One of the big unsolved problems with nuclear power is disposal of the spent nuclear fuel from the reactors. There have been a lot of proposals and some tests in different countries that use nuclear power but an acceptable permanent disposal system has been elusive. The U.S. is filling up reactor cooling pools with spent nuclear fuel assemblies and will have to move a great deal of the spent fuel to dry cask storage on or offsite soon. Attempts to build a permanent geological repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada were canceled in 2009 and the most optimistic projection for siting and constructing a permanent repository is now 2050. Canada is also struggling with siting issues for nuclear waste depositories.
In 2009, a proposal was put forward by the Canadian Nuclear Security Commission (CNSC) to store over seven million cubic feet of low and intermediate level nuclear waste in a deep geological repository (DGR) next to Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes, at the Kincardine facility. The Ontario Power Generation (OPG) company at the Bruce Power nuclear generation station in Inverhuron, Ontario was contracted to carry out the project. Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste have been gathered at the Bruce Power plant in anticipation of the completion of construction of the DGR. The waste is to be ultimately buried less than one mile from Lake Huron. The Great Lakes supply the drinking water for over eighty million people in Canada and the U.S. Any leak from the DGR could reach Lake Huron and contaminate the water.
Critics of the project in Canada say that reporting on public concerns about the possible health and environmental impacts of the DGR has been deliberately suppressed in the Canadian press. They point to edicts from the Harper administration that require that certain subjects, including nuclear issues, not be discussed publicly by government scientists and officials. Reinforcing this claim of censorship was a recent announcement by the Canadian Minister of Health that all official discussions of the DGR would be suspended until after the elections in November of 2016.
The CNSC has also come under intense public criticism for their plans to transport high-level nuclear waste. They propose shipping containers of waste up through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence River and across the Atlantic to Sweden for reprocessing. The high-level waste remaining after processing would be returned to the Halifax harbor in Canada. It would then be trucked across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario to the Bruce Power station. Initial announcements of this plan resulted in a huge public backlash and the plans were shelved in 2010. It now appears that the plans are being quietly implemented. Bruce Power, OPG and the CNSC have all publicly stated that only low and intermediate level waste will be stored at the Kincardine DGR. There has been no coherent and definitive statement from any of them about what exactly is going to be done with the high-level waste that makes the round trip to and from Sweden.
A lot of the early planning for the Kincardine DGR took place at private meetings behind closed doors. This has added to the public outrage and backlash. U.S. Congressmen have been requesting that the U.S. President pressure the Canadian government to cancel the DGR and arrange for better storage of existing tons of waste at Bruce Power.
