When planning nuclear waste sites in Canada, consider Ukraine’s potential nuclear crisis
As more countries learn from the Ukraine war, the risk is that many inter-related problems surrounding nuclear power beset future generations for thousands of years.
An aerial view of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station—the world’s largest nuclear generating station—on the shore of Lake Huron, near Kincardine, Ont. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
OPINION | BY ERIKA SIMPSON |This article was also published in The Hill Times, July 6, 2023.
Nuclear reactors need cooling water to prevent nuclear accidents. That’s why the largest operating nuclear generating station in the world—the Bruce reactor in Ontario—was constructed on the shore of Lake Huron, and the Pickering and Darlington reactors were built on the shore of Lake Ontario.
Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is considering a proposal to bury all of our nation’s high-level nuclear waste in a borehole in Teeswater, Ont.,—situated in the Great Lakes water basin—or in Ignace, Ont., which is located on rivers that drain into the Hudson’s Bay water basin.
As seen in Ukraine, humankind’s future could be adversely affected by warring parties that take advantage of nuclear power plants in order to instil fear and foreboding about nuclear meltdowns that could possibly be worse than the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both Russia and Ukraine accused each other this week of plans to attack and potentially explode Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP)—the largest in Europe, and currently occupied by Russia since 2022.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is aware of reports of mines having been placed near the ZNPP’s cooling pond. The IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi travelled with a team of IAEA experts to the facility for a third time last month. “With military activities and tension intensifying in the area” and the explosion of the Kakhovka dam “further complicating the facility’s extremely challenging nuclear safety and security status,” the team saw first-hand that the Kakhovka reservoir had drained, he said.
The IAEA team advises the plant’s large cooling pond and different channels at or near the site hold sufficient reserves to be able to provide cooling water in the short- to medium-term in case the reservoir can no longer be used. Unfortunately, the IAEA is the only international organization that can provide independent and neutral assessments of the ZNPP’s safety and security. There are limits to the team’s access to the site, and reports according to Ukrainian officials are that Russia has mined the facility, and either Russia or Ukraine carried out drone attacks on the power supply switchyard.
At the same time as the plant copes with water-related scarcity, the ZNPP depends on a single 750 kilovolt power line for the electricity it needs for essential functioning, compared to the four power lines it used before Russia’s attack on Ukraine. According to the IAEA’s most recent public statement on June 21, the ZNPP lacks back-up power if the single line is lost.
The IAEA team saw significant damage and also remnants of parts of drones that had targeted the area. “Now more than ever, all sides must fully adhere to the IAEA’s basic principles designed to prevent a nuclear accident,” Grossi stated in a June 21 statement.
Observers in Canada may jump to the conclusion that a nuclear meltdown could poison all of Europe for thousands of years—and it is not worth our lives so that Ukraine can be whole—but we need to pay careful attention to Grossi’s assessment that “while the presence of any explosive device is not in line with safety standards, the main safety functions of the facility would not be significantly affected.”
Nevertheless, questions remain about what could happen if the water at the Kakhovka reservoir continues to recede. In light of the lessons learned from the ZNPP debacle, the design of all nuclear reactors and disposal facilities should prioritize the protection of water, particularly large water basins.
In future, long-term caretaking of reactors and disposal facilities needs to be internationally monitored as well as nationally ensured. Consent from local communities in whose territory future facilities will be planned must be obtained through democratic processes. In Canada, Indigenous Peoples must be consulted, and must be able to exert a veto because their water basins and livelihoods could be affected for more than seven generations into the future.
Ukrainians near the ZNPP site must wish they could have vetoed the Soviet Union’s decision to build the facility back in 1980. The six Soviet-designed water-cooled reactors contain uranium 235 with a half-life of more than 700 million years, according to Reuters. Due to the war, all six reactors are in cold shutdown; however, electrical pumps still must somehow move precious water through the reactor cores to cool the fuel.
Canada’s NWMO submitted its recommendations for an Integrated Strategy for Radioactive Waste to our minister of natural resources on June 30. The NWMO claims it engaged for two years (during the COVID-19 pandemic) on issues surrounding what to do with nuclear waste including high-level waste that will remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet what the NWMO recommends regarding high-level waste still remains unclear. Whether all the waste should be buried or stored above ground until humankind develops new technologies that ensure it is not reusable remains an unanswered scientific and technical question. How might it be transported on Canada’s highways and disposed of so that it is not a credible soft target attracting the interest of warring parties is an unanswered dilemma.
The NWMO’s new strategy recommends that intermediate-level waste and “non-fuel, high-level waste from medical isotope production” be disposed of in a deep geological repository. Where will such a depository or depositories, and the high-level waste, and the waste from proposed Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) be buried if SMRs are indeed successfully developed and distributed in remote areas?
The answers to these sorts of questions, and related consent-based siting processes, should involve all Canadians. As more countries learn from the Ukraine war, the risk is that many inter-related problems surrounding nuclear power beset future generations for thousands of years.
Erika Simpson is a professor of international politics at Western University, the president of the Canadian Peace Research Association and the author of many articles on nuclear issues available on Western University’s expert gallery.