This article was previously published in The Hill Times.
The legacy of strikes on nuclear sites has made evident that nuclear power plants and waste disposal sites could become targets in conflict zones.
By Erika Simpson| September 2, 2024
Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency says he will visit the Kursk nuclear power station in south-west Russia this week. He is taking “very seriously” the risk that the facility could be damaged during Ukraine’s incursion into the region.
The nuclear station is situated about 40 kilometres west of the city of Kursk, home to about 500,000 people. The station has two active reactors, two decommissioned older units, and two partly built ones. The two operating reactors have no protective dome. “It’s a Chernobyl-type plant,” Grossi said, with the reactor core “totally exposed.”
Ukrainian forces are advancing within range of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP), according to open sources, and Grossi noted that it is located “technically within artillery range” of Ukrainian positions. On Aug. 22, a Ukrainian drone carrying an anti-tank grenade was intercepted and downed near the spent fuel storage at the KNPP, Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported. The drone was brought down by electronic warfare countermeasures. The unmanned aircraft bore the logo of Ukraine’s Army of Drones project, and the Russian Federation informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Aug. 22 that its remains were found within the territory of the nuclear plant.
It may be possible to seriously damage a spent nuclear fuel pool with a drone. Spent fuel-pools contain some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet. Should a pool lose its cooling water, exposing spent fuel rods to steam or air, the rods will heat to the point of rupture, releasing enough radiation to seriously contaminate thousands of square kilometres.
Ukraine is deploying thousands of troops into the Kursk region, which includes the nuclear plant. Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have accused Ukraine of targeting the facility during the incursion.
Natural Resources Canada and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) can learn valuable lessons from the attacks on Kursk, and on Ukraine’s own Zaporizhian nuclear power plant, which has been under Russian control since early 2022.
The first lesson is that we need to keep radioactive waste out of the biosphere, but Canada’s new radioactive waste policy appears to provide the nuclear industry with free license to abandon radioactive waste quickly and cheaply. That will leave North Americans with little protection from radioactive wastes that will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years.
According to critics, Canada’s new policy fails to address problems identified by the IAEA which explicitly said defunct nuclear reactors should not be entombed in place except in extreme circumstances. Yet the new policy enables the abandonment of reactors beside Lake Huron (the Bruce reactors), Lake Ontario (Darlington and Pickering reactors), and the Ottawa and Winnipeg rivers.
Ukrainians and Russians did not give free, prior, and informed consent before the Russian-designed nuclear reactors were built. But Canada must obtain permission to store or dispose of waste on Indigenous Peoples’ territories, as laid out in article 29(2) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada affirmed the declaration, but a proposed radioactive waste site in unceded Algonquin territory is close to approval, and would violate this principle.
Broad-stroke reassurances from supporters of another proposed deep geological repository for Canada’s nuclear waste have failed to allay important environmental and serious security concerns for current and future generations.
This October, the tiny community of Teeswater, Ont., will hold a municipal referendum on the plan to store all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste in one deep geological repository (DGR). An earlier plan had proposed burying intermediate- and low-level nuclear waste in limestone caverns constructed under the Bruce reactor, but was met with a “no” vote from members of the Saugeen-Ojibway Nation. That led to Bruce Power withdrawing its own proposal in June 2020.
The current proposal for a $23-billion DGR project may be constructed 50 kilometres away from the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, the world’s largest operating nuclear site that supplies 30 per cent of Ontario’s power. Whether the proposal goes ahead in partnership with a willing host community will be decided by the Governor in Council. Once one of the two remaining possible host communities—either Teeswater or Ignace, Ont.—is selected, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada will continue to lead decades-long consultation processes.
The legacy of strikes on nuclear sites, like the Russian assault on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, has made evident that nuclear power plants and waste disposal sites could become targets in conflict zones. Few people in Canada are publicly asking about terrorist threats, and whether the site could become hostage to nefarious bargaining.
In light of the attacks on nuclear power plants in Europe, the NWMO—which is responsible for developing and implementing Canada’s plan—should reconsider other options, such as a rolling stewardship model, which actively plans for retrieval and periodic repackaging of nuclear waste.
Erika Simpson is an associate professor of international politics at Western University, the author of Nuclear Waste Burial in Canada? The Political Controversy over the Proposal to Construct a Deep Geologic Repository, and Nuclear waste: Solution or problem? She is also the president of the Canadian Peace Research Association.