Let me begin with the fact that we have three, I would guess, classes of nuclear waste, if you would describe it as that. One is the so-called “heritage waste”, which has actually come from the days when the federal government was responsible for and was managing the extraction and the shipment of all the uranium that was mined. There are sites, historically, that have fallen to the federal government to renovate.
Some of the first announcements made by this Minister of Natural Resources were around the funding, I think, of about $540 million towards dealing with the “legacy waste”, as it's called. It is in fact restoration work around transportation lines in northern Saskatchewan and other parts of the country. It is dealing with low-level waste at Port Hope, where there was a uranium facility, which probably most of you have read about. And there was, in fact, an office in Montreal that was dealing with the historic waste from the original sites where a lot of work was done.
That classification of material, which is left over from the heritage development of the industry, resides with the federal government and has, I think, in most cases, been the same for places such as the United States or Great Britain, or otherwise. In fact, when Great Britain sold their operations, their nuclear state-owned operations, they obviously retained the liability to deal with the historic waste, and I think that has been the model that has most effectively been seen to be fair for all of the people in the societies where those choices have been made.
The second classification of waste is the low and intermediate level of waste, which really represents the tools, coveralls, and clothing that people wear when they are inside the units. Tools used to do actual work are probably also intermediate waste, as opposed to low. Those are contained in a single facility in Ontario, and probably also at site in Quebec, and also at Point Lepreau, where the materials are compacted. They are treated in many ways just like regular garbage, if I can describe it that way. So it is contained in a special way, but likewise, by the people who are operating the facilities.
The third batch—actually I guess there's a fourth—is really the spent fuel bundles, and those I've described in my remarks to Mr. St. Amand. The material goes into water first, and then from the water into the dry storage and moves forward.
The siting, which is what the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is now waiting for permission to proceed with, is seen to take upwards of 30 years, to find a site that is appropriate. The process is, I think—