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Great Lakes nuke battle in the dumps

“Would you bury poison beside your well?” 

That’s the question Beverly Fernandez, head of Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, asked the audience gathered in Toronto council chambers on October 6. 

Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) plans to permanently bury nuclear waste 680 metres underground just over a kilometre from the shores of Lake Huron puts all of our drinking water at risk, Fernandez says.

All three of the world’s so-called “deep geological repositories,” two in Germany and one in the U.S., have leaked despite assurances that these facilities were infallible. Just last year, New Mexico’s had to be shut down because of a leak that exposed 22 workers to radiation. 

Provincially owned OPG says the dump, planned at the site of the Bruce nuclear power plant in Kincardine, will only store low- and intermediate-level waste, stuff like contaminated mops, waste filters and reactor components. And that storing the waste underwater will “have no impact on the surrounding environment.”

Actually, the joint federal review panel that recommended the feds green-light the facility last spring was a little less decisive about that, concluding the dump will “not likely result in any significant adverse environmental effects.” If any leaks were to occur, the panel noted that it would be diluted by Lake Huron’s 4 trillion cubic metres of water, as well as rainfall.

Is dilution really the solution to pollution when nuclear waste can stick around for 100,000 years? The David Suzuki Foundation’s director general for Ontario and northern Canada, Faisal Moola, doesn’t think so. He says, “We can’t afford to risk one of the world’s largest sources of fresh drinking water.”

So far, 176 Great Lakes communities, states and cities, including Toronto, Chicago and Michigan, have signed resolutions opposing OPG’s plans. Some 87,000 citizens from across the U.S., Canada and 145 countries have signed a petition calling on the federal Enviro Minister Leona Aglukkaq to reject the underground nuke dump. A decision is expected in early December. 

U.S. Congressman Dan Kildee told the City Hall gathering that bipartisan resistance is mounting south of the border “to stop this plan from moving forward.”

He admits temporarily storing the waste above ground at the Bruce power station isn’t an ideal solution, but moving ahead with a permanent facility under a mile from the Great Lakes “represents a more urgent threat. Surely, there must be a better location to permanently store nuclear waste than on the shores of Lake Huron.”

OPG didn’t have to look hard to find a willing host community in Kincardine, which gets $36 million over 30 years for backing the dump. Last year, a provincial ombudsman found Bruce County mayors broke the law by holding closed-door meetings with OPG about the dump, dating back to 2005. 

Ontario Clean Air Alliance’s Angela Bischoff suggests fighting one dump doesn’t go deep enough. She says Ontario needs to stop producing nuclear waste altogether. “We currently have on the Ontario side alone 18 working nuclear reactors. They’re all old, and they all need to be shut down in the next decade.” But the province is planing to refurbish 10 nuclear reactors at Darlington and Bruce, “locking us in for another four or five decades.”

adriav@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation

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