Great article. The site selection process seems pretty ethical. For me, burying nuclear waste has a sci-fi feel to it.
For the repository to be built, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization will have to embark on what Wabigoon Lake describes as “the largest and most strenuous impact assessment in Canadian history” to ensure the project poses minimal human and environmental harm.
A big concern here is ground water. If a tectonic plate movement damages the underground storage, the waste could contaminate ground water and it would be pretty much impossible to clean it up. One of the hardest challenges in my opinion of nuclear waste storage is the generational responsibility to keep it stored safely, although you could argue the same responsibility exists for landfills already.
I’d assume that “geologically stable” was one of the requirements when they first made a list of potential locations.
Fortunately, all of the heavy-water CANDU reactors currently in commercial service in Ontario are fueled by unenriched uranium, so the worst possible outcome shouldn’t result in much more contamination being released into the environment than we would see with a natural uranium deposit of comparable size nearby. Which isn’t nothing, but the result would be a smallish statistical increase in cancers, not people dropping dead from Acute Radiation Syndrome. Many industrial sites do more damage and are less scrutinized, but we get all weird about radiation the moment the word “nuclear” comes up, and have a hard time putting the risks in perspective.
For some reason when I see Lake Wabigoon I think of Garrison Keillor….
