experience with this stuff. This is all going to be a new learning experience for them. It’s brand new. In fact, they’re making it up as they go along.”

And none of that is to mention possible terrorism: nuclear sites of all types are inviting targets for state and rogue actors.

During my childhood, scientists and documentarians touted hydroelectricity as the clean, abundant answer to the country’s electricity needs, a nearly inexhaustible resource. What wasn’t then anticipated was the exponential growth of consumption, the need to throttle our use of fossil fuels and the political popularity of nuclear power as a “clean” alternative to renewable energy sources.

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We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. By leaning so heavily on nuclear power plants (Ontario gets nearly 60 per cent of its electricity from them, and that’s set to rise), we’ve created a multi-generational problem that will need tending and commitment. Our dependence on nuclear power is essentially a Hail Mary pass into the future.

Edwards contends burying nuclear waste in a DGR amounts to abandoning it, not a conscionable decision. However, he holds out a shard of hope that future generations will be smarter about the stewardship and disposal of nuclear waste.

“They’re going to do a better job than we’re doing and maybe . . . maybe in 100 or 200 years . . . they’ll be able to neutralize it; render it harmless.”

Meanwhile, as we make huge public investments in electric vehicles and otherwise amp up our dependence on electricity, we need to meet our corollary obligations and devote more attention to the nuclear waste we leave behind.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist. cornies@gmail.com

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