More than a dozen towns are thinking about letting Canada bury its high-level radioactive waste in their backyards. Why? Tom Spears investigates
Who would want a pile of used fuel from nuclear reactors that will be radioactive for millennia? William Elliott does. Badly enough to fight for it.
The boss at the economic development corporation serving the Elliot Lake region sees the upside of something that usually provokes gut reactions of not-in-my-backyard.
"There's the obvious economic impact of 700 to 1,000 permanent fulltime jobs (and) $16 billion to $24 billion of direct investment," he says. "It's going to be one of the biggest economic development projects in Canadian history."
Put that way, maybe it's not so hard to see why Elliot Lake and its neighbours are campaigning to become the place where Canada buries all our high-level radioactive waste.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization is looking for a site to sink thousands of tonnes of used reactor fuel forever, replacing the temporary storage that Canada has used for 60 years. This concept, called deep geological disposal, offers major economic development, and people in Elliot Lake and nearby Blind River are listening.
So are hard-hit towns farther west such as Wawa and Hornepayne, where the regional population has fallen since the early 1990s from 15,000 to less than 12,000. The same all the way to Pinehouse, Sask. Everyone wants the hundreds of permanent jobs that a waste site would bring.
Wherever it ends up, "it's going to have a net positive impact on the whole region," says Elliot Lake Mayor Rick Hamilton.
His city, a former uranium mining town whose mines have all shut down, is halfway between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. The population has fallen from 14,000 to 11,500, and the main industry today is retirement living.
A massive project to bury used uranium half a kilometre down in the Canadian Shield could change that.
"You talk about transformational!" says Elliott.
And he means it's transformational in a good way.
"If you know any of the Elliot Lake history, we mined uranium. We were the uranium capital of the world."
Having spent decades digging uranium out of the ground, the workers of Elliot Lake aren't bothered so far by the prospect of putting it back underground.
One resident posting comments on the Elliot Lake Standard's website says his home's value rises a little with each step toward a waste site.
"If we finally win this sweepstake, held among so few competitors," it will bring high-paying jobs for engineers and doctors, he wrote. "You want to see downtown revitalization? Get out of the way."
Opposition does exist, but so far there isn't the type of massive protest that would explode if it was proposed to dump the waste in Ottawa.
"People are inquisitive, they want to know what it's all about, which is a good thing," says Mayor Hamilton, a former uranium mine worker.
"People are very comfortable that it's a very regulated industry, that the people who work in the industry are very conscientious, and there are real opportunities," adds Elliott.
"Economically there's a huge potential positive impact."
Elliott says there's also a moral view that the town that grew from uranium should take care of it.
The boss at the economic development corporation serving the Elliot Lake region sees the upside of something that usually provokes gut reactions of not-in-my-backyard.
"There's the obvious economic impact of 700 to 1,000 permanent fulltime jobs (and) $16 billion to $24 billion of direct investment," he says. "It's going to be one of the biggest economic development projects in Canadian history."
Put that way, maybe it's not so hard to see why Elliot Lake and its neighbours are campaigning to become the place where Canada buries all our high-level radioactive waste.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization is looking for a site to sink thousands of tonnes of used reactor fuel forever, replacing the temporary storage that Canada has used for 60 years. This concept, called deep geological disposal, offers major economic development, and people in Elliot Lake and nearby Blind River are listening.
So are hard-hit towns farther west such as Wawa and Hornepayne, where the regional population has fallen since the early 1990s from 15,000 to less than 12,000. The same all the way to Pinehouse, Sask. Everyone wants the hundreds of permanent jobs that a waste site would bring.
Wherever it ends up, "it's going to have a net positive impact on the whole region," says Elliot Lake Mayor Rick Hamilton.
His city, a former uranium mining town whose mines have all shut down, is halfway between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. The population has fallen from 14,000 to 11,500, and the main industry today is retirement living.
A massive project to bury used uranium half a kilometre down in the Canadian Shield could change that.
"You talk about transformational!" says Elliott.
And he means it's transformational in a good way.
"If you know any of the Elliot Lake history, we mined uranium. We were the uranium capital of the world."
Having spent decades digging uranium out of the ground, the workers of Elliot Lake aren't bothered so far by the prospect of putting it back underground.
One resident posting comments on the Elliot Lake Standard's website says his home's value rises a little with each step toward a waste site.
"If we finally win this sweepstake, held among so few competitors," it will bring high-paying jobs for engineers and doctors, he wrote. "You want to see downtown revitalization? Get out of the way."
Opposition does exist, but so far there isn't the type of massive protest that would explode if it was proposed to dump the waste in Ottawa.
"People are inquisitive, they want to know what it's all about, which is a good thing," says Mayor Hamilton, a former uranium mine worker.
"People are very comfortable that it's a very regulated industry, that the people who work in the industry are very conscientious, and there are real opportunities," adds Elliott.
"Economically there's a huge potential positive impact."
Elliott says there's also a moral view that the town that grew from uranium should take care of it.
"The people who say, geez, why don't we just wait (and) leave it in temporary storage for 50 years - philosophically I don't agree with that," he says. "The temporary facilities are temporary."
Fuel today sits for about 10 years under water, until it cools enough to be packed in containers above ground. All this storage is at Canada's five nuclear plants - one reactor in each of New Brunswick and Quebec, and 20 more in Ontario at Darlington, Pickering, and near Kincardine.
Vying for the waste - or at least considering it - are nine towns in Northern Ontario (Ignace, Ear Falls, Wawa, Township of the North Shore, Elliot Lake, Hornepayne, Nipigon, Schreiber, and Saugeen Shores) and three in Saskatchewan (Pinehouse, English River First Nation, and Creighton).
For the first time, there are also two towns in southwestern Ontario.
Brockton, which takes in the former town of Walkerton, says it wants to "learn more" about possibly hosting the disposal site.
Nearby Saugeen Shores, on Lake Huron, has gone a step farther. It has asked for a screening of its geology, to see whether it is suitable.
The town shows up on many maps as Port Elgin and Southampton; these towns and one township amalgamated under the new name, and the area sits just north of the Bruce Nuclear Power Development and its eight reactors.
Many Saugeen Shores residents work at the Bruce plants.
Mayor Mike Smith cautions that the town is just at the start of a potentially long journey: "The first step is (to) learn more about the process." Still, "there's some interest in seeing whether we potentially could be a site.
"We've got about 40 per cent of the workers from the present (Bruce) nuclear site living in our community, so I think that's where the interest came from," he says.
Councillors toured the site where Bruce waste is temporarily stored last month, and a committee wants the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to screen the local geology.
"We haven't made decisions other than that, to this point," Smith says.
He also says other communities in the region, marketed to tourists for the sandy beaches of Lake Huron, are privately showing interest.
Saugeen Shores is closely watching geological research done in neighbouring Kincardine, which wants to build an underground waste site for much lower-level radioactive materials, such as mildly contaminated workers' clothing and tools.
Kincardine's testing shows layers of shale and limestone some 450 million years old which are stable and not fractured. The waste would go 680 metres below the surface.
The chemistry of water pumped from test holes shows it moves less than one metre in 1,000 years, and never really flows in a constant direction. It's much saltier than today's oceans, the remnant of a sea from hundreds of millions of years ago that is separated from the shallower groundwater that people drink.
"That's the type of geology they're looking for worldwide for geological depositories," Smith says. "Even if you had a worst-case scenario and a failure (of the storage) and it starts to travel, by the time it would reach the surface it would be benign."
Fuel today sits for about 10 years under water, until it cools enough to be packed in containers above ground. All this storage is at Canada's five nuclear plants - one reactor in each of New Brunswick and Quebec, and 20 more in Ontario at Darlington, Pickering, and near Kincardine.
Vying for the waste - or at least considering it - are nine towns in Northern Ontario (Ignace, Ear Falls, Wawa, Township of the North Shore, Elliot Lake, Hornepayne, Nipigon, Schreiber, and Saugeen Shores) and three in Saskatchewan (Pinehouse, English River First Nation, and Creighton).
For the first time, there are also two towns in southwestern Ontario.
Brockton, which takes in the former town of Walkerton, says it wants to "learn more" about possibly hosting the disposal site.
Nearby Saugeen Shores, on Lake Huron, has gone a step farther. It has asked for a screening of its geology, to see whether it is suitable.
The town shows up on many maps as Port Elgin and Southampton; these towns and one township amalgamated under the new name, and the area sits just north of the Bruce Nuclear Power Development and its eight reactors.
Many Saugeen Shores residents work at the Bruce plants.
Mayor Mike Smith cautions that the town is just at the start of a potentially long journey: "The first step is (to) learn more about the process." Still, "there's some interest in seeing whether we potentially could be a site.
"We've got about 40 per cent of the workers from the present (Bruce) nuclear site living in our community, so I think that's where the interest came from," he says.
Councillors toured the site where Bruce waste is temporarily stored last month, and a committee wants the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to screen the local geology.
"We haven't made decisions other than that, to this point," Smith says.
He also says other communities in the region, marketed to tourists for the sandy beaches of Lake Huron, are privately showing interest.
Saugeen Shores is closely watching geological research done in neighbouring Kincardine, which wants to build an underground waste site for much lower-level radioactive materials, such as mildly contaminated workers' clothing and tools.
Kincardine's testing shows layers of shale and limestone some 450 million years old which are stable and not fractured. The waste would go 680 metres below the surface.
The chemistry of water pumped from test holes shows it moves less than one metre in 1,000 years, and never really flows in a constant direction. It's much saltier than today's oceans, the remnant of a sea from hundreds of millions of years ago that is separated from the shallower groundwater that people drink.
"That's the type of geology they're looking for worldwide for geological depositories," Smith says. "Even if you had a worst-case scenario and a failure (of the storage) and it starts to travel, by the time it would reach the surface it would be benign."
There was never uranium mining in this region, but there is other mining: The world's largest underground salt mine is a 45-minute drive south, in Goderich. Its cavernous tunnels stretch five kilometres under Lake Huron, sealed from the lake overhead by the same rock formations that exist close to the Bruce nuclear plant.
Northeast of Lake Superior, the prospect of jobs also has huge importance.
Linda Nowicki, the mayor of Wawa, watched her town's population fall from 5,000 to about 2,900 through declines in tourism and forestry, and provincial taxes cutting into mining exploration.
Wawa has decided to learn more about the waste project, without committing beyond that.
"We'd be crazy not to," says Nowicki. For one thing, the waste will travel past Wawa anyway on its trip to Hornepayne, 100 kilometres north, if Hornepayne wins the waste. It's in the running.
"There is some very strong opposition from a fairly decent-sized group," she notes. She predicts they might come around if they studied the proposal.
Vanessa Moynihan is a fourth-year English and history student who hopes to return to her native Wawa and teach high school.
"I'm a northern girl," she says.
She started a Facebook page to rally opposition and is also circulating a petition. She says between 700 and 800 supporters have signed.
"We (in Wawa) are known for our natural resources and our beauty and I think nuclear waste kind of contradicts that," she says.
And she worries about the future. "Nuclear waste hasn't been around long enough to know how it's going to be contained 100, 1,000 or 100,000 years from now.
"It's not clear enough. There are too many what-ifs. We don't want to be a guinea pig."
As for the jobs and money, she suggests most of the spending will go to engineers, scientists and contractors "from down south," not to the townspeople. "Nobody in our town has that kind of expertise."
Town officials, she adds, "are so blinded by money that they're not looking at the whole picture."
Meanwhile, back in Elliot Lake, William Elliott is adding up reasons why his home should be at least a finalist. There's the existing housing stock, the hospital, the airport, the long experience with uranium.
Some other town may win the right to bury high-level radioactive waste, but it will have a fight on its hands first.
Northeast of Lake Superior, the prospect of jobs also has huge importance.
Linda Nowicki, the mayor of Wawa, watched her town's population fall from 5,000 to about 2,900 through declines in tourism and forestry, and provincial taxes cutting into mining exploration.
Wawa has decided to learn more about the waste project, without committing beyond that.
"We'd be crazy not to," says Nowicki. For one thing, the waste will travel past Wawa anyway on its trip to Hornepayne, 100 kilometres north, if Hornepayne wins the waste. It's in the running.
"There is some very strong opposition from a fairly decent-sized group," she notes. She predicts they might come around if they studied the proposal.
Vanessa Moynihan is a fourth-year English and history student who hopes to return to her native Wawa and teach high school.
"I'm a northern girl," she says.
She started a Facebook page to rally opposition and is also circulating a petition. She says between 700 and 800 supporters have signed.
"We (in Wawa) are known for our natural resources and our beauty and I think nuclear waste kind of contradicts that," she says.
And she worries about the future. "Nuclear waste hasn't been around long enough to know how it's going to be contained 100, 1,000 or 100,000 years from now.
"It's not clear enough. There are too many what-ifs. We don't want to be a guinea pig."
As for the jobs and money, she suggests most of the spending will go to engineers, scientists and contractors "from down south," not to the townspeople. "Nobody in our town has that kind of expertise."
Town officials, she adds, "are so blinded by money that they're not looking at the whole picture."
Meanwhile, back in Elliot Lake, William Elliott is adding up reasons why his home should be at least a finalist. There's the existing housing stock, the hospital, the airport, the long experience with uranium.
Some other town may win the right to bury high-level radioactive waste, but it will have a fight on its hands first.
Origin
Source: Ottawa Citizen
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