"The Chalk River Megadump" - Gordon Edwards - January 10,

[Oscar]

"The Chalk River Megadump" - Gordon Edwards - January 10, 2024

I just gave a 10-minute interview about the Chalk River megadump and the decision yesterday by CNSC to grant the licence amendment to CNL. Here are some random thoughts about these matters that may be helpful in getting journalists to understand why there is such a sense of disappointment about the licensing of the Chalk River megadump.

Points to consider:

The project is objectionable on grounds of POOR SITING, LACK OF CONSENT, RADIOACTIVE LEAKAGE, BAD GOVERNANCE, AND LACK OF ALTERNATIVES. It is the first time in Canadian history that permission has been given for a PERMANENT facility for human-made radioactive materials (i.e. post-fission nuclear wastes).

(1) POOR SITING - Siting a toxic landfill operation right beside the Ottawa River that provides drinking water for millions of people downstream serves only the interests of the industry. CNL wants to push radioactively contaminated material to the edge of their property to make room for more on-site development. But the edge of the CNL property is the Ottawa River. This choice of site is not made on health or environmental grounds but only on grounds of industrial convenience. (Despite its name, CNL is a privately owned entity, belonging to a consortium of multinationals.)

For example, on the crown land that houses the Chalk River site, one could go 20 kilometres away from the river. and even put the waste in shallow below-ground chambers that can be monitored and prevented from leaking - better for people and the environment, more costly and less convenient for industry. But CNSC’s sole mandate is to protect people and the environment, not to do the bidding of the industry.

(2) LACK OF CONSENT - (a) Chalk River is sited on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. 10 of the 11 Algonquin communities involved have emphatically stated that they do not consent to this project. According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, there should be no storage or disposal of toxic materials on indigenous lands without the free, prior, informed consent of the Indigenous people. After its “final" licensing hearings for the project, another year was made available for Algonquin input, and that input revealed many serious flaws in the environmental impact statement (EIS), This input was however disregarded by the CNSC and approval was granted despite the lack of consent.

2. (b) In addition, over 130 municipalities down-river from the dumpsite (almost all on the Quebec side) did not consent to this project and, in some cases, expressed their opposition, including all of the members of the Montreal agglomeration council. So the approval is given at the request of the industry that created or accumulated the radioactive waste over many years, but without the consent of the people whose grandchildren and great grandchildren might suffer the consequences when leakage occurs.

2 (c) The government and industry has stressed that, in the case of HIGH-level radioactive waste, they are searching for a WILLING host community, and they say they will not impose a waste facility on an unwilling community. Well, there are many unwilling communities in the case of the Chalk River megadump. Why does the interest of the industry trump the interest of Canadian citizens?

3. (a) RADIOACTIVE LEAKAGE - Many radionuclides to be included in the dump remain dangerous for hundreds of millennia. Plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,00 years), Technetium-99 (Half-life of 210,000 years), Chlorine-36 (half-life of 301,000 years), Iodine-129 (half-life of 17 million years). How can the CNSC assure that these materials, contained in a 25-metre high landfill covering 14 hectares of land, will outlast the pyramids of Egypt which are only 5,000 years old? What kind of science can guarantee protection of people and the environment from toxic materials stored in an earthen mound over such enormous time periods? Leakage is inevitable. Such long-lived toxic materials do not belong in a surface mound subject to the vicissitudes of subsidence, erosion, and extreme weather.

(b) Other materials with shorter half-lives are nevertheless too mobile in the environment to be totally contained. Tritium is radioactive hydrogen - it forms radioactive water molecules which will escape into the river in large amounts but at low concentrations. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. The planners anticipate that such radioactive tritium-contaminated water will be released into wetlands below the dump at a rate of hundreds of thousands of disintegrations per second per litre, which is equivalent to millions of disintegrations per minute per litre. None of this tritium can be removed by the liquid effluent treatment plant, so it will end up in the Ottawa River and some of it, eventually, in the bodies of those that drink the water downstream. No municipal water treatment plant can remove tritium from the drinking water. There is no protection. Each disintegration inside a human body has the potential to damage a living cell so that it becomes a cancerous growth years later. No one will be keeping track of these cancers, and the industry and the regulator may regard such illnesses as “not significant” — but they are very significant to the individuals and the families so affected. Adding cancer-causing materials to drinking water is not an acceptable public policy. Who has the right to decide what is an “insignificant” number of radiation-caused cancers?

4. (a) BAD GOVERNANCE - The industry is permitted to do things for its own convenience that are entirely unnecessary. For example, 99% of the initial radioactivity in the megadump will be commercial wastes from profit-making companies in Canada and abroad. These wastes are imported into Chalk River for “management” - storage or disposal. These are “cobalt-60” radiation sources, emitting penetrating gamma rays, which require heavy shielding to protect the workers. These commercial wastes do not have to go into the megadump - there are only 2 or 3 kilogarms of these intensely radioactive materials, and they could easily be stored in existing above-ground concrete bunkers located on the Chalk River site, where they can be safely monitored for about a century or two, during which time they will have harmlessly disintegrated into non-radioactive byproducts. This is due to the much shorter half-life of 5.7 years for cobalt-60.

Incidentally, if the cobalt-60 were removed from the megadump, the next most abundant source of radioactivity (98% of the remaining activity) would be due to the tritium content.

(b) The age of nuclear waste is just beginning, even as the age of nuclear power seems to be winding down. Nuclear waste can threaten the health of humans and other species, and should be kept out of the natural environment insofar as that is possible. Ordinary people, not just the industrial experts, must have a significant say in how, and where, and in what manner, these radioactive poisons are to be stored, as well as how they are going to be packaged and labelled. Future generations must have the ability to repackage these wastes as necessary and to repair any leakage that might occur in the future, which means careful planning and documentation instructing future generations on what measure to take in case of leakage. These steps are not being implemented adequately by either the industry or the regulator. The wrong people are in charge because of a built-in conflict of interest: the industry wants to limit its future liability, the regulator wants to minimize its future obligations. But the long-lived wastes will not go away no matter what the industry or the regulator choose to think. This is not a matter that can be decided “once and for all”. There is too much that we just don't know.

I will send this now even though it is incomplete. More to come….

Gordon.
Dr. Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility