Depending on who you talk to, Canada's first proposed deep geological repository — or deep underground dump — for nuclear waste is either a safe place to store nasty stuff or an easy-to-forget environmental disaster that will loom for a million years.
Test holes for the proposed 680-metre deep repository are currently being drilled one kilometre inland of Lake Huron, at the Western Waste Management Facility, a short distance from the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario. Construction will begin in 2012 if the site passes its environmental assessment.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) describes the assessment as exhaustive but environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and Beyond Nuclear have raised serious concerns about the planned site.
Most concerning, they say, is site's proximity to the Great Lakes, the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world.
The repository is being designed to hold 200,000 cubic metres of low and intermediate-level nuclear waste. Currently awaiting a permanent dump site is 70,000 cubic metres of low-level waste, mainly ash from incinerated items used in generating stations, such as mop heads, cloths and gloves.
Approximately 9,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste, including used reactor components and filters used to clean reactor water, also await disposal. Low-level and intermediate-level waste from the refurbishment of Ontario's nuclear reactors will also be directed to the site.
Spent nuclear fuel bundles, the most radioactive of nuclear power byproducts, will not be stored at the facility.
While low-level waste can be handled without protective shielding, Marie Wilson, the spokesperson for Western Waste Management Facility, said the intermediate-level waste will remain dangerously radioactive for "an extremely long period of time."
"We're talking thousands and thousands of years and beyond," she said, adding that the average isolation period needed for intermediate-level waste was 250,000 years.
The repository will include a number of excavated "rooms" chiseled from the limestone at the bottom of the hole. Intermediate-level waste may be packaged in concrete cylinders lined on the inside and outside with steel, though Wilson said the containers' design wasn't yet finalized.
Wilson said she is confident the site will be safe. "If it's not safe to build it, we won't build it."
The site's depth and distance from Lake Huron will prevent groundwater from being contaminated, she said. The repository will be 480m below Lake Huron's deepest point of 200m. The groundwater table, said Wilson, is at 100m.
"It's very difficult for anything to get through these rock formations, so nothing is going to move through them very easily."
Environmentalists, however, do not share that confidence. They allege that it is dangerously short-sighted to store waste that can stay lethally radioactive for over a quarter of a million years at a storage site next to Canada's largest freshwater resource. Some climatologists predict global warming will make freshwater increasingly scarce and a far more precious resource than oil in the future's uncertain forecasts.
Dave Martin, the climate and energy coordinator for Greenpeace, is among several that object to the location.
Martin believes that since the radioactive waste is so long-lived, it is virtually guaranteed to contaminate the ground water and lake system at some point in the future.
So why the contentious location? According to Wilson, "We have the geology at our facility and a willing host community."
But because OPG is only now confirming whether the geology is actually appropriate, Martin alleges the power company decided on the location long ago and is simply going through the hoops to get it built.
One of those hoops was getting the surrounding communities to go along with the idea. Communities in the proximity of the proposed site were offered hefty payouts from OPG that have already begun, though the final decision on the site won't come until 2012 at the earliest.
Each community gets two large lump payments, one in 2005 which has already been paid and another in 2013. The communities also get regular annual payments until 2034.
For Kincardine, the two lump payments are $1.3 million and the regular annual payments are $650,000. For Saugeen Shores, the payments are $500,000 and $250,000; for Huron Kinloss, $130,000 and $70,000; for Arran-Elderslie, $80,000 and 40,000.
Martin equates the payments to a bribe for not objecting to the proposed waste disposal site.
"I think its all about buying complicity in the project."
But besides money, said Martin, there is also an emotional factor at play in the selection of the site.
The public is much less likely to raise a fuss about adding another nuclear reactor to a site that already has one, or burying nuclear waste underground where the waste is already stored above ground.
It's a phenomena known as "the sacrifice area" and is why Ontario Power refurbishes old reactors and builds new ones on the same site rather than trying to do "greenfield" developments in entirely new locations, according to Martin.
Wilson said the project has only encountered "pockets of opposition" and that the OPG's 40-year track record of successful waste management has earned it the trust of local communities. A telephone survey contracted by the municipality of Kincardine found 60 per cent of residents favoured the plan, she said.
"They really are quite supportive of what we are doing."
But while the public in the immediate vicinity of the proposed site may accept the plan, others around the Great Lakes are objecting. Across the border, a coalition of groups is lobbying to have the site moved.
Kevin Kamps, a self-described "radioactive waste watchdog" works with Beyond Nuclear, one of the U.S. based groups involved in that push.
"There is a lot of concern," he said, noting that hundreds of individuals and three dozen groups submitted comments during the public consultation on the project that concluded on June 18.
Among other things, his group is demanding the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission be taken off the environmental assessment panel that will decide whether the repository gets built.
"Their reputation is a rubber stamp agency," he said, pointing to the scandal that erupted after the former head of the commission, Linda Keen, was fired for shutting down the medical isotope reactor in Chalk River over safety concerns.
Environmental groups like Greenpeace also deny that the deeply-buried repository is the best of available options to deal with nuclear waste that already exists.
He suggested that any nuclear waste site needs to be accessible so that the waste can be monitored or retrieved if it starts to leak or if water gets into the repository.
"The problem is, once you dig a hole in the ground it's easy to walk away and forget about it."
And when the thing you're forgetting about can poison huge areas for hundreds of thousands of years, that's not such a good idea, he said.