In a historic referendum, the town of Ignace, Ont., voted last month to move forward as the potential site for Canada’s first underground spent nuclear fuel storage facility. Of 640 ballots cast, 495 — or 77 per cent — supported hosting a facility in the community.
“We are proudly the first community in Canada to be indicating our support and our willingness to [be the site for a] Deep Geological Repository in this area,” Ignace Mayor Kim Baigrie said in a July 10 press release, using the technical term for a nuclear waste storage facility.
The town’s support for the site may reflect a broader trend of growing public support for nuclear energy and improved understanding of its costs and benefits.
“Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t have the baggage that comes along with living through the Cold War, which creates the openness to nuclear,” said Madison Hilly, founder and executive director of the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal, a US nuclear advocacy organization.
“But beyond just being open, we’re seeing excitement from young people,” she said.
“In part, I think it’s due to their seriousness about climate. Nuclear is the only technology with a proven historical track record of delivering deep decarbonization. It’s also the only technology that can directly substitute for what fossil fuels offer: energy day and night, regardless of the weather or season.”
A recent report by the RBC Climate Action Institute backs up these claims: between 2012 and 2023, Canadian public support for nuclear power increased from 37 per cent to 55 per cent. An even greater percentage — 62 per cent — say they view nuclear energy as essential to Canada’s net-zero strategy.
Historically, public fears about the ability to safely operate nuclear reactors and store the resulting waste have posed major obstacles to getting projects off the ground. In 2011, for example, Bruce Power abandoned plans to build a nuclear power plant in Peace River, Alta., over residents’ concerns about the site’s impact on local water and wildlife.
Some experts say such fears betray a profound misunderstanding of the actual environmental and health risks associated with nuclear storage.
“Nuclear waste undergoes exponential radioactive decay,” said Chris Keefer, president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy, a Canadian nuclear advocacy organization. “In 40 years, 99.9 per cent of the radioactivity is gone … Within 400 years, you could hold a spent fuel bundle in your hands.”
Canada’s spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in above-ground concrete and steel casks, which are engineered to shield the decaying material and continuously monitored.
“It’s a solid waste produced in a very small volume that we have a perfect track record of storing, with no injuries to humans from radiation from spent civilian nuclear waste — not just in Canada, but around the entire world, in the history of civilian nuclear power,” said Keefer.
If nuclear waste is ultimately stored in deep geological repositories, the safety standards will be similarly rigorous.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, a statutorily-created non-profit tasked with nuclear waste management, estimates that the worst-case scenario of radiation exposure for someone living above a deep geological repository would be 80 nanosieverts in a year. To put that figure in perspective, a person who eats a single banana is exposed to 100 nanosieverts of radiation from the decay of the banana’s potassium-40.
And that worst-case scenario would only be realized after a series of highly improbable engineering failures, says Keefer.
However, not everyone is sold.
In a 2023 letter to a parliamentary Standing Committee on Natural Resources, the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick argued that deep geological repositories are an untested technology, with none yet active anywhere in the world. They also noted that transporting nuclear waste to these facilities comes with risks of accidents in transit.
‘Do something’
Some pro-nuclear critics have different issues with deep geological repositories.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about long-term nuclear waste facilities is that they are an engineering or public health necessity, rather than a legal or bureaucratic necessity,” says Mark Nelson, managing director of Radiant Energy Group, an energy data and advisory firm.
“The waste isn’t hurting anyone, and is extremely simple to keep from the environment on an ongoing basis at low cost. So the requirement to ‘do something’ with it is not based in science but in law and pop culture.”
Ignace’s strong support for hosting a deep geological repository in its community may have been shaped by an educational campaign that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization ran in the lead up to their referendum. An expected $26-billion in investments and a thousand new community jobs may have also helped sweeten the deal.
Now that Ignace has demonstrated its intention to move forward, attention is shifting to South Bruce, Ont., the only other community that is under consideration as a potential host. South Bruce’s own municipal referendum is set for October and a final selection decision is expected by the end of the year.
Regardless of which site is chosen, construction of the repository is not slated to begin until 2033, with operations expected to commence in the early 2040s.
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