Dear Editor,
With all the recent announcements around the Deep Geological Repository (DGR) for spent nuclear fuel, which is being proposed to be built in South Bruce, a lot of readers may be unclear as to whether and why we need a DGR in Canada. Let me bring some clarity to this issue, for those who may be rightly confused.
First of all, Canada (especially Ontario) has a lot of spent fuel. After all, we’ve been commercially producing electricity from our CANDU reactors since 1968, when Bruce County’s Douglas Point reactor went online. Currently, Ontario receives about 60 per cent of all its electricity from its five nuclear stations, which produce almost no greenhouse gas. After being removed from the reactors, spent fuel is kept under water in the plant, during which time it naturally releases most of its radiation, which is safely absorbed by a few meters of water. It is then transferred to very large, very robust “dry storage containers”, which are kept in a special warehouse on each nuclear site. The dry storage facilities at Bruce, Pickering and Darlington are all operated by Ontario Power Generation. They offer occasional tours of the facilities, which are extremely clean and well-maintained.
Now, a warehouse within a kilometer of the Great Lakes is a good place to store the waste for the time being. It is maintained by a strong, successful company, under the watchful eye of a strong national regulator. The problem is that spent fuel remains toxic (at levels that decrease over time) for thousands of years, and who can predict what will happen in the next few thousand years? Companies typically last tens of years, and historically, even the strongest of nations have only stayed in place for a few centuries. In a DGR, the waste will be safely and permanently sealed in chambers in the bedrock, where no human activity is required to keep it safely isolated from people.
I’m often asked “What about recycling the fuel?” Can’t we re-use that spent fuel to power more nuclear reactors? The answer is a definitive “yes”, but that doesn’t negate the need for a DGR. France, which receives some 72% of its electricity from its nuclear fleet, has been recycling spent fuel to create new fuel for its reactors for a number of years. This reduces France’s reliance on uranium imports, and reduces the amount of high-level nuclear waste it produces. But guess what? Even though some of the waste can be turned back into fuel, the rest is still waste, and when the recycled fuel comes out of the reactor, it also becomes waste. So France still has lots of residual high-level nuclear waste. And what are they doing with it? Building a DGR, just like Canada is planning to do.
So the plan for the South Bruce DGR not only presents a significant economic opportunity for our area. It also solves a significant energy infrastructure problem for Canada.
Tony Zettel
RR5 Mildmay
