Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County
P.O. Box 981, Pembroke, Ontario K8A 7M5
March 1995
BACKGROUNDER: AECL'S DISPOSAL CONCEPT IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR POCKETBOOK, YOUR HEALTH, AND YOUR COMMUNITY
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) wants the federal government to approve its "disposal concept" of putting high level nuclear waste in the Canadian Shield. It also wants Canadian taxpayers to pay for this. AECL's "Environmental Impact Statement on the Concept for Disposal of Canada's Nuclear Fuel Waste" contains the following recommendation:
We recommend that those who have responsibility for the safe management of used fuel - the federal government and the owners of the used fuel - also have responsibility for implementing the disposal concept.
In effect, AECL is recommending that Canadian taxpayers agree to pay whatever costs are incurred in disposing of high-level nuclear wastes from their reactors.
The notion that high level wastes from AECL-made reactors are the taxpayer's responsibility is consistent with AECL's philosophy for dealing with its own wastes. Canada's Auditor General has repeated criticized AECL's failure to properly account for hundreds of millions of dollars of decommissioning costs for its own facilities, including highly contaminated buildings and leaking waste dumps at the Chalk River Laboratories. AECL responded to the Auditor General as follows:
we anticipate that this liability arising from past asset usage will continue to be met from dedicated government funding. Therefore, no liability has been recognized in the accounts. Management regrets that the corporation's auditor disagrees that this is the appropriate treatment in the circumstances.
Nor is AECL shy in asking taxpayers to fund its nuclear reactor research and development costs. AECL was left untouched by the recent federal budget cutting exercise, and will receive in excess of $170 million in tax-free government hand-outs for the fiscal year 1995-96. Total R&D subsidies during AECL's history have exceeded $10 billion. In return for this federal largesse, provincial utilities such as Ontario Hydro have been saddled with billions of dollars of additional debt when forced to write off nuclear stations that can not meet their expected lifetime performance for power generation.
AECL still pursues a dream of building a new CANDU reactor in Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, but its main target is overseas markets, particularly in Third World Countries. It has set a strategic objective of "obtaining one-quarter of the emerging global market for nuclear electricity". Past reactor deals with Argentina, Romania, and South Korea have been heavily financed by federal government loans. Some deals have also involved bribe payments from AECL's agents. Details of these deals are shrouded in secrecy, and it is possible that they include agreements to return nuclear fuel wastes to Canada.
Few people are aware that CANDU reactors, which use natural uranium, produce over five times more high level nuclear waste than other reactor designs with comparable electricity output which use enriched uranium. The Worldwatch Institute recently reported that Canada's commercial nuclear reactors had accumulated 17,700 tons of high level fuel wastes by 1990, while all U.S. reactors had produced 21,800 tons by that same year.
Health and safety concerns: poorly addressed by the EIS
The Environmental Impact Statement for AECL's "disposal concept" stresses the advantages of having nuclear waste buried underground, while downplaying the hazards of operating the disposal site. AECL redefines the word "safe" to mean "meeting criteria, guidelines, and standards". This curious definition avoids the contentious issue of health impacts of radiation, notably cancers and immune system damage. AECL does not explain that "criteria, guidelines, and standards" for radiation exposure have been repeatedly lowered as new evidence of adverse health impacts has emerged. It should be noted that standards have been set by international bodies which are isolated from public input.
Although underground sites for high level nuclear wastes are an option worth investigating, there are major advantages in not rushing to approve a vague "concept" of permanent burial. For several years after being removed from the reactor, used fuel rods are literally "too hot to handle". As fuel wastes remain in above-ground storage at reactor sites, radiation and heat levels decline. By lengthening the period of above-ground storage, radiation exposures to workers and the general public during transportation and handling, and the hazards of a fuel waste accident, will be greatly reduced. The Environmental Impact Statement is virtually silent on this issue.
Another reason for delaying approval of a permanent burial concept is scientific uncertainty about the possibility of an atomic explosion of buried wastes. A U.S. researcher has warned that as burial casks break down thousands of years in the future, dispersal of long-lived wastes such as plutonium-239 and uranium235 in rocks and water could lead to a chain reaction and a series of nuclear blasts. Whereas dozens of U.S. scientists have been arguing over such matters, AECL seems intent upon obtaining approval with only minimal funding for an independent technical review. Environmental groups that sought to hire scientific experts to review AECL's disposal concept were given inadequate funding for this purpose by the intervenor funding panel.
Why is AECL avoiding the siting issue?
Environmental groups have severely criticized AECL's plan of seeking approval for the "concept" of nuclear waste burial in the Canadian Shield without conducting detailed investigations on a particular site. They charge that this amounts to a public relations exercise from which AECL wishes to conclude that a "solution" for the nuclear waste problem has been found. AECL is simply wasting public funds in the current environmental assessment exercise, knowing that the process will have to be repeated if a site is chosen in the future. Ontario's Minister of Environment and Energy has already emphasized this point, stating that "any proposal for the management of used nuclear fuel that is brought forward in Ontario will have to be evaluated under Ontario's environmental assessment process".
Northern native communities are already being targeted as potential hosts for the disposal site, despite the absence of siting considerations in the Environmental Impact Statement. Saskatchewan's Meadow Lake Tribal Council has expressed an interest in creating a nuclear fuel waste disposal site on its lands. This raises the possibility that siting on native lands could be used as an excuse to avoid a full federal environmental assessment.
The Environmental Impact Statement does not rule out the possibility that a Canadian site could accept nuclear fuel wastes from other countries. Environmental groups suspect that AECL's attempt to gain "concept" approval is linked to its efforts to increase reactor exports. Unless nuclear waste imports are clearly ruled out, issues such as thefts of waste fuel and nuclear terrorism must be addressed. This becomes more significant in light of a clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement may expressly forbid Canada from restricting nuclear waste fuel shipments from the United States and Mexico.