Press release - October 22, 2006
At public hearings on Monday in Kincardine, Ontario, Greenpeace Canada will urge the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to say ‘no’ to a low-level environmental assessment on Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) proposed radioactive waste dump, less than a kilometre from the shore of Lake Huron.
"The unprecedented proposal by Ontario Power Generation to dump
radioactive waste beside Lake Huron will make the Bruce region into
a permanent nuclear sacrifice area and affect future generations in
Canada and the United States for hundreds of thousands of years,"
said Dave Martin, Greenpeace Canada Energy Coordinator. "Any
proposal for these radioactive wastes demands the highest level of
scrutiny and independence - not the low-level environmental
assessment proposed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission."
The battle has been joined by 19 American environmental groups
who have expressed concerns because of possible transboundary
radioactive contamination of the Great Lakes. Congressman Bart
Stupak (D-MI) has written to the CNSC and Environment Minister Rona
Ambrose expressing his concern about the proposal. Stupak
represents Michigan's First Congressional District with half the
state's landmass and 1,613 miles of shoreline.
Some of the Canadian organizations fighting the radioactive
waste dump include: Greenpeace Canada, Northwatch, Citizens for
Renewable Energy, Sierra Club of Canada, David Suzuki Foundation,
Great Lakes United, and the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear
Responsibility. The Saugeen Ojibway Nations are also calling on the
CNSC for the proposed low-level environmental assessment to be
upgraded to a Panel Review, the highest level environmental review
under federal legislation.
Greenpeace Canada is calling on the CNSC to delay this
assessment process, since it would, in effect, allow the nuclear
industry to decide Canada's policy for the long-term management of
non-fuel radioactive wastes. This contravenes the federal
government's 1996 Radioactive Waste Policy Framework, which
stipulates that this responsibility lies with the federal
government. Greenpeace Canada filed a complaint with federal
Environment Commissioner regarding OPG's radioactive waste dump
proposal in June 2006.
Greenpeace has also called on the CNSC to include
decommissioning waste in planning for the Bruce facility; expand
the study area to include downstream communities on the Great Lakes
in Canada and the USA; extend the assessment timeframe to one
million years because of the long lifetime of radioactive elements
in the waste; include a worst-case accident scenario involving
leakage of radioisotopes from a deep underground dump; examine the
safety of radioactive waste transport from the Pickering and
Darlington sites to the Bruce site; and consider alternatives to
radioactive waste incineration.