Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
I'd like to continue with the nuclear issue. One of the things I've taken an interest in is the deep geological repositories for radioactive material. I'm wondering how far off we are with new technology to deal with what's taking place. In Germany, the Morsleben and the Schacht DGRs have been decommissioned because they've been deemed unsafe. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico recently had a breach contaminating over 20 people. Thank goodness it was an isolated location.
OPG right now is considering Kincardine as a DGR. It's never been done before. It's within about a mile and a half of the Great Lakes. It's created quite a problem. There are about 153 resolutions representing 20 million people who are opposed to this, including the U.S. Congress and Senate, which has two distinctive bills about this. Canada once promised, under the Joe Clark regime, that they would never do this type of activity within 10 miles, I believe, of the Great Lakes. We seem to be breaching that agreement.
I would ask whether or not there has been any type of breakthrough. What we're doing now is that basically a shaft about the length of the CN Tower goes down into limestone. It doesn't seem like a very high-tech solution to take the secondary nuclear waste, bury it as deep as we possibly can, and hope that nothing happens for 100 million years. How far away are we from maybe some new technology that could actually deal with this waste in I think a little bit more of a sophisticated way? The minister now has our report on her table. She's put it off until after the next election and is actually calling for more hearings because of the complexity of this.
I'm just eager to hear whether there's any new technology on the forefront out there that could help deal with this problem, because I think it's a very crude way to deal with nuclear waste.