By Lindsay Potter

After 10 years, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) still seeks a “willing” host for the latest planned deep geological repository (DGR), a vault designed to hold over 5.5 million used reactor fuel bundles 2,200 feet below ground for thousands of years. Though there are no DGRs operating currently, the first has been constructed in Finland and potential sites are being surveyed in Switzerland. The NWMO is dangling “job creation” and short-term economic stimulus as boons of the $24 billion project, but environmental groups, concerned residents, and activists decry the threat to watersheds and local health.

The argument over the DGR’s viability is déjà vu for opponents of the similar Ontario Power Generation project, which sought approval for 16 years before scrapping plans in June 2020, capitulating to scientists, community and political leaders, and an overwhelming dissenting vote by the Saugeen Ojibway First Nation.

The newly proposed DGR site in the South Bruce community of 6,000 sits below 1,500 acres of farmland, 25 miles from Lake Huron and 30 miles inland from the Bruce Nuclear Station, where radioactive waste is currently stored in aboveground casks on the lake’s shore. Ignace, the other potential host, is a town of 1,200 in northwestern Ontario roughly 150 miles from Lake Superior on Indigenous treaty land.
The South Bruce community is divided between those against the DGR, largely lead by the group Protect our Waters (POW), and those in the self-titled “willing-to-listen” camp who tow the NWMO’s line that radioactive waste is safe and skeptics are fear-mongers. The latter want to delay a decision in order to learn more about the DGR, contradicting the more than 1,700 signatories to POW’s petition demanding a 2022 referendum. The campaign to persuade local residents features speakers selected by the NWMO who overwhelmingly find DGR and nuclear to be safe “best-practices.” Despite October’s local election of a slate of relatively pro-DGR candidates, including mayor Mark Goetz, there is bi-partisan support for holding a binding community referendum on the question. However, many Canadians and experts stipulate that leaving the decision up to a single provincial township puts tens of millions who rely on the lake for drinking water and southern Ontario for agricultural products at risk without consent, not to mention fails to consider the dangers posed by moving this waste across Canada to its chosen resting spot.

Indigenous activist and author Tanya Talaga describes Ignace-area tribal chiefs’ “vehement opposition” to hosting the DGR on the traditional territories of Treaty 9, Treaty 3, and the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850, on land near the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, in an area also home to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) which represents 49 First Nations in northern Ontario close to the Arctic Watershed. “The NWMO appears to consider ‘agreement’ … to mean a decision made by the few while ignoring the many,” Talaga writes, confirming a “complete lack of consent” among NAN leaders. NAN Grand Chief Derek Fox said “if I have to be the one there, getting hauled away to jail … I will be there to make sure this waste does not enter into our territory.” The NAN chiefs collectively agreed their nations will resort to any means necessary and intend to protest and take legal action. A DGR in Ignace would violate Article 29 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canadian Parliamentarians adopted in 2021, though Ontario refuses to enact matching provincial legislation.

For now, the Canadian nuclear industry seems determined to park its accumulated radioactive waste on the shores of the Great Lakes without regard for redundancies. It is hard to imagine how advocates of nuclear energy can consider this clean or green when the global failure to determine a safe way to store the constantly accumulating waste continues to prove unresolved.

— Bayshore Broadcasting, Oct. 24; London Free Press, Oct. 23; Midwestern Newspapers, Oct. 19; CTV News, Oct. 8; Globe and Mail, Aug. 11, 2022

By Lindsay Potter

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), in Carlsbad, New Mexico, opened in 1999 as the only long-term storage facility designed to entomb radioactive nuclear weapons waste for 10,000 years in ancient salt bed caverns excavated 2,000 feet below ground. However, in February 2014, an improperly packed drum self-heated to 1,600 degrees and exploded, spewing uranium, plutonium, and americium throughout 30,000 cubic meters and into the ventilation shaft, which failed to contain the poison air. The calamity caused a three-year shutdown, left at least 22 workers internally exposed to plutonium radiation, and potentially exposed another 140 people working on the surface. The lack of oversight cost tax-payers $2 billion in clean-up and another $73 million in fines the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) levied on the Department of Energy (DOE) — though the money went to improve infrastructure in and around WIPP rather than to local constituents affected by the release. Nuclear Waste Partners (NWP), the DOE’s contractor running the site, was docked a mere $1 million off its multi-million dollar annual incentive, paid by the federal government above the cost of operating the site. WIPP receives shipments of transuranic waste from 22 locations around the country, mostly plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools, and equipment from Cold-war era weapons production. However, the DOE is considering expanding WIPP’s capacity, operations, and timeline to include storage of private commercial nuclear wastes and surplus plutonium.

WIPP’s re-opening was plagued with mishaps — including releases of contaminated air, roof collapses, and dozens of permit violations — but resulted in no penalties. Regardless, the EPA deemed WIPP compliant in July 2017, and the DOE promised a $2 million reopening bonus, dangling another $2.1 million for meeting performance milestones. The facility resumed full operations in 2021. In October, Panel 7, a radioactively contaminated work space sitting open since 2014, was filled and sealed with a 100-foot thick layer of salt sandwiched between two steel bulkheads. In November, workers loaded the first barrels, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, into Panel 8, the final-permitted panel.

Poor Performance, Perpetual Problems

Despite precedent, on February 26, 2021, improperly packed pyrophoric materials caused a waste drum to spark and, throughout 2022, WIPP faced a slew of further accidents, failures to comply, and unanticipated shutdowns, rendering the number of received shipments nearly fifty percent short of productivity goals.

In August, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was forced to stop shipments to WIPP for two months while the NMED investigated issues at the waste handling bay, including several containers from INL with radioactive surface substances or elevated internal radioactivity, some of which were sent back to Idaho.

Multiple unplanned maintenance issues stalled work, including a September shutdown to assess the waste hoist’s brake pads. However, while the hoist was not operating, NWP changed specifications for the equipment, and work resumed days later.

On October 10, WIPP’s air monitors tripped. Tests found radon on air filters from radium-226, released by decaying uranium, likely from gas vented from containers as waste breaks down. Radon gas is the greatest cause of lung cancer among non-smokers according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Two months earlier, on August 9, NMED logged a shipment from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) missing vent filters necessary to contain particulate matter.

Sixty More Years of Waste Production

The DOE applied to renew its 10-year permit with requests to add two new panels and remove WIPP’s 2024 closure date, leaving its operational timeline open-ended. While the NMED reviews the application, Santa Fe locals are pushing back against a new plan to bury surplus plutonium at WIPP. The proposal would send plutonium across the country, some 1,500 miles each way, from LANL to the Savannah River Site to be diluted and then back for burial at WIPP.

Yet the DOE digs deeper to find further sources of waste for WIPP’s coffers. The Government Accountability Office reported on September 29 that WIPP is the “preferred alternative” dumping ground for “greater than Class C (GTCC)” waste — “commercial low-level nuclear waste from decommissioned reactors or unused medical or industrial equipment” (Carlsbad Current-Argus). Projections through 2083 estimate the DOE will accumulate 12,000 cubic meters of this and other “GTCC-like” wastes, neither of which has a current legal pathway for disposal. The DOE may “assume responsibility” for radioactive waste generated by private companies and use taxpayer money to bury it deep in the salt caverns, so the commercial nuclear industry can continue to rake in profits without concern for how to handle its legacy of contamination. Ultimately, the DOE is awaiting approval by Congress as federal law may not allow government custody of the waste.

These new projects could drive WIPP operations indefinitely, with the facility presently under half its statutory 6.2 million cubic foot capacity. However, the nine new storage panels needed to hold this quantity would require additional permitting by the NMED.

— Associated Press, Nov. 26; Carlsbad Current-Argus, Nov. 2, Oct. 25, Oct. 24, Oct. 14, and Oct. 13, 2022