Any plans to add nuclear power plants in Canada, or to refurbish existing ones, must be preceded by a “full-on public debate,” and solid plans for storing all of the existing-and future-nuclear waste, said Eva Ligeti, who spoke Wednesday at a centre for environment seminar.
Nuclear waste from Canadian reactors consists of spent fuel rods half a metre in length and 30 centimetres in diameter. Presently, it is stored on-site at each plant. While highly radioactive, the rods are stored underwater, in massive pools. Later on, they are put into containers for longer-term storage, but the waste “remains a health hazard for essentially forever-infinity,” Ligeti noted.
Two million of them have added up since commercial power generation began in Canada in the 70s-enough to fill five hockey rinks up to boards-level. And 85,000 more are added each year.
Ligeti was Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner between 1994 and 1999. Now, she is on the advisory committee of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), an organization set up in 2002 to study the disposal of Canada’s nuclear waste.
In the 90s, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL)-the Crown Corporation that manages Canada’s atomic energy program-suggested burying the stuff deep beneath the Canadian Shield. A panel that examined the proposal in 1998, however, argued against the project, because it lacked widespread public support.
NWMO has now come up with a new plan, dubbed “Adaptive Phase Management”-a plan that is implemented in phases, and which may take up to 300 years to complete. The point, Ligeti explained, is that the APM is not a fixed process; it has “on-ramps and off-roads,” as she put it.
The first phase involves preparing nuclear waste for storage in a central repository; in the second phase, waste is transferred to a central storage location; lastly, it is transferred to its final resting place.
For such projects, you “can’t demonstrate public support, but what you need is public tolerance,” Ligeti said. As an example, she pointed to a nuclear waste storage project in Finland, which succeeded with local support, despite opposition at the national level.
But to build such public tolerance, a serious discussion of the place of nuclear power in Canada’s energy policy must first take place. “We need a full-scale, full-on public debate,” Ligeti said. “I think there are many points of view which need to be heard.”
She lamented the fact that nuclear power is never an issue during election campaigns-though that could change in the run-up to Ontario’s provincial election in fall 2007.
But that would be “a different kind of debate,” Ligeti worries-a debate over having enough electricity, and maintaining living standards, she said, and not an “open, substantive public debate.”
