The Hook

On September 29th, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will hold a public hearing on a Bruce Power plan to ship 16,000 tonnes of radioactive waste through Ontario to Sweden to be melted down.

Bruce Power operates the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world, on the shore of Lake Huron in southern Ontario.

The steam generators from a section of that plant, which processed radioactive water for about 20 years before being decommissioned, are considered low-grade radioactive waste. They were originally slated for disposal in long-term storage on-site, but in April the company decided to ship them to Sweden first to separate into their component parts.

In a press release, the Sierra Club of Canada claimed credit for the hearing, but its executive director, John Bennett, said to the Tyee that it doesn't mean much on its own. He said he wants a full environmental assessment performed on the proposal.

"The Sierra Club feels that this is a major deviation from the original environmental assessment. That would call for a revisiting of the environmental assessment, not just a rubber-stamping of the change," he said.

Bruce Power Community and Government Relations Manager Ross Lamont, meanwhile, said that the Sierra Club's concerns are overblown.

"For the general public, there really aren't any concerns," he said, "What we really have here is largely a group of people who are against nuclear power, and this is their opportunity to demonstrate that."

Lamont said that the generators are being sent to Sweden so that their casings can be separated from the residual waste they contain and the non-radioactive material, thousands of tonnes of high-grade steel, put back on the market. The waste would then be shipped back to Ontario for long-term storage.

North America lacks a facility that can recycle generators of this size, Lamont said.

"It's all about reducing the volume of material that you're putting into long-term storage," he said, "It's like a conventional landfill site, where you try to minimize by composting, recycling, reusing, whatever you can do. It's no different, except it's more expensive."

Lamont also noted that low-grade radioactive waste is shipped around the country constantly at no risk to the public.

"Medical isotopes or isotopes used for sterilization, things in food processing, things in mining, there's a whole bunch of different types of things that radioactive materials are shipped as," he said, "Whenever people hear about radioactive materials or low-level waste, if they don't really understand the process they have legitimate questions. But in this case the legitimate questions have been asked and answered."

But Bennett said that beyond concrete worries about public health, there were real process issues in Bruce Power's change of plans. He said that it's the policy of Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organization that waste be disposed of within the country, and that a plan which seems to violate this principle should be closely scrutinized.

"Maybe they're right. Maybe this isn't a hugely dangerous thing. And then maybe they should just have another environmental assessment and prove that," he said.

Lamont said that the public hearing is as much to address misconceptions out there about the project as to air public concerns. And while he refused to speculate as to what the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission would ultimately decide, he emphasized repeatedly that the plan had been declared safe.

The implication is that no changes are likely to come of the hearings. This is certainly Bennett's belief.

"For us now, the question is whether or not we're going to go [to the hearing]," he said, "Is it worth our time and effort to go to something that's a foregone conclusion? But then, we're environmentalists and a lot of what we go to is a foregone conclusion."

Ryan Elias is completing a practicum at The Tyee.