OPG Intends to Double Size of Radioactive Waste Burial on Lake Huron
Over twenty-five environmental groups will ask the federal Joint Review Panel today to suspend the hearings assessing Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) radioactive waste dump proposal until the company clarifies the actual volume and types of radioactive wastes it plans to store at the facility.
The groups say OPG plans to double the amount of long-lived radioactive wastes to be stored in its proposed underground radioactive waste dump under Lake Huron, but failed to reveal this during the seven year-long federal environmental review.
“After participating in the process for six years, it is completely unfair and dishonest of OPG to double the size, add a new category of waste, and increase the radioactive threat of the proposed waste dump under Lake Huron,” said Paula Lombardi, legal counsel for a family living beside the proposed radioactive waste dump.
At a public meeting of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) last month an OPG representative said the company intends to also put longer-lived radioactive wastes from the dismantling of the province’s reactors in the proposed facility. This would equal approximately 130,000 m3 of additional radioactive waste and double the size of the dump. Public consultations have been underway since 2007 on a smaller dump for less radioactive waste.
“This approach amounts to project splitting which is not a permissible way to do Environmental Assessments under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act,” said Theresa McClenaghan, Executive Director and Counsel with the Canadian Environmental Law Association. “This environmental assessment is for the whole life of the project and must include the entire project as reasonably anticipated.”
Ms. McClenaghan will file the formal procedural request on behalf of the organizations on Tuesday afternoon.
Some of the groups requesting the hearings be suspended include: Greenpeace, Northwatch, Huron-Grey-Bruce Citizens Committee on Nuclear Waste, Save our Saugeen Shores, Beyond Nuclear, International Institute of Concern for Public Health, Bruce Peninsula Environmental Group, Algonquin Eco Watch, Sierra Club Canada, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and Bluewater Coalition.
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Securing approval for nuclear waste site won’t be ‘quick or easy process’: First Nations
“If things go south in a hurry, where do our people go? We do not have the luxury of picking up and leaving.”
By John Spears Toronto Star Sep 16 2013
KINCARDINE—First Nations communities near Ontario Power Generation’s proposed nuclear waste disposal facility won’t be rushed into supporting the project, a federal hearing has been told.The company has pledged not to proceed with the massive underground storage facility “until the Saugeen Ojibway Nations (SON) community is supportive of the project.”
But SON leaders told the opening day of hearings into the facility that they’ll insist on what could be a lengthy process. About 150 people showed up Monday for the opening of the hearings.
“The DGR (deep geologic repository) is a forever project,” Chief Randall Kahgee of the SON told the panel.
“If things go south in a hurry, where do our people go? We do not have the luxury of picking up and leaving.”
The SON’s traditional territory includes the Bruce nuclear site. Its people live in two principal communities, one near Southampton, the other near Wiarton.
“Who we are as a people is deeply linked with our homeland,” Kahgee said.
OPG wants to entomb low and intermediate level radioactive waste from all its nuclear stations in storage chambers carved into a limestone formation 680 metres deep. It will be on the site of the Bruce nuclear power station, with the main access shaft 1.2 kilometres from the shore of the lake.
OPG has promised not to proceed “until the SON community is supportive of the project.”
Kahgee told the three-member panel that the SON was never consulted when the huge Bruce nuclear power station was constructed, or when OPG first began storing waste on the site.
He said SON is willing to work toward a solution to the waste storage issue, but the formal brief submitted with his presentation underlines that the process may not be speedy.
“The letter is only the first step on a long road,” the brief warns
“SON and OPG must now build on the commitment to work together on a new model for decision-making in SON territory,” it says, and it cautions: “This will not be a quick or easy process.”
“SON communities do not currently have confidence in OPG’s assessment of the potential impacts and risks of the DGR project.”
The waste would not include used fuel, which is considered “high level” waste. A separate process is under way to pick a site to bury used fuel, which is known as high level waste.
Low-level waste includes items such as clothing worn by workers in radioactive areas, and mops or rags used in areas where there are low levels of radiation. Intermediate-level waste, such as components from reactor cores, can be highly radioactive, requiring shielding in radiation-proof containers for tens of thousands of years.
Laurie Swami, vice president of OPG, noted that low and intermediate waste from all the company’s reactors is currently stored in surface facilities on the Bruce property.
She said surface storage is not a long-term approach, however. The company needs to find a permanent solution for the waste to avoid passing responsibility to future generations, she said.
OPG wants to build a “deep geologic repository” or DGR to hold the waste. The facility will cover about 40 hectares, encompassing 31 storage rooms, each 250 metres long. They’ll be able to handle 200,000 cubic metres of waste – the amount to be generated by the operation of OPG’s current fleet of reactors for their lifetimes.
But if more reactors are built, Swami said, “we are confident that safe expansion of the DGR is possible.”
Swami said that the environmental and health effects of the site are “essentially zero.”
“It is OPG’s conclusion that the DGR project is not likely to result in any significant adverse effects on the environment.” Swami said.
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has also concluded that the project will not likely have any significant impact.
The hearings are scheduled to last four weeks.
The federal panel must approve OPG’s proposal before it can proceed. The panel has commissioned a critique of OPG’s application, which says its analysis is “not credible,” “not defensible,” and “not reliable.”
How Ontario plans to deal with tonnes of nuclear waste: Bury the problem
By SHAWN McCARTHY The Globe and Mail Sep. 12 2013
INVERHURON, ONT. — On a clear day, Marti McFadzean can see the Bruce nuclear plant from her home in this cottage town on the sandy shores of Lake Huron, where she had summered since childhood and has now retired.
Ms. McFadzean was never too concerned about the proximity of a nuclear plant to her family’s tranquil summer retreat, where five generations have gathered since 1928. But this summer, the former school administrator interrupted her retirement to become a full-time NIMBY activist.
She and many of her neighbours along Lake Huron’s eastern shore are campaigning against a $1-billion plan by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to bury low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste in a deep geologic repository (DGR) at the Bruce site, a facility that would be built just two kilometres from her home and only a kilometre from the lake itself.
For nuclear power producers, the Bruce DGR represents part of a long-term answer to a thorny problem that has dogged the industry since its postwar inception: what to do with the radioactive waste that will remain dangerous long after the reactors are gone, in some cases for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, OPG is currently storing low- and intermediate-level waste at ground level at the site, but it wants a permanent solution.
The utility’s disposal plan and a parallel proposal to build a high-level nuclear waste repository are fuelling fears across the region known as “Ontario’s West Coast.” In cottage-friendly towns like Inverhuron, Kincardine, Tiverton and Saugeen Shores, neighbours have taken opposing sides. Lawn signs proclaiming, “No Nuclear Waste Dump” and “Save Our Shores” sprouted like weeds this summer, and at public meetings prominent speakers have declaimed against the risk of contaminating the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water for 40 million people.
“We’re not anti-nuclear,” Ms. McFadzean said in interview over coffee at Inverhuron’s Cottage Groceries & Restaurant. “We’re just saying: Do it right. If you bury the waste, it is going to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ but remain there for generations.”
Opposition has also sprung up on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes. Towns in Ohio have passed resolutions against the plan, while Michigan’s State Senate unanimously endorsed a motion opposing a nuclear waste repository on the shores of the lake it shares with Canada. State Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood, who spearheaded the opposition there, plans to speak against it at hearings in Ontario.
Critics like Ms. McFadzean are gearing up for the hearings, which begin Monday in Kincardine, after which a federal review panel will make its recommendation. The panel will assess whether it is safe to bury as much as 200,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste some 680 metres under ground, in limestone that OPG scientists say is highly impermeable and has not moved in a million years. For the intermediate-level waste – a small fraction of the total – it will take 100,000 years for the radioactivity to break down to safe levels.
As the provincially owned OPG pursues its site for low- and intermediate-level waste, a federally appointed body is slowly proceeding with plans to build a permanent underground storage site for high-level waste – mainly the spent fuel rods that are now stored in pools at each reactor site. Bruce County municipalities such as Saugeen Shores, as well as others around the country, are vying for the right to host that site – to the anger of some residents.
Saugeen Shores resident Beverly Fernandez leads a protest group called Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, which paid for a billboard this summer on Toronto’s busy Queen Elizabeth Way, decrying the plan to bury nuclear waste near the Great Lakes as a “bad idea.”
She has worked tirelessly against the DGR – devoting, in her own words, “seven days a week, every waking hour and many sleepless nights.” At a recent town hall at Wayne State University in Detroit, she described the OPG proposal in apocalyptic terms. “To permit the burial of radioactive nuclear waste right beside the Great Lakes is a crime against humanity, a crime against the Earth and a crime against future generations,” she said to a standing ovation.
In an interview, she complained that OPG never looked for an alternative site and short-circuited the process by focusing only on the Bruce site. She also noted that some international sites have had water problems.
OPG insists the repository will be secure and will be monitored for up to 300 years. “We’ve been extremely conservative in our approach,” spokesman Scott Berry said during a visit to the Bruce site. “We have to assure ourselves, the public and the regulator of the safe handling and storage of the waste.”
Currently, OPG stores all low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste generated by the province’s 20 reactors at the Western Waste Management Facility, situated at the Bruce site.
As much as 50 per cent of the material that would be buried in the DGR over the next 40 years is already at the site. Some 80 per cent of the material is low-level waste – things such as mop heads and protective clothing – and is kept in shed-like buildings above ground. The more dangerous items – resins, filters and equipment from retooled reactors – are entombed in steel-and-concrete vaults just beneath the surface.
Initially, OPG looked at three options for dealing with the waste: surface storage with greater processing, the use of concrete vaults just below ground level and, finally, deep burial. It determined that all three were technically feasible and safe after a 2004 report from consultants Golder Associates. OPG opted for the deep storage after the town of Kincardine stated its preference for the DGR.
While several protest groups have sprung up, the utility has the support of the local municipal governments, which have been receiving as much as $650,000 a year from OPG for agreeing to host it.
Mike Smith is mayor of Saugeen Shores. He is also a former worker at the Bruce plant, which is owned by Cameco and TransCanada Corp. and some Ontario pension funds and unions.
“We have 2,000 people that work out there [at Bruce], and I hear it from both sides,” Mr. Smith said in an interview at his office. Despite complaints that the decision is set in stone, he insisted the municipality is still deciding whether to be an official candidate for the high-level waste site being planned by the federally appointed Nuclear Waste Management Organization.
“The thing that escapes people with the Kincardine [OPG] project is that the waste is all here now and it’s going to continue to come here so long as nuclear plants operate in Ontario,” he said. “So if you’re opposed to it, does that mean you’re happy with the way things are now?”Mr. Smith said the DGR – and the high-level waste repository, should it be approved – would bring significant employment and financial benefits to an area that has little industry beyond the nuclear plant.OPG has spent years drilling deep into the dense limestone, formed some 450 million years ago, that lies 650 metres below the Bruce site. In comparison, Lake Huron has a maximum depth of 200 metres.
During that exploration process, the scientists recommended locating the repository deeper than initially planned to take advantage of the seismically quiet, impermeable Cobourg limestone formation, said the project’s chief geophysicist, Mark Jensen.“It’s good fortune that the best geology lies under the Bruce plant,” Dr. Jensen said.But in a submission to the panel,
University of Alberta professor Peter Duinker slammed the environmental impact study done by OPG as “not credible” and “not reliable,” though he offered no opinion on the project itself.
Indeed, a staff report from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission – which is jointly responsible for the panel that must approve the project – concludes that OPG’s plan poses little risk to the public. “The overall safety case for the DGR is acceptable,” says the CNSC report, which was filed with the review panel this week.
But critics are skeptical about the scientists’ assurances and worry about biased regulators.CNSC president Michael Binder met in 2009 with pro-development mayors in the region. Notes taken of the meeting by a municipal employee, obtained this year by opponents via a request under the Access to Information Act, describe Dr. Binder as telling the mayors that he next hopes to see them at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the DGR.
“The CNSC seemed to think its role was to promote the project and make people feel good and safe about it,” said Pat Gibbons, a retiree in Saugeen Shores who worries that approval of the DGR project would set the stage for the more dangerous high-level waste site to be located in the town.
CNSC spokesman Aurèle Gervais said Dr. Binder would not comment on the alleged statement but added that the commission president attended the meeting at the invitation of the mayors and “presented the science-based regulatory requirements for the project.” Mr. Gervais said Dr. Binder is not a member of the review panel and will not participate in the decision.
For the critics, relations between the industry, the municipal officials and the regulators have been far too cozy. But they remain hopeful that the swell of opposition, rippling across the water to towns on the U.S. side, will keep the waste site from being located anywhere near their backyards or indeed in the Great Lakes watershed.
CTV News Hearing underway for proposed nuclear waste facility in Kincardine
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