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HIGH-LEVEL NUCLEAR WASTE: NO END IN SIGHT

What Is High Level Nuclear Waste?

The nuclear waste that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) is proposing to bury is spent fuel from CANDU nuclear reactors. In order to create the energy needed to produce electricity, uranium is converted into fuel pellets, which are then packed into 24-kilogram fuel bundles.
After these fuel bundles can no longer efficiently produce electricity, between 12 and 18 months, the bundles are removed and considered 'spent fuel'.

The spent fuel contains over 200 deadly radioactive elements, byproducts of the fission process, including uranium, plutonium, cesium, and strontium.

The radioactivity of these elements is measured in half lives. A half-life is the amount of time it takes for the material to lose half of its radioactivity. Plutonium, for example, has a half-life of 24,400 years. This means that plutonium remains dangerously radioactive for more than 250,000 years. Other waste byproducts have half-lives as long as 710,000 years (uranium235) or 15.8 million years (iodine129).[1]

What Can It Do To Me?

Nuclear waste can cause you harm in several ways. Radioactive waste can give off energy as alpha, beta or gamma rays. Spent fuel gives off gamma radiation so powerful that it can quickly kill any unprotected person standing near it. The gamma rays can pass through human tissue and can also cause radiation sickness, cancer, reproductive failure, and genetic deformities.[2]

The radiation from alpha or beta emitting elements, like plutonium, cannot pass through skin. However, if these radioactive materials are inhaled or ingested, they can be as deadly as gamma emitters.

The Worldwatch Institute notes that "less than 150 kilograms (of plutonium), proportionately spread to the lungs of the world's 5.4 billion people would be enough to cause lung cancer in every one of them."[3]

Regardless of the type of radiation given off, all radioactive materials are harmful to biological tissue. This means it is dangerous to you, your family, your pets and all other living things.

Where Is The Waste Now?

High-level nuclear waste is stored in water-filled pools for ten to fifteen years. The water cools the hot spent fuel and blocks its radiation. These pools are located at the reactor sites. Most waste is currently stored in these pools.

A small amount of waste has been moved to dry storage, also at the reactor sites.[4] These storage areas are continually monitored for leaks or any other potential problems.

What Does AECL Want To Do With High Level Waste?

AECL is proposing to bury high-level waste in an undetermined location under the Canadian Shield. The Canadian Shield is an ancient rock formation covering about 4.8 million km2. It is remarkable for its many lakes, rivers and valuable minerals.[5]

The AECL concept is to dig an underground vault 500 to 1000 meters inside the rock, deposit the spent fuel and fill in the hole. The containers holding the spent fuel would be designed to last at least 500 years. As well, various barriers would be used including "the buffer, backfill, and other vault seals; and the geosphere (the rock, any sediment overlying the rock below the water table, and the ground water)."[6] The site would then be closed and eventually abandoned.

Problems with AECL's Disposal Concept

• Groundwater

Water covers 71% of the surface of our planet. Without it, life on Earth would simply not exist. However, water is also under the surface, forming complex underground rivers and lakes. Eventually, these water systems reach the surface and enter the food chain. The Canadian Shield is particularly well-known for its interconnected waterways.

AECL has said that the waste containers would be designed to last at least 500 years. But it is absolutely impossible to build containers that can last as long as the radioactive waste. It is also impossible to predict the flows of groundwater through fractured rock, which many experts believe to be inherently chaotic.[7] Future fracturing could result from earthquakes, the excavation itself, human intervention and the heat generated by the waste which will continue for over 50,000 years. Even AECL's computer programs cannot accurately predict where contaminated water may end up. It is inevitable that some of the waste will seep out and that groundwater will carry it to our wells, springs, lakes and rivers.

• Transportation

As far as we know, there have been no transportation accidents involving spent fuel. This is due to the fact that spent fuel rarely leaves reactor sites.

However, transportation accidents involving other radioactive materials have occurred. In 1991, a container filled with radioactive materials broke open inside a truck. Some of the powder escaped into the air, contaminating the truckers and the environment.[8] Another accident occurred in 1994 when a truck transporting nuclear waste collided with another vehicle.[9]

Accidents are not the only concern. Terrorist groups could endanger the lives of Canadians if they were able to successfully sabotage or hijack a shipment of nuclear waste. Terrorists could potentially make a bomb from plutonium extracted from the spent fuel. However, it is more likely that it would be stolen or blown up for dispersal into the environment causing extensive contamination and killing thousands of people.[10]

• Earthquakes

Geological experts have said that the effects of an earthquake "may lead to releases of radioactivity from waste temporarily stored above ground, in transit, or in permanent storage."[11] AECL claims the Canadian Shield is a predictably geologically stable region. However, on Christmas Day, 1989, the unexpected Ungava earthquake rocked the Canadian Shield. This quake hit 6.1 on the Richter scale and was surprising in that it caused a surface rupture and was in a region that showed no previous earthquake activity. Maurice Lamontagne, a seismologist with Natural Resources Canada, says that earthquakes in the Shield occur about once every 20-25 years.[12] It is impossible to predict earthquakes over hundreds of thousands of years. The detrimental effect of such a quake on the integrity of the shaft leading to the waste and vault seals is equally unpredictable.

• Accidental Explosions

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico released a study in 1994 stating that if enough leaking plutonium gathered in one spot it might set off a chain reaction that could "explode in a nuclear blast equal in force to about a thousand tonnes of high explosive, setting off other blasts throughout the vast repository."[13] This nuclear explosion, caused by 'accidental criticality', could spread poisonous radioactive waste into the groundwater and ultimately back to the surface.[14]

Canada: Nuclear Dumpsite for the World?

Canada's trade agreements with the United States (FTA and NAFTA)[15] may prevent Canada from "limiting or prohibiting the import of nuclear waste."[16] In fact, a spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Control Board has said he knows of no law prohibiting the importation of high-level nuclear waste into Canada.[17] The possibility of being forced to import high level waste has increased with the precedent set by federal government's decision to accept plutonium from American and Russian nuclear warheads.

Politicians and others are in some instances actively promoting Canada as an international nuclear waste site. Liberal MP David Iftody, for example, has promoted Whiteshell Laboratories in Pinawa, Manitoba as a site "for the disposal of nuclear waste from hundreds of reactors around the world and the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal."[18]

Nuclear waste imports would mean that the transportation concerns regarding accidents and terrorism would be heightened as Canada becomes a North American, or even global, nuclear dumpsite.

Site Selection

Experience in Canada and around the world has shown that it will be an extremely difficult and time-consuming task to site the proposed dumpsite. The federal government's only attempt so far to site a nuclear dump (for 800 million tons of low-level radioactive waste from Port Hope, Ontario) has met with failure so far. An 8-year, $21 million siting process turned up only one community, Deep River, willing to house a low-level nuclear dump site. Deep River is the bedroom community for AECL's Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. However, the residents of Deep River demanded job guarantees for AECL employees which the federal government was unwilling to provide.[19] If the government can not site a low-level dump site, how will it find a "volunteer" community willing to accept a high-level nuclear waste dump?

A recent poll found over 75 per cent of Manitobans oppose the idea of disposing high level nuclear waste underground in Manitoba.[20] Manitoba has passed legislation banning a nuclear dump and Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow has declared that burying nuclear waste in his province is "a dead issue, pure and simple."[21]

Other countries have had siting difficulties after approving various geologic disposal concepts. The U.S. has selected a site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. However, local protests and legislative action by the Nevada government have raised doubts about whether the dump site will ever be completed. In Sweden, a disposal concept was approved but the government has been unable to find a willing community for a site. Even after promises of jobs to a town with high unemployment, the residents still voted "No!" by 73 per cent.[22] "No" votes have also thwarted siting attempts in Switzerland.[23]

The Cost of a Concept

From 1978 to 1996, AECL and Ontario Hydro have already spent $700 million just to develop the concept.[24] AECL estimates that the cost of the repository would be over $13 billion. This could be a gross underestimate. As well, this figure does not even include the annual estimated monitoring costs, $23 million before closure and $9 million after, or the transportation costs.[25]

Past estimates for nuclear capital costs have been out by factors of three or more. This was the case with the Gentilly, Point Lepreau and Darlington nuclear power plants. The initial AECL estimate for the Darlington nuclear power plant was $2.5 billion. That estimate was raised to $3.5 billion and the final cost came to $14.4 billion.[26] The federal panel which is reviewing the concept expects to spend about $7 million by the time their report on the concept is finalized.[27]

Women and Waste

Women's groups have strongly condemned AECL's disposal concept for its failure to address the health effects of radiation on women. It has been pointed out that the models used to assess health risks inadequately address such adverse effects as breast, thyroid and uterine cancers, reproductive health problems, birth defects in children and immune dysfunctions. [28]

Voice of Women point out that "future generations will have to live with the consequences of decisions they did not make, and giving them the illusion that the problem of nuclear wastes has been solved by deep burial is not a responsible course of action."[29]

First Nations

Although the official site selection process cannot begin unless the disposal concept has been approved, AECL has been searching out possible "volunteer" communities. First nations communities in economically depressed areas have been promised huge financial benefits if they are willing to accept a dump site. Studies have already been conducted by the Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC), in spite of intense opposition within the community and among MLTC band councils.[30] However, the MLTC has recently rejected the burial concept.

Aboriginal leaders have voiced concern over proposals to dump high-level waste on their land.[31] Many First Nations have already passed anti-nuclear waste resolutions. The Indigenous Women's Network Saskatchewan says "the nuclear waste dump proposal is an example of 'environmental racism', where large industries prey upon the desperation of aboriginal people to take the world's garbage - first it was the toxic tailings from uranium mines and now, nuclear waste." [32]

Not a single country in the entire world has been able to find a permanent solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste. After decades of research and planning there remain too many technological, social, ethical and economic uncertainties. In the best case scenario, continued scientific efforts will develop a method for rendering nuclear waste harmless or otherwise destroying it. For example, research is on-going into 'transmuting' nuclear waste into short-lived or non-radioactive substances.

On the other hand, we may have to accept that, due to the very nature of long-lived, radioactive waste, a permanent disposal concept may be impossible and perpetual monitoring will be required.

The current AECL disposal concept simply cannot guarantee the safety of future generations. Therefore, it makes no sense to rush into a potentially deadly situation. For now, we should keep the waste at reactor sites, in monitored, retrievable storage facilities where we can prevent dispersal into the environment. Several alternative options must be fully considered before a final decision is made on the ultimate fate of our high-level nuclear waste.

Our immediate priority must be to stop the problem at the source by halting
the production of nuclear waste. This means phasing out nuclear power.

We are saying to our descendants that the wastes we leave them are their burden, their lookout, their danger -- because we couldn't be bothered to find a safer way to generate electricity.

Carl Sagan, 1992[33]

ENDNOTES

[1]
Nicholas Lenssen, Nuclear Waste: The Problem That Won't Go Away, (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1991), p. .9-12.

[2]
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Burying Uncertainty (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), p. 14.

[3]
Nicholas Lenssen, Nuclear Waste: The Problem That Won't Go Away, (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1991), p. 16.

[4]
Atomic Energy Control Board, "Used Fuel in Storage", Managing Nuclear Fuel Waste (posted on the AECB web site located at http://ulysses.srv.gc.ca/aecb/

[5]
The Canadian Encyclopedia Plus (CD-ROM by McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1996).

[6]
AECL, Summary of the Environmental Impact Statement on the Concept for Disposal of Canada's Nuclear Fuel Waste (Ontario: Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, 1994), p. 9-11.

[7]
Gordon Edwards, mathematician and president of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

[8]
Tom Spears, "Trucker finds radioactive spill costly," Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa: Southam Ltd, Nov. 30, 1993).

[9] "Driver hauling radioactive load still in serious condition after highway collision," Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa: Southam Inc., Mar. 24, 1994) p. B5.

[10] Martin Bond, Nuclear Juggernaut: The Transportation of Radioactive Materials (London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., 1992), p. 182-188.

[11]
Regina L. Hunter and C. John Mann, ed. "Seismic Hazard Assessment," Techniques for Determining Probabilities of Geologic Events and Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 153.

[12] Geological Survey of Canada, Geophysics Division. The Lac Turquoise Fault Scarp: Surface Faulting from the Ungava, Québec, Earthquake of 1989. (Ottawa: Energy, Mines and Resources, 1990). Also: Telephone conversation with Maurice Lamontagne, Seismologist with NRCan. Date February 13, 1997.

[13]
William J. Broad, "Scientists fear explosion of buried waste," The New York Times (New York: New York Times Co., Mar. 5, 1995), p. 1.

[14] C.D. Bowman and F. Vennari, Underground Autocatalytic Criticality from Plutonium and other Fissile Material (New Mexico: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1994).

[15]
Specifically Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Article 901(2)(c), and North American Free Trade Agreement Article 603(3)(a).

[16]
Roma De Robertis, "Nuclear Waste Disposal Questioned", Prairie Messenger ( Saskatchewan:Order of St. Benedict Inc., Nov. 21, 1994), p. 1, 8.

[17]
Bill Doskoch, "Nuclear Waste May Create Jobs", The Leader Post (Regina: Hollinger Inc., Oct. 14, 1994).

[18]
Tim Plett, "Iftody relieved to see AECL lose control of Pinawa research lab", Steinbach Carillon (Manitoba: Deksen Printers, Jan. 6, 1997) p.1, 2.

[19]
Canadian Press, "Nuclear Waste; Disposal deal dead, town's mayor says", The Windsor Star (Windsor, Southam Inc., Jan. 04, 1997), p. F12.

[20]
A poll conducted by Viewpoints Research shows that 76.5% of Manitobans oppose the idea of disposing high level nuclear waste underground in Manitoba. The poll questioned 800 people in late December and the results are considered accurate to plus or minus 3.5% 19 times out of 20.

[21]
Randy Burton, "Romanow vetoes nuclear waste dump in North", Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon: Hollinger Inc., Nov. 4, 1993), p. 3.

[22]
cited by WISE Power in Europe 22 Sept. 1995 / Die Tagenestzeitung (FRG), 19 Sept. 1995.

[23]
cited by WISE Power in Europe 22 Sept. 1995 / Die Tagenestzeitung (FRG), 19 Sept. 1995.

[24]
Letter from William A. Farlinger, Chairman, Ontario Hydro to Patrick Rasmussen, Réseau Québécois des Groupes Ecologistes. Dated January 28, 1997.

[25]
AECL, Summary of the Environmental Impact Statement (Ontario: Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, 1994), p. 40. All figures are in 1991 dollars.

[26]
Memo from J. McCredie, Project Manager, Darlington G.S. to K.R. Hedges, General Manager, Ontario Hydro Services. Dated March 20, 1992.

[27]
Guy Riverin, Executive Secretary , Panel Secretariat, Nuclear Fuel Waste Management and Disposal Concept Review, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. January 27, 1997.

[28]
Andrea Ritchie, "Too Much Haste to Bury Nuclear Waste", Connections Vol. 2, Issue 2 (Toronto: Women and Environments Education and Development Foundation, Jan. 1996). p.3.

[29]
Text of Presentation by Voice of Women to CEAA hearings on AECL's Disposal Concept. Date Feb. 26 1997.

[30]
Jeffrey Ulbrich, "A home for nuclear waste?", The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon: , Feb. 24, 1995). p. A1

[31]
"Northern Aboriginal Leaders Oppose Nuclear Development" press release issued on Nov. 16, 1993 by Rod Bishop, Mayor of Green Lake, George Smith, Councillor, Pinehouse Lake, Ed Benoanie, Councillor, Lac La Hache Band.

[32]
Muldrew, Fiona, Indigenous Women dump on nuclear waste storage.., Vol. 10, Herizons, 01-01 1996, pp 8.

[33] Carl Sagan, "Tomorrow's Energy," Ecodecision (Montreal: Environmental and Policy Society, 1992) p.18.