Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) announced November 28 that it had chosen the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Township of Ignace in northwest Ontario as the future site for Canada’s Deep Geological Repository (DGR) for the abandonment of all of Canada’s high-level radioactive waste reactor fuel.
The site is north of Lake Superior, 90 miles northeast of Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park and 150 miles north of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
The NWMO’s public announcement does not mention that the “not-for-profit” NWMO is wholly owned by the three radioactive waste-producing utilities in Canada. These NWMO owners profit indirectly from Canada’s willingness to take possession and accept liability for the deadly, long-lived industrial waste material that was profitably produced by private corporations for decades.
The small town of Ignace (population 1,200) has given its consent for NWMO to build a DGR at the Revell Lake area. However, the Indigenous community of Wabigoon First Nation (population 800) has only agreed to study the proposal, announcing on November 18, “The yes vote does not signify approval of the project; rather, it demonstrates the Nation’s willingness to enter the next phase of in-depth environmental and technical assessments to determine safety and site suitability.”
Approval was neither sought from nor given by any of the communities along the 1,615-mile transportation corridor that would be used to ship the reactor fuel from New Brunswick, Quebec, and Southern Ontario over public roads, for half a century or more.
While Laurie Swami, NWMO President and CEO said in the announcement, “This project will solve an environmental issue.” The same press release says that the project has a “175-year timeline.”
The NWMO’s announcement claims, “There is international scientific consensus that a deep geological repository is the safest way to manage used nuclear fuel over the long term.” However, the watchdog group We the Nuclear-Free North (www.wethenuclearfreenorth.ca) reports, “The nuclear industry likes to portray the use of deep geological repositories as an accepted practice, asserting there is an ‘international consensus’ about their use. But that ‘consensus’ reflects agreement among proponents, not the public or independent experts. In fact, there is a list of technical and scientific uncertainties.” (See: https://nonuclear.se/files/rock-solid-a-scientific-review.pdf)
⸺ Thanks to Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and Brennain Lloyd with Northwatch and We The Nuclear Free North, for reporting.
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