I can.
There are two stages now in the Canadian context, in the world context. As the material comes from the calandria, where it is generating the heat to generate the electricity, it is put in water sometimes called the swimming pool and it cools there between seven and ten years. Then it is moved into dry storage above ground in concrete designed facilities in Douglas Point, which was our first prototype commercial operation, a 200-megawatt unit at Bruce. Those are above-ground storage facilities that look like silos. At Becancoeur, they are what is called a “max store”, designed by AECL, which is a different shape, but they do the same thing. They contain in dry storage the spent fuel. And that is where it is now.
The third phase, which is what the NWMO has worked on, is then to take the material and introduce it into a deep geological repository with the prospect that there will be an intermediate step, slightly below-ground storage area, which would permit us not only to monitor the dry fuel storage area, but also to retrieve it, if we needed to reprocess it.
So I think the big thing is that when we first started taking the material from the calandrias, we theoretically had an understanding of what would happen. When I toured the Douglas Point facility, which was taken out of service in the mid-eighties, I asked if things were happening the way they were expected to with respect to the decommission that occurred there. And people identified that is exactly what's happening.
The interesting thing about physics is that it's physics, and once you know the properties of the materials you're dealing with, you can predict pretty well how this is going. What you can predict as well is how the man-made structures that are designed to contain and deal with them are working, and those structures are all working extremely well indeed.
So we've been very sophisticated. We've got a lot of science that goes into dealing with it. And I think the other thing that permits us some degree of comfort is that the deep geological repository option is one that is also well along the way in Finland as well as in Sweden as well as in France. Of course I think everybody has probably heard about the Yucca Mountain Program. So we're on the right track, a good strong record now of forty-plus years of storage. I think in the early days we thought we'd just be leaving it. I think now we're turning our minds to thinking about making sure we can get at that energy when we need it later.