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It’s a good thing seals aren’t on a humpback whale’s menu, particularly for a seal known as “Zillion.”
A photograph by a whale-watching naturalist captured the seemingly bewildered seal in the mouth of a humpback whale after it was accidentally gulped in the waters off Anacortes, Wash. After, Zillion was flushed out back to the ocean. “It was a funny, funny moment for everybody. I mean, it probably wasn’t that funny for the seal,” Captain Tyler McKeen said.
Over the last 25 years humpback whale numbers have recovered after they were hunted to local extinction, visiting the Salish Sea, the inland waters between British Columbia and Washington State, during their migrations.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
This photo provided by Blue Kingdom Whale and Wildlife Tours shows a seal in the mouth of a humpback whale on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in the waters off of Anacortes, Wash.Brooke Casanova/The Associated Press
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Do it yourself: Why and how to plant your own food forest
- After the fires: Finding hope in devastation, these Calgary brewers crafted a beer from the flowers that sprout after wildfires
- Energy: Oil and gas emissions swamp progress in other Canadian sectors, report says
- Politics: Liberal MPs accuse Jagmeet Singh of caving into Pierre Poilievre on carbon pricing
- Analysis from The Narwhal: A year after Ontario’s Greenbelt scandal, battles over proposed intrusions still simmer
A deeper dive
Nuclear waste’s forever home?
Around the world, nuclear power is getting a fresh look. For this week’s deeper dive, a peek into Canada’s plans to deal with waste.
What do we do about the radioactive waste? When it comes to nuclear energy, that is the problem that troubles many Canadians.
Canada’s nuclear authorities believe that they have the answer: They will isolate the used reactor fuel in a “deep geological repository,” or DGR. Specialists would bore down about 700 metres to reach stable rock formations, creating a shaft deeper than the CN Tower is tall.
Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) plans to choose a community that will play host to that unusual tomb by the end of this year. Wherever it goes, it will be a massive undertaking, costing an estimated $26-billion and taking years of preparation and construction. Ignace, in Northwestern Ontario and South Bruce in Southern Ontario are considering taking on the role.
A South Bruce group that is against hosting a DGR calls it “a centuries-long science experiment.” No one, says the website for Protect Our Waterways, “has ever designed, built and operated a DGR for high-level nuclear waste, anywhere in the world.”
The problem is not: that the reactors produce an incredible amount of waste. Decades of nuclear-power generation in Canada has yielded 3.3 million fuel bundles. Stacked like firewood, they would fill nine hockey rinks up to the top of the boards.
The problem is: that the fuel remains a potential hazard for a long – very long – time. Though it loses most of its radioactivity in the first 10 years, bringing it down to one-thousandth of its value when it was removed from the reactor, the remaining radiation lingers on for hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. Only after about a million years does its radioactivity return to a level equal to that of the uranium ore from which it was created.
When designing a solution, the agency had to think in science-fiction terms about what might happen in the distant future. To learn more about ideas and questions around Canada’s nuclear waste storage, read more here.
Illustration by Murat Yukselir
What else you missed
- Liberal House Leader calls Pierre Poilievre a ‘fraudster’ over his carbon price warning
- Future of Montreal basement apartments in question over flooding
- In NY and elsewhere, climate protesters say pace of change isn’t fast enough
- The number of rhinos is slightly up but poaching has increased too
- Zoos need to become more involved in conservation than entertainment, zoo conference hears
Opinion and analysis
Andrew Coyne: The conservative defeat of carbon pricing is the defeat of economics – and of conservatism
Editorial board: Mr. Singh, meet your ‘big polluters’: all of us
Green Investing
Shell scraps plans for hydrogen project in Norway
Shell has scrapped plans for a low-carbon hydrogen plant on Norway’s west coast due to a lack of demand, the energy company said on Monday, days after Equinor cancelled a similar planned project in Norway. On Friday, Equinor said it scrapped plans to produce blue hydrogen in Norway and export it to Germany because it was too expensive and there was insufficient demand.
- Brookfield Asset Management raises $2.4-billion for climate fund backed by UAE
- Lack of workers with ‘green skills’ a challenge for Canada’s low-carbon economy goals
The Climate exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackle 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 reader questions.
Photo of the week
A girl looks down from a balcony where red pepper ristras are hung to dry in Salqin village in Syria's rebel-held Idlib province, near the border with Turkey, on September 14, 2024. During harvest season, Salqin, alongside other towns of Syria's northwestern rebel-held Idlib region traditionally growing this crop, is colored red as farmers process the peppers, drying them on balconies and rooftops to produce flakes, paste, and powder, to be sold in local or external markets, a livelihood which has become threatened in recent years due to its increasing costs amid climate change and conflict.AAREF WATAD/AFP/Getty Images
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP28, and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- Resilience lives on in Mi’kmaq country
- Norway’s gamble into sustainable salmon farming
- Green Steel? Algoma wants to go electric
- As backyards disappear, urban planners still want to bring nature to our doorstep
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