An Ontario farm town to vote this fall on whether it wants to house Canada's largest nuclear waste tomb | CBC News (2024)

Colin Butler · CBC News

· Posted: May 01, 2024 7:55 PM EDT | Last Updated: May 2

A bucolic Ontario farm community will decidein an online vote this fall if it wants theirquiet rural town to be the site of a multi-billion-dollarproject — Canada's largest permanent tomb formillions of bundles of spent nuclear fuel.

TheNuclear Waste Management Organization's search for a deep geological repositorystretches back decades, andhas been narrowed down to:

• Teeswater, a town with a population ofabout 5,880, 170 kilometres north of London andpart of themunicipality of South Bruce.
• Ignace, a northwestern Ontario community with a population of about 1,200,some 245kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.

On Wednesday, Teeswater officials published the terms of the deal for voters to decide, in an online referendumonOct.28, if they'd be in favour of being home to the repository.

If thevote is "yes" to buryingused Candu reactor fuel deep below the earth, the town will get hundreds of high-paying jobs and $418 millionin subsidies from Canada's nuclear industry over the course of the project.

If voters say "no," the town still gets $4million.

The referendum's outcome will only matter, of course, if Teeswater is chosen overIgnace— a decision the NWMOexpects to announce by year's end. Earlier this year, the NWMO, which is tasked with finding storage forCanada's nuclear waste, reaffirmedits confidence in the project's safety.

Once the host site is chosen, there will be a regulatory decision-making process,followed by a construction period of about 10 years. The facility is expected to be operational in the early 2040s.The latest NWMO projection, in 2021, estimated the project would cost $26 billion over its175-year life cycle.

Community divided over nuclear repository

Forpeople in Teeswater, theOctober referendumwould bethe culmination of a 12-year debate that has left deep ruptures in the community,between those who see welcoming radioactive waste as a new kind of prosperity and those who see it as just a potential danger.

For instance, according to a March 2021 report from South Bruce's treasurer, the community hadreceived more than $3.2 million from the NWMO since 2012, and the money has been used for everything from St. JohnAmbulance training, to offsetting extra costs of the pandemic and payingthe salaries of municipal employees.

Those against the project have included a citizens' group, Protecting Our Waterways –No Nuclear Waste,whichargues the NWMO's plan to bury the nuclear waste "is untested, unsustainable, and ... unwanted in our community."

"We are not anti-nuclear," the group's website says. "The nuclear industry provides many of our residents with well-paying jobs and is a positive contributor to our local economy. However, South Bruce has already done its part for the industry. Just because the NWMO likes our geology doesn't mean our community wants to store its nuclear waste underneath our geography."

Theproposed600-metre-deep geological repository would seespent nuclear wastecontained behind multiple barriers, including copper casks, bentonite clay, layers of concrete andthe geology itself to keep the waste sealed away.

"We know thatsystem of protection does work and the challenges are notlikely to ever occur that deep underground," said John Luxat, an engineering professor at Hamilton's McMaster Universitywhoholds the senior industrial research chair in nuclear safety analysis.

Luxat said the best way to ensure the waste remains sealed away is to keep it as far as possible from air and water, which will cause the copper containers to oxidize.

The deep vault is nearly three times the 229-metre depthof nearby Lake Huron, far away from water.If penetrated,the layers of concrete and clay surrounding the waste couldcause the copper casks that contain it to rust.

"You need to keep it away from air and water," Luxat said, adding the vault is "for all intents and purposes meant to store the waste forever."

Once the repository is built, the NWMO said, some 30,000 shipments of nuclear waste would begin moving from eight interim storage facilities from Manitoba to New Brunswick to theOntario dump site through some of Canada's most densely populated areas.

Even then, Luxat said, the risk is minimal, noting the transportation of spent nuclear fuel already happens regularly. The rods are moved to cooling ponds where they would rest for approximately 10 years. After that, they'retaken to temporary holding facilities,in either shallow pits or above ground in dense concrete bunkers.

Luxat noted that when nuclear waste is moved anywhere, it's packaged and sealed inside a specially designed container that couldwithstand collisions from large vehicles,such as trains, or being dropped from great heights.

"They've been doing thistransporting the spent fuel totemporary sites fordecades nowand there's never been a
dangerous event."

In some cases, Canada's nuclear waste, has been sitting in temporary storage since the mid-1960s and Luxat said the risk of leaving it where it is, is far greater than finding a permanent place to entomb it.

"It would be a significant increase in risk becausethey wouldbepotentially exposed to much higher levels of moisture," he said, noting both Teeswater and Ignace were chosen because of the "low probability of seismic damage to the rocks."

In order to make the deep geological repository a reality, the nuclear industry still needs the support of nearby Saugeen First Nation, which has yet to make a decision on the project.

When reached by CBC News on Wednesday, Chief Conrad Ritchie said he wouldn't comment until Saugeen's band council had a chance to meet with representatives from nearby Ojibway of the Nawash First Nation on the Bruce Peninsula later this week.

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