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Residents of South Bruce, a municipality about 120 kilometres north of London, Ont., have narrowly voted in favour of hosting a nuclear waste disposal site.

The unofficial results of a referendum published Monday evening by Simply Voting, an online voting platform, showed that, of the 3,130 votes cast, 51.2 per cent voted in favour while 48.8 per cent were opposed.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a non-profit organization representing major nuclear power generation utilities, has been searching since 2010 for a site to permanently store spent fuel from nuclear reactors. There, a facility known as a deep geological repository, or DGR, would be constructed more than half a kilometre underground at an estimated cost of $26-billion.

South Bruce, home to about 6,200 residents, is a rural, largely agricultural area of less than 500 square kilometres. It includes a few small communities, including Mildmay, Formosa, Culross and Teeswater. The NWMO has secured more than 1,500 acres of land north of Teeswater for the project.

From the outset, the NWMO said it would build the facility only “in an area with informed and willing hosts” – one municipality and one Indigenous group. South Bruce is one of two finalists to host the DGR, down from an original list of 22 communities that expressed interest. The NWMO said it will announce its final selection by Dec. 31.

Under a hosting agreement the municipality signed earlier this year, South Bruce stands to receive $418-million over nearly a century and a half if selected. The municipality agreed not to do anything to oppose or halt the project, and at the NWMO’s request will communicate its support. The NWMO can modify the project in several respects, such as changing the kind of waste it will store there. The facility would be constructed between 2036 and 2042 and would then receive, process and store nuclear waste for another half-century.

South Bruce’s referendum, which began last week, asked residents to vote by phone or online on whether they were willing to host the DGR. Simply Voting reported a turnout of 69.3 per cent, well above the 50-per-cent minimum required to make the outcome binding under Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act.

The other community still in the running is Ignace, Ont., a town of 1,200 more than 200 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay. Its council voted to host the DGR in July, a decision supported by 77 per cent of registered voters who participated in a non-binding online poll. The town would receive $170-million under its hosting agreement. The location, known as the Revell site, is about 40 kilometres west of Ignace.

The NWMO is also seeking approval from two Indigenous communities: the Saugeen Ojibway Nation for the South Bruce site and the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation for the Revell site. Neither First Nation has given its consent, but NWMO spokesperson Craig MacBride said the organization is “in active discussions” with both.

“The NWMO still anticipates selecting a site by the end of this year,” he wrote in an e-mailed response to questions.

As of June, 2023, Canada had accumulated 3.3 million spent nuclear fuel bundles, each the size of a fire log. They’re currently stored at nuclear plants in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, and roughly 90,000 new ones are added each year. Upon removal from a reactor, they are highly radioactive and must be stored in pools of water for about a decade; afterward, they’re moved to storage containers made of reinforced concrete and lined with half-inch steel plate.

The South Bruce referendum follows a campaign that lasted a dozen years and produced rifts within the community.

Protect Our Waterways, a local group opposed to the DGR from the outset, had demanded a referendum. Some DGR supporters opposed putting the matter to a public vote, preferring to leave the decision to elected officials. Municipal officials pointed to the area’s economic decline and shrinking population and emphasized the benefits of the NWMO money. Both sides often accused each other of spreading misinformation.

In a commentary published in August, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank, deemed geological disposal “the best long-term solution” for Canada’s nuclear waste, one supported by extensive planning, consultation and science.

“Our society will not last hundreds of thousands of years,” wrote Heather Exner-Pirot, the institute’s director of energy, natural resources and environment. “Geological disposal seeks to address the risks that nuclear waste poses in the inevitable event of societal breakdown or civilizational collapse.”

Several other countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Japan are also pursuing the construction of DGRs. Finland’s ONKALO repository, the first to be completed, has been running storage trials this year.

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