Activists from several nuclear-free watchdog groups are claiming that the nuclear industry will omit nuclear waste transportation from the impact assessment of the Northwestern Ontario deep geological repository project.

A statement issued by We the Nuclear Free North to The Chronicle-Journal on Wednesday calls on individuals, groups and organizations to make their voices heard, to ensure the long-distance transportation of nuclear fuel waste to the proposed deep geological repository is examined during the upcoming federal impact assessment of the repository project.

We the Nuclear Free North is an alliance of people and groups opposing a deep geological repository for nuclear waste in Northern Ontario.

Dodie LeGassick, nuclear lead for Environment North, said this is where the long-advocated proximity principle — the long-term management of nuclear fuel waste close to its points of production — comes back into play.

“Transportation is the major issue in terms of getting the high-level waste up into Northwestern Ontario, and that’s why we always promote the proximity principle, which is essentially what they’re already doing,” LeGassick said. “For the past 60 years, they’ve safely kept the waste at the nuclear reactor sites. So we just recommend that they create bunkers and something a little safer and away from the lakes, then transportation would not be an issue.”

Elysia Petrone-Reitberger of Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki said the nuclear industry’s proposed repository project affects hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, and potentially millions of individuals, along the routes the nuclear waste would travel for at least 50 years.

“The Nuclear Waste Management Organization NWMO has always presented the transportation component as a part of the project, and it must be retained as part of the impact assessment,” Petrone-Reitberger said. “The industry’s categorical statement that transportation will be omitted from examination is strategic — they don’t want transportation scrutinized, as it’s a very weak spot in their safety case.”

But it is not the case, according to Carolyn Fell, manager of impact assessment communication with the NWMO. The transport of used nuclear fuel, from where it’s stored today to the repository, is already regulated through federal regulations, with Transport Canada and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

“We’re just not at that phase (in the project),” Fell said. “The next step in the project is to submit the initial project description to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, which formally starts the regulatory process, which takes about three years. After we submit the initial project description, the impact assessment agency will go out and seek comments.”

Fell added that this is where We the Nuclear Free North can provide comments to the impact assessment agency, which are all taken into consideration.

“We’ll get some feedback from the impact assessment agency, and about three months after that, we will get tailored impact statement guidelines, which will dictate what we need to put into our impact assessment,” she said. “It’s a regulatory process, and they are very robust.”

Fell pointed out that about 2,000 radioactive shipments are made safely every single day, and that’s why stringent regulatory requirements based on international standards that must be met for the transfer of used nuclear fuel already exist.

— With files from Doug Diaczuk, The Chronicle-Journal