To the editor,
I sincerely thank you for your services to the general public.
Thank you to everyone who has expressed their concerns regarding the deep geological repository (DGR) site proposed for highly radioactive nuclear waste disposal.
Nuclear waste, and particularly the highly radioactive nuclear waste, that every utility operating one or more nuclear reactors has to manage may have started as being a local problem, but over time it has become quite a serious global environmental issue.
We all need to realize and accept that harmful radioactivity leaking into the environment is not just a local issue, but a global one. We have already become aware of this fact not only through the well-publicized incident sites such as the Three Mile Island in the USA (1979), Chernobyl in the present day Ukraine (1986) and Fukushima in Japan (2011), but also through other sites such as the Hanford site in the USA where the leakage from highly radioactive waste containers has already been detected in the Columbia River, and the Irish Sea where the waste from the British nuclear processing plant is directly dumped into the sea, among many others.
The simple question here is, do Ontario residents want to deal with such scenarios within the Great Lakes Basin?
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created by the United Nations Assembly to observe and ensure the safe operation of a variety of nuclear facilities globally. Among other functions, IAEA has been re-sponsible for making sure that the waste generated by such facilities is properly stored and its safety is monitored indefinitely to ensure that it does not cause any major harm to the environment. Since the beginning, the IAEA has been and still is trying to prevent potential miscalculations, especially in regards to the storage of highly radioactive waste in different member countries. The IAEA member countries are apparently sharing some information. However, the experts in every country that uses nuclear energy, who are in charge of designing long-term solutions to deal with their nuclear waste, are clearly working independently of each other.
Globally, highly radioactive waste has already accumulated to seriously large amounts, and as years go by it is only becoming worse. The world is in a desperate situation and it needs a safe and practical solution(s). The only way a practical and long-term solution can be reached is by countries sharing their accumulated knowledge and experiences, as well as fully cooperating in their future research.
So far, most of the solutions offered by different countries have been just temporary “fixes” or “band-aid” solutions. France has had the most success in this field, since by reprocessing the used fuel it has managed to greatly reduce the volume of its highly radioactive waste that needs to be stored indefinitely. Finland is in the process of building its own DGR at Onkalo, where huge copper canisters, each containing several fuel assemblies, are planned to be placed some 400 metres underground.
In the case of DGR, the first and foremost concern must be the durability of the canisters used because they need to be 100 per cent leak-proof for a very, very long time, ideally for thousands of years and not just for a few hundred years as some have stated. The design of these proposed canisters must be evaluated and their storage must be regularly monitored by IAEA representatives.
The individuals elected to the local government (the council as well as the mayoral positions) simply don’t have the necessary qualifications to make sound decisions about a DGR site as being “appropriate” for highly radio-active waste disposal. Dealing with highly radioactive waste is a serious issue that concerns the whole nation. Therefore, to make decisions on how it should be handled, where and how it should be stored as well as how it should be monitored, the federal government needs to work on it with a board comprised of experts in the proper fields. This board should be overseen by and report to the IAEA.
The IAEA has already informed/warned the Canadian government (Atomic Energy of Canada, which is also responsible for protecting the environment) that the sites in the Great Lakes Basin are unsafe due to the ongoing climate change. Therefore, why is such DGR site which is within the Great Lakes Basin still being considered by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization?
Bahram Esmailzadeh, M.Sc. Nuclear Engineering
Hamilton
