Who’s taking Canada’s nuclear waste? 

A small town in Northern Ontario has agreed alongside the local First Nations community to bury Canada’s nuclear waste for centuries, but it faces opposition from other Indigenous and anti-nuclear groups.  

Ignace, population around 1,200, about 250 km northwest of Thunder Bay, signed a $180-million agreement in November. The Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation (Wabigoon) agreed separately but hasn’t shared details and didn’t respond to a request for comment. Both are backing the next stage of assessments for the industry-funded Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s (NWMO) $26-billion greenfield deep geological repository.  

“Most people in the community knew they weren’t making a decision for them, they’re making a decision for their children,” Giacomo Pastore, Ignace’s outreach and communication lead, said in an interview. More than three-quarters of Ignace residents support the project, he said.  

However, Eagle Lake First Nation, whose traditional territory overlaps with the Wabigoon, filed an application in Federal Court on Dec. 20, seeking a judicial review of NWMO’s repository location. We The Nuclear Free North, a coalition of environmental groups, citizens and First Nation communities, have also banded together to challenge the project.

“It might take a thousand years, but it will fail,” Elder Roy Ignace says on the coalition website. “No matter what kind of a container, no matter how solid that container you put into the ground, sooner or later it will rot and it will break – and whatever is in it will spread.”

Lingering waste

While nuclear power is marking a triumphant return as a “clean energy” more than a decade after the Fukushima disaster, at stake is the often glossed-over detail of what to do with the radioactive waste that lingers for a staggering 10,000 to 100,000 years. The number of reactors globally is increasing as countries prepare for soaring power demands from artificial intelligence and data centres. But just getting this repository built and accepting spent fuel could take decades.  

Construction on the repository, which could store an estimated 5.9 million used nuclear fuel bundles, is slated to begin in 2033 and finish in 2043. The project is to be funded through a trust established by Ontario Power Generation, Hydro-Québec, Atomic Energy of Canada and New Brunswick Power Nuclear Corp.  

The NWMO has been in talks with Ignace and the Wabigoon alongside 22 other candidates since 2010.

“This is a huge project,” Pastore said. “We’re looking at 700 to 1,000 jobs at any given time at that facility.”

Eagle Lake and We The Nuclear Free North are aligned surrounding their challenge to the term “host community.” They raise the point that communities along the waste transportation route are also “hosts” to the same risks as the destination communities.  

“Throughout the decision-making process, NWMO refused to engage with Eagle Lake First Nation in good faith, refused to provide criteria for its recognition of a host community, refused to provide notice or reasons for its rejection of Eagle Lake as a host community that are justifiable, intelligible or transparent, and refused to inform Eagle Lake of what evidence it could produce to substantiate its position that it should be a host community,” the First Nation community said in its December court filing.

Road transport

Craig MacBride, spokesperson for the NWMO, said it will take around 50 years to transport the fuel and fill the repository. Transportation plans haven’t been finalized, but it’s likely to be rail or road.  

“If it were road, it would probably be two or three trucks a day for about nine months of the year, every year for like 40 years,” MacBride said. “After that’s done, there’ll be an extended period of monitoring, which could last many decades,” he said. “Our assumptions are 70 years of monitoring.”

But MacBride said the final decisions will be made by future societies when monitoring finishes around 2160.  

“The decommission and closure of the facility is expected to take about 30 years, which takes you to 2190 based on current assumptions,” MacBride said. “The closure will be decided in collaboration with the NWMO and communities of the time. (…) We don’t want to handcuff them with decisions made now.”  

Currently, used nuclear fuels are stored in cooling ponds before being moved into temporary storage containers that last about 50 years.  

“These are warehouses that are near the generating stations, which are generally on the shores of lakes like Lake Ontario and Lake Huron,” MacBride said. “It’s safe now, but what does 800 years from now look like?”

Ice-age proof

The vault is built to withstand a 3-km ice sheet on top of it, about the same thickness as the last ice age 20,000 years ago across that part of Canada. The plan also includes contingencies for societal collapse or future humans stumbling on the site.  

Heather Exner-Pirot, director of the Natural Resources, Energy and Environment program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, has tracked the establishment of the repository closely.

“We often think that nuclear waste is the Achilles heel of nuclear energy,” Exner-Pirot said. “(But) compared to any other processes and the energy production, this is an industry that actually knows where every single gram of waste it has ever produced is and monitors and inventories it and actually has a plan to remove it from the ecosphere.”

As the project moves into the regulatory and assessment stage, MacBride said the NWMO is already starting to look for a second site.  

“We see this as taking the burden off future generations and starting the process now.”