The Point Lepreau nuclear power plant in Point Lepreau, N.B., on July 9, 2018.Kevin Bissett/The Canadian Press
Two Ontario municipalities are vying to become hosts for an underground disposal facility for Canada’s nuclear waste. Both must formally announce in the coming months whether they’ll accept the facility – but they cannot know exactly what wastes they’d be agreeing to receive.
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) designed its $26-billion facility, known as a deep geological repository, to receive spent fuel from Candu reactors located in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. This year, it plans to choose between the last two sites still in the running: the Municipality of South Bruce, Ont., located more than 120 kilometres north of London; or near Ignace, Ont., a town of 1,200 more than 200 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.
But since the project was conceived, two of NWMO’s three members (Ontario Power Generation and New Brunswick Power) proposed to build new reactors that would burn different fuels and produce novel wastes. The organization guarantees reactor developers that it will dispose of these wastes, even though their nature might not be understood for decades. And in the past few months, both candidate municipalities signed agreements that spell out how the project could be modified to receive such wastes, while limiting their ability to refuse.
These provisions help reduce uncertainty for the nuclear industry. A roadmap produced last year by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a U.S. lobby group, noted that because most small modular reactors (SMRs) being developed would burn different fuels from those of existing reactors, “technology neutral” criteria for accepting spent fuel into repositories was needed as soon as this year in both Canada and the United States.
But the provisions could make it harder to find willing hosts.
Ignace will decide through a council resolution whether it will accept the repository by July 30. South Bruce will hold a by-election in late October.
Consent from First Nations is also required. NWMO spokesperson Fred Kuntz said the organization is negotiating hosting agreements with both Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation for the Ignace project and Saugeen Ojibway Nation for the one in South Bruce. Both are in a position to effectively halt the project, and both have indicated they are not open to accepting SMR wastes at this time.
Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at York University, said the NWMO’s decision to accept responsibility for non-Candu wastes means the host communities can’t know the nature of some of the waste they’ll receive, nor the quantity.
“They really are being asked for a blank cheque.”
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Canada’s waste inventory includes 3.3 million Candu fuel bundles as of last year, and grows by about 90,000 annually. Each is about the size of a firelog and weighs slightly less than 20 kilograms. They’re highly radioactive upon removal from a reactor, and must be stored in pools of water for about a decade before they can be moved to storage containers. Utilities have considerable experience handling the bundles, and the industry has developed copper-clad containers to place them in, which in turn would be encased in bentonite clay in underground chambers.
The municipalities also agreed to accept fuel owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., a Crown corporation that operated several research reactors. There are dozens of types of wastes from these reactors, in far smaller amounts.
The hosting agreements detail what the NWMO is offering in return. South Bruce says it’s expecting $418-million over nearly a century and a half. Ignace anticipates $170-million. Jake Pastore, a spokesperson for Ignace, said its lower amount in part reflects the fact that the repository’s site is more than 30 kilometres west of the town, whereas the South Bruce site is on farmland within its boundaries and subject to local taxes.
And the agreements clarify what the repository won’t be receiving: Both agreements explicitly prohibit storing liquid nuclear waste. Waste originating from another country is similarly verboten.
Beyond these provisions, however, the agreements afford the industry considerable flexibility.
Ignace has agreed that the repository could accept spent fuel from SMRs and other non-Candu sources, provided a licence application has been filed with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The commission is considering three SMR-related applications.
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The agreement also lays out a process by which the repository’s scope can be changed to accept other forms of spent fuel. Mr. Pastore said the NWMO would have to complete an “intense” regulatory review before introducing non-approved wastes. The organization has provided assurances, he added, that it would not bring such wastes unless there was “full agreement on moving forward.”
Both agreements contain dispute-resolution mechanisms, but the municipalities have agreed to support the NWMO in any regulatory process, including proposals to modify the project’s scope. Ignace has agreed not to support any resident or other municipality that opposes a regulatory approval sought by the organization.
“They’re basically surrendering any kind of fundamental right of public dissent on the part of the mayor and town council,” said Gordon Edwards, a consultant who runs a non-profit organization called the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
“We’re talking about binding future generations.”
South Bruce’s agreement is less permissive than Ignace’s. It doesn’t make direct references to accepting SMR wastes. And it stipulates that before making a regulatory application to modify the repository’s scope, the NWMO must notify the municipality at least three years in advance. The municipality would have an opportunity to provide comments and the organization must make “good faith efforts” to address them, and provide reasons if it rejects the municipality’s suggestions.
Dave Rushton, a spokesperson for South Bruce, said the municipality understands that it may later be asked to store non-Candu wastes, but it’s comfortable that its agreement affords adequate protections. Any non-Candu wastes wouldn’t be deposited in the repository for the next half century, leaving time to learn about its properties.
“And then if we are not satisfied, we can let the regulator know that we’re not happy, and why we’re not happy,” he said.
The types of waste produced in Canada could change significantly if the nuclear industry’s plans come to fruition.
Candus consume natural uranium with minuscule concentrations of the more fissile uranium-235. But most reactors in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere use “enriched” fuel containing higher quantities of U-235. Virtually all SMRs would use enriched fuels. And some would use exotic fuels for which there is limited international experience.
For example, New Brunswick Power proposes to build an ARC-100 reactor at its Point Lepreau plant, which would use a metallic uranium alloy fuel. The vendor, ARC Clean Technologies, said its reactor will need to be refuelled only every 20 years, and wastes from the proposed facility “will be fully characterized” and placed in appropriately sized and approved on-site storage containers while awaiting final disposal.
New Brunswick Power also seeks to build a molten salt reactor called the Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner. A 2021 study of reactor technologies by the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that all molten salt reactors it reviewed lacked “a well-formulated plan for management and disposal” of spent fuel.
“There’s so many different SMR designs, and I don’t think we can predict, in 2024, if many or any of them are ever going to go into production,” said Brennain Lloyd, a project co-ordinator with the environmental group Northwatch, which opposes the Ignace repository.
“But there’s potential that we could have a number of different designs, and all of them might behave differently. That’s a dog’s breakfast of additional risk.”
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On its website, the NWMO has said that SMR waste “will have characteristics similar” to spent Candu fuel. But Ed Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that assertion is “patently false.” The ARC-100′s fuel, for instance, is “completely different in every respect” from Candu fuel bundles.
“Canada is deeply involved in a number of projects,” he said. “They’re all different, they all have considerably different potential waste forms, which have not even been characterized. In each case, there’s little to no experience with managing the waste from these reactors.”
Mr. Kuntz, the NWMO spokesperson, said his organization is in talks with several reactor vendors. But decisions on how to accommodate their wastes won’t be made until an operating licence has been issued. Only then would enough information exist to understand the waste’s chemistry, durability or other characteristics that might affect the repository’s design. SMR wastes might also be sent to another repository, he added.
The Saugeen Ojibway Nation, from whom the industry seeks consent, has objected in writing to receiving SMR waste in its territory, adding that this “fundamental change in circumstances” means its discussions with the NWMO must be “reset.” It said its concerns about these wastes have not been addressed, and it’s not satisfied with the information it provided. “The ground is shifting beneath us, and the original project description no longer reflects the reality,” it declared in a regulatory submission in November.
In an interview, Chief Gregory Nadjiwon of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation – one of the two member nations of Saugeen Ojibway Nation – said his organization is looking for resolution to wastes that have long been in its territory at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. It’s disinclined to receive wastes from other Candu stations outside its territory, let alone from SMRs.
“If you have a complex issue that hasn’t been resolved, why would you add another layer to it?”
Clayton Wetelainen, chief of the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, said his community is negotiating with the NWMO only to receive 5.9 million Candu bundles. “That’s all we’re discussing at this point,” he said. As for proposed SMR wastes, the First Nation has not received information about their nature, nor the expected quantities.
“We believe that should be a separate process,” he said.
More controversial still is the possibility that the repository might accept wastes from reprocessing – which means applying physical and chemical processes to spent fuel to recover fissionable products, which could be used for new reactor fuel.
The notion of doing this commercially in Canada has percolated for decades. But an NWMO report published in 2005 warned reprocessing would “inevitably produce residual radioactive wastes that could be more difficult to manage than used nuclear fuel in its un-reprocessed form.” And some of the material separated during reprocessing could be used to make nuclear bombs.
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Two decades on, reprocessing seems to be gaining traction. The federal government has contributed more than $50-million in funding to Moltex Energy, a startup company which in partnership with New Brunswick Power plans to build a reprocessing plant at Point Lepreau.
Moltex has said it would strip the zirconium alloy cladding from Candu fuel, and then place the uranium pellets in a bath of molten salt – the beginning of a process of extracting radioactive components to include in fuel for its proposed reactor. It says wastes from this process are more compact and less hazardous than the original spent fuel, and easier to deal with – and it believes its reprocessing wastes will meet the repository’s acceptance criteria.
The NWMO, however, has noted that commercial reprocessing to date has resulted in “large volumes of chemically complex wastes,” most of which must be placed in a repository. Reprocessed uranium tends to be “very radioactive,” it observed.
Mr. Edwards said that when a Candu fuel bundle is demolished for reprocessing, all of the radioactive materials contained within are released into a solid or liquid form. “You no longer have these nicely packaged fuel bundles, you have something that’s much more complex and more difficult to manage.”
Documents released by New Brunswick Power under the province’s freedom of information legislation, and supplied to The Globe and Mail by nuclear issues researcher and activist Susan O’Donnell, show the corporation regarded long-term storage of reprocessing wastes as critical for attracting investors for its next-generation reactor projects.
Mr. Wetelainen said Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation cannot predict how reprocessing technology might evolve in coming decades, and it should not be part of the current negotiations. But the option of reprocessing should be kept open.
“Retrievability is one of the issues that we brought up,” he said.
Mr. Edwards said that reprocessing is the dirtiest segment of nuclear fuel chains. Sites where it has taken place, such as Hanford, Wash., in the U.S., Sellafield in Britain, and La Hague in France, are heavily contaminated and could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up. The two candidate municipalities should have obtained legally binding vetoes against receiving reprocessing wastes, he said.
“Otherwise, they’re being led by the nose, assuming that one thing is going to happen when instead, something very different may end up happening – something that’s much more threatening to the community.”