Potential impacts on ground-water, tourism, mental health, as well as the prospect of truck crashes involving radioactive materials, are among a myriad of concerns being formally raised in response to a proposed underground nuclear waste storage site near Ignace.
The concerns are included in the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada’s “summary of issues,” which it compiled from feedback it received on an initial project description document put forward by the waste site’s proponent, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO).
The public had until Feb. 4 to submit feedback after the NWMO’s lengthy initial project description was made available for review over a 30-day period.
“The proponent is required to provide a response that sets out how it intends to address the key issues identified in the (summary) as part of the development of its project,” the impact agency said this week in a project bulletin.
That includes issues “related to potential adverse impacts the project may have on the rights of Indigenous peoples in accordance with section 15 of the Impact Assessment Act,” the agency added.
If the waste site formally known as a deep geological repository (DGR) is approved, it would bury in a controlled environment nearly six million spent nuclear-fuel rod bundles from the country’s nuclear power plants over several decades.
“The project is expected to span approximately 160 years, encompassing site preparation, construction, operation and closure monitoring,” the impact agency says in a backgrounder.
It’s been estimated that it would take 20 years just to build the DGR. Spent fuel rods are currently stored at nuclear power plants.
The NWMO has said they could be railed or trucked to the future DGR, if it’s approved, in specialized containers designed to withstand hard impacts and fiery crashes.
Though transportation of the radioactive fuel rods was not specifically part of the NWMO’s initial project description, some who submitted feedback on the document raised the issue regardless.
“Failing to include transportation in the assessment would lead to project splitting and undermine both the integrity of the assessment process and the duty to consult and accommodate our nations,” said one joint Indigenous submission that included Fort William First Nation.
In response to earlier concerns about how the fuel rods could be hauled,, the NWMO has noted that nuclear materials have been safely shipped across Canada for many years without causing harm to people or the environment.
That assurance hasn’t quelled concerns being felt by both Indigenous and municipal leaders in the Thunder Bay region.
“While limited transportation of nuclear materials occurs in Canada, the proposed (DGR) project would require the sustained, decades-long transportation of unprecedented volumes of high-level radioactive waste across vast geographic areas, including numerous Indigenous territories,” said the joint submission that included Fort William First Nation.
It added: “This activity is neither routine nor ongoing in any meaningful regulatory sense.”
In its summary of issues, the impact assessment agency said it also heard about “cumulative health effects in the region, particularly related to legacy industrial contamination, including the inter- generational health implications of historic mercury releases from Dryden Mill.”
Other submissions, the agency said, referenced “ the public perception and psycho-social impacts associated with living near the nuclear project, including impacts on mental health.”
