Just to clarify, I'm not responsible for anything at AECL. I work in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency. I do work in the area of nuclear safeguards that are applied to all countries, including Canada. In the past, I worked at AECL, and I certainly addressed the issues of spent fuel management.
The question is, what can we do best now and into the future? What we can do now is, essentially, what we're doing now. We have surface storage of nuclear waste that is among the best forms of storage of waste on the planet. It's remarkably robust. Looking at used nuclear fuel, that is the reason why we can do it, because it is a robust material in the first place and, as I mentioned, it's all in one place.
What we're doing right now is fairly good. You mentioned, and I understand why, that it's odd to talk about future civilizations. It certainly is odd, but when you think about it, that's what we're talking about with geological repositories. Otherwise, there's no reason to change what we're doing now, because we're doing a very good job. If you visit the nuclear sites in Canada, you'll see where all the nuclear spent fuel is from the reactors, and it's very safe. That's good for hundreds of years, and good for as long as we can make civil structures.
Civil structures won't last forever, and neither will civilizations. We do have to worry about the glaciers, and not just the next glaciers but the glaciation period after that, and the one after that. They'll come every several tens of thousands of years, and that is all within the life of this material. That is all within the life of any toxic material that's out there. We are looking at only nuclear waste, when we talk about this time frame. I wish we could treat all toxic material the way we treat spent nuclear fuel, and the way we look to the point hundreds of thousands of years from now instead of just hundreds of years in dealing with it.
You did say it's odd, and odd is one of the reasons why it's hard to have this conversation with Canadians, because it is something that is way beyond—even hundreds of years way beyond—the normal horizon of people's imaginations.
Why are we talking about tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years? With nuclear waste, you can put pretty good numbers on the waste, because we have it all in one place, it's all in front of us, and it's highly characterized. As soon as you put the numbers on the waste and say how long it's going to last, then people get scared. They don't realize that there's a lot of other waste out there, and a lot of it's not kept in one place, but because we can put the numbers on it, it raises people's fears about how long it lasts.