Canada’s nuclear waste buried deep underground
Canada’s nuclear waste to be buried in deep underground repository
Canada's nuclear industry is generating enormous amounts of waste that will remain radioactive for centuries to come. As Eric Sorensen reports, plans are underway to store that used fuel in a repository deep underground, but the plan is not without controversy.
Canada has been at the forefront of nuclear energy for almost 80 years. Canadian uranium and Canadian researchers were central to the U.S. development of nuclear weapons in the Second World War.
The first test reactor was built at Chalk River, Ont., giving this country a head start in developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes after the war. Ottawa created a Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., and we soon emerged as a leading nuclear nation, building Candu reactors for electricity in this country, and selling Candu technology to several countries around the world.
Of the three major nuclear plants located in Ontario, Bruce Power near Lake Huron is the largest.
The province of Ontario became one of the most nuclearized jurisdictions in the world. Three major nuclear plants were built at Pickering and Darlington on Lake Ontario, and the biggest one in Bruce County on Lake Huron. Today, nuclear power accounts for 60 per cent of the electricity in the province.
From day one, there has been a current of opposition to nuclear power, and like an electrical surge, criticism has spiked at times – during cost overruns in the province, and in the aftermath of disasters abroad. The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania occurred just as a federal election campaign was getting underway in Canada in the spring of 1979.
Then-leader of the New Democratic Party Ed Broadbent called for a moratorium on expanding nuclear power in Canada. The opposition leader, Joe Clark, said he would have a committee of Parliament look into all aspects of nuclear power.
The immediate danger from Three Mile Island would pass and so did the political debate. Much the same happened after Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima, Japan in 2011. The disasters were horrific and chilling, but the loud debate over nuclear energy eventually receded.
Decades into the nuclear era the world has suffered periodic nuclear catastrophes, but it has also been left with a legacy of relatively safe use of nuclear energy.
In fact, the fear that may have existed near nuclear plants when they were first built, has largely been replaced by confidence in the safety of nuclear technology.
“It’s been here for 50 years, and it’s a part of life,” the mayor of Kincardine, Ont., Anne Eadie, told Global News.
Kincardine sits next to the Bruce Power facility. About one-third of the plant’s 4,200 workers live in Kincardine.
“We are quite, quite comfortable. I would think there is more risk going on our roads to work than actually working at a nuclear power plant,” said Eadie.
While the nuclear creating heat and electricity has been well contained in reactors, ceramic pellets and fuel bundles, we have been left with big a problem that everyone saw coming: the hazard posed by nuclear waste.
Used nuclear fuel from the Bruce Power plant near Lake Huron, Ont. is stored in massive containers on site.
Nick Vyfschaft / Global NEws
At the Bruce plant, low and intermediate level wastes are accumulating. Low-level includes worker clothing and tools. Typically, they could be radioactive for 100 years. Intermediate-level waste is described as resins, filters and used reactor components that could be a hazard for 100,000 years.
Ontario Power Generation has slowly made headway for a plan to bury this waste in a deep underground repository next to the Bruce plant. Much of it now sits in large tanks with row upon row of cement lids poking above the surface.of the ground.
Fred Kuntz, wearing an OPG hard hat, gazed over the containers: “This is all safe storage for now, but it’s not really the solution for thousands of years. The lasting solution is disposal in a deep geologic repository.”
He pointed to a stand of trees. “The DGR would be built here.”
Some think that’s a terrible idea. The repository could leak, it could be attacked, and the location on the Bruce site is barely a kilometer from Lake Huron, which has opponents on both sides of the Great Lakes up in arms.
“There isn’t a magic bullet. It’s not like we can put it out of sight and we’ve solved the problem.” said Theresa McClenaghan of the Canadian Environamental Law Association.
She suggests humans have little concept of how long 100,000 years is. She questions whether the facility would last and whether we can be sure we’ll be able to communicate the dangers to some future civilization.
OPG says the proximity to Lake Huron is much more distant when you plunge the waste into rock more than half a kilometer below the surface. That’s more than three times deeper than the depth of the lake in sedimentary rock that is 450 million years old.
The proposed deep geological repository for nuclear waste will be 680 metres below the surface more than three times deeper than the depth of Lake Huron.
Fred Kuntz of OPG said, “The rock at 680 metres deep is impermeable. It’s dry. It’s strong. The geology at that depth below the site has been isolated from any groundwater or the lake for hundreds of millions of years.”
The deep geological repository was approved by an environmental review panel in 2015, but both the Harper and Trudeau governments have put off giving the final go ahead. It now appears to hinge on the approval by indigenous people in the region.
Nick Vyfschaft / Global News