Deep ground nuclear repository is a bad idea

All is not as it seems with the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s (NWMO’s) statement earlier this month trumpeting its success in finding two communities willing to host the underground burial of Canada’s used nuclear fuel.

NWMO announced it had selected the Revell Lake area between Ignace and Dryden as a site for the deep burial of highly radioactive waste – waste that will remain an exceedingly dangerous hazard for hundreds of thousands of years.

In the Township of Ignace and Wabigoon Lake Ojibwe Nation, NWMO said, it now had the two “willing host” communities it needed to move ahead with the project to build a deep geological repository (DGR) to house high-level nuclear waste from nuclear reactors across Canada.

But the statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by NWMO to gaslight you and me, the Northwestern Ontario public.

In a referendum held in November, Wabigoon Lake Ojibwe Nation members agreed only to a process of “site characterization,” or environmental assessment. They didn’t rubber stamp the building of a DGR.

The community’s “yes vote does not signify approval of the project” to build a DGR, said Chief Clayton Wetelainen in a post-referendum statement. NWMO knows this, of course, which is why its statement to the contrary demonstrates the lengths to which it will go to manufacture consent.

According to We the Nuclear Free North, NWMO has “used the Township of Ignace as a proxy decision-maker, excluding residents and communities downstream from the site and along the transportation route.”

Curiously, Ignace is more than 45 kilometres from the Revell area and in a different watershed. There are many communities closer to DGR ground zero that, also curiously, have not been consulted.

And then there are the many, many communities along the thousands of kilometres long route across which NWMO plans to truck the waste – three shipments each day for nine months of the year for 50 years or longer. More than 40,000 shipments. Those communities haven’t been consulted either.

Northwestern Ontarians are well aware of the many accidents involving transport trucks on Highway 17 and other major arterial roads. They won’t be convinced that a catastrophic spill of highly radioactive waste can’t happen.

But NWMO will trot out all kinds of self-serving reasons why trucking the waste is super safe.

As We the Nuclear Free North and other concerned organizations know, there is a sensible alternative to a DGR. Nuclear waste can be maintained and monitored near its sites of production, just like it is today. Secure, above-ground facilities can be utilized until better management strategies are developed.

Currently there is no DGR for high-level nuclear waste operating anywhere in the world. This means that NWMO views the citizens of Northwestern Ontario as little more than global guinea pigs.

As We the Nuclear Free North adds, “A DGR is beyond risky – it is an experimental, reckless gamble posing a grave threat to present and future generations.”

Gary Kenny,
Shuniah – tbnewswatch.com

article website here

When the science says that these underground depositories are safe and that the method of transporting the spent nuclear fuel rods is safe, people have serious doubts.  What about the future?  Who knows what will happen to all that material stored underground for all of those hundreds and thousands of years? What about the children?

But allowing, no INSISTING on the injections of a novel, untested, unproven, rushed, largely secret ‘vaccine’ that has had  no long term studies, and is largely ineffective with huge potential  for dangerous side effects on human health for generations to come; injecting that ‘vaccine’  into the bodies of everyone on the planet including children as young  as new-borns and doing that over and over again forever is OK?  No potential future health problems there?  No worries about the children’s futures?   Seriously?

Which is worse?  I will take the underground depositories any day over being an unwilling part of a giant long term ‘vaccine’ safety study.