Canada is one step closer to burying nuclear waste in northwestern Ontario
Nuclear waste from across Canada could be sent to Ignace, Ont., northwest of Lake Superior, pending environmental approvals
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Great article. The site selection process seems pretty ethical. For me, burying nuclear waste has a sci-fi feel to it.
For the repository to be built, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization will have to embark on what Wabigoon Lake describes as “the largest and most strenuous impact assessment in Canadian history” to ensure the project poses minimal human and environmental harm.
A big concern here is ground water. If a tectonic plate movement damages the underground storage, the waste could contaminate ground water and it would be pretty much impossible to clean it up. One of the hardest challenges in my opinion of nuclear waste storage is the generational responsibility to keep it stored safely, although you could argue the same responsibility exists for landfills already.
I'd assume that "geologically stable" was one of the requirements when they first made a list of potential locations.
Fortunately, all of the heavy-water CANDU reactors currently in commercial service in Ontario are fueled by unenriched uranium, so the worst possible outcome shouldn't result in much more contamination being released into the environment than we would see with a natural uranium deposit of comparable size nearby. Which isn't nothing, but the result would be a smallish statistical increase in cancers, not people dropping dead from Acute Radiation Syndrome. Many industrial sites do more damage and are less scrutinized, but we get all weird about radiation the moment the word "nuclear" comes up, and have a hard time putting the risks in perspective.
A couple of issues with that. For one thing, the uranium coming out of the CANDU reactors has been purified, unlike uranium ore which is mixed in with huge amounts of stone and other materials and it's natural state.
Also, as I understand it the reactors convert about 1% of the uranium into plutonium, which is much more toxic and emits more radiation.
So while there may not be as great a danger as some people fear, there is definitely more than an equivalent amount of natural uranium.
These aren't bins of glowing green ooze like in the cartoons. Most waste products are solid and are stored in heavy duty, shielded bins. Kyle Hill on YouTube created a really good video that demonstrated walking through a storage facility and literally hugging one of the bins. His rad meter was perfectly normal the whole time. He also examines other risks as well as the risks of other methods of power generation.
Video for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Here's the one where he hugs the waste casks: