Ever since Lester Pearson was parachuted into the northern Ontario riding of Algoma East, home of the uranium mining town of Elliot Lake, successive Liberal governments have been promoting Canada’s nuclear industry across the country and around the world. Their latest pitch is that nuclear power is a clean source of energy that will save us from the climate crisis.
As Winston Churchill is thought to have said, one should never let a good crisis go to waste. In a move reminiscent of George Bush Jr. parlaying 9/11 into a war with Iraq, the Liberals seem intent on channeling legitimate concern about the climate into support for their nuclear agenda.
Anyone unconvinced by three decades of IPCC warnings may find the scorched earth in B.C. a compelling indication that a climate crisis is indeed upon us. But while a change of course from fossil fuels is urgently needed, swapping out one environmental nightmare for another makes no sense.
While this might all seem irrelevant to us here in the Pontiac, next time you are out for a hike along the top of the magnificent Oiseau Rock, near Sheenboro, cast a glance across the Ottawa River. There you will see the site of Canada’s first nuclear reactor at Chalk River, where the world’s first nuclear meltdown happened in 1952. Over the seven decades since, all manner of radioactive material has accumulated on the site. Clearly, something has to be done with all this waste.
In 2015, the problem of cleaning up the Chalk River site was punted by the Harper government when it created Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) and sold all the shares to a private sector consortium of multinational corporations including SNC Lavalin.
CNL’s proposal is to build a mega-dump on the Chalk River site that would hold one million cubic meters of radioactive waste in a so-called near surface disposal facility (NSDF) that will rise 20 to 25 metres above ground, covering an area of 11 hectares within a kilometre of the Ottawa River. They claim that only low-level radioactive materials would go into the dump, requiring containment for only a few hundred years. The CNL plan envisions a lifespan for its NSDF of 50 to 70 years, followed by surveillance for another 300 years or longer, if necessary.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ole Hendrickson of Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area (CCRCA) says that many of the materials to be included in the dump will be dangerously radioactive for more than a hundred thousand years which, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), should be stored tens of meters or more underground, not in an above-ground mound.
Whether these cancer-causing substances remain deadly for a few hundred or a few hundred thousand years, the fact remains that they currently sit on the shore of one of Canada’s major rivers, the source of drinking water for Ottawa and Montreal and countless smaller communities, important habitat for fish, birds and other creatures, and a popular recreational resource for cottagers, swimmers and boaters up and down the valley.
It raises some important questions. Are there any scenarios for disposing of these wastes other than in a mound by the Ottawa River?
Is it ethical to expect unborn generations to live with the risk and expense of our radioactive wastes?
And how can our government justify pushing ahead with new nuclear projects when it has not yet come up with an acceptable means of disposing of nuclear wastes?
It can be argued that anyone who is not a nuclear physicist does not have the knowledge required to evaluate the risks and arrive at a reasonable decision on any of these questions.
Well, we may not be nuclear experts, but we are experts at living in the Pontiac. Here, our well-being derives from the health of the environment in which we live and in which we raise cattle for milk and meat, grow everything from apples to zucchinis that feed people for miles around, and in which residents and tourists alike love to cottage, camp, swim, fish, paddle and hike.
We recognize that especially the food-production, tourism and recreational parts of Pontiac’s resource-based economy would be at risk should there be any real or suspected radioactive releases, planned or accidental, reported or kept secret, in the years to come. The seventy-year history of Chalk River has had plenty of all of the above, so it is difficult to believe that there will not be more in the future.
No, we may not have a huge say in how the nuclear industry is developed across the country, but we do have a responsibility to speak up about how it could affect the part of the country in which we live. It appears that nobody else is going to do that.
In an election year – municipal for sure, and quite probably federal, as well – we need to express our concerns to anyone running for office. We need to ask them what they make of this issue and what they are going to do about it. If other jurisdictions hundreds of kilometres down-river and down-wind are concerned about this, surely candidates seeking to speak for the Pontiac should be too.
Charles Dickson
