Minister: Reject lakeshore nuke dump

Lake Huron in the near distance, at the Ontario Power Generation's Bruce Power Site in Kincardine, Ontario.

As the March 1 deadline for Canada’s federal environment minister Catherine McKenna to decide the fate of Ontario Power Generation’s underground nuclear waste repository nears, the list of opponents and the list of arguments against continue to grow.

Ontario Power Generation, the province-owned electrical utility, has proposed burying low- and mid-level waste from its nuclear power plants at its Bruce Peninsula facility. The nuclear waste would be stored in deep underground wells less than a mile from Lake Huron.

OPG’s scientists and engineers said the waste would be safely isolated from the lake and from the environment forever. Critics worry about what “forever” means in the context of nuclear materials that would be radioactive for thousands of years. Critics are especially frightened by what even a small leak would mean so close to Lake Huron and the Great Lakes.

In May 2015, a federal panel appointed by McKenna’s predecessor approved the dump. Since then, Canadian voters replaced their government with Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, which has encouraged opposition to the Kincardine proposal and hope that McKenna will reject it.

Across the United States and Canada, 184 municipalities representing more than 22 million people have voiced opposition to the nuclear dump. U.S. senators and congressman have petitioned Trudeau to stop it. State and provincial lawmakers and governors from every Great Lakes state are against it.

This month, a broad coalition of environmental, health and anti-nuclear groups again petitioned McKenna to reject OPG’s dangerous scheme. Their letter to the minister details a long list of defects in the process that led to its prior approvals.

Chief among them is the most obvious one; the one that everyone has been asking since this idea first bubbled up: Why didn’t OPG investigate whether another site was more appropriate?

We don’t know if there is an appropriate place in Ontario or in Canada to bury the radioactive garbage from Ontario Power Generation’s nuclear plants. But we do know that it would be entirely inappropriate to leave it in a pit next to one of the Great Lakes.

We trust Catherine McKenna will agree.