Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm honoured to be invited to address the committee members today. My name is Gordon Edwards. I am president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, a not-for-profit organization. I have also served as a consultant on nuclear issues for governmental and non-governmental organizations for the last 40 years. For example, I was retained by the Office of the Auditor General last year to serve on an external advisory committee in connection with a performance audit of the CNSC.
I graduated from the University of Toronto in 1961 with a gold medal in mathematics and physics. In the ensuing years, I earned two master's degrees and a doctorate. In 1974 I coordinated a study on the role of mathematical sciences in Canadian business, finance, industry, government, and policy planning for the Science Council of Canada. This study was published in eight volumes, and copies were placed in all Canadian university libraries.
The greatest challenge facing the nuclear industry today is the question of nuclear waste, including the dismantling of radioactive structures and the decontamination of radioactive sites. Going forward, parliamentarians need to play a much more active oversight role. The industry is making plans to abandon these dangerous wastes right beside major bodies of water, such as the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and the Winnipeg River.
Important matters of public policy are being decided by default, by the nuclear industry and its regulator, based on technical considerations buttressed with scientific extrapolations, but these decisions are not wholly technical in nature, as they will implicate society as a whole. For example, right now there is a plan to ship 23,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid waste over a period of four years from Chalk River, Ontario, down to Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This type of material, containing a witch's brew of fission products and actinides, has never before been shipped anywhere in North America in liquid form. Nevertheless, there has been no environmental impact statement, nor have there been any public hearings having to do with this proposal. I believe Parliament should be intervening in this and saying, “Wait a minute. What's going on here?”
There are other questions here. Should the radioactive internals of the nuclear power demonstration reactor and the Whiteshell WR-1 reactor in Manitoba simply be entombed right beside the rivers where they were built, where they will remain dangerous for many thousands of years? Or should all the nuclear waste from all of Ontario's reactors, except the irradiated nuclear fuel, be placed in a deep geological repository less than one mile from the waters of Lake Huron?
Surely these are societal decisions and should involve our elected representatives. This is especially so when two DGRs, deep geological repositories, in Germany, expressly built for the permanent disposal of non-fuel nuclear waste, have failed spectacularly. They figure it'll take 30 years to get the radioactive waste back out of the Asse II repository and the Morsleben repository. The German government has declared that what is happening now is unacceptable. As well, the DGR in Carlsbad, New Mexico, underwent a major failure in 2014, costing billions to set straight.
It would be beneficial to Canadians if the various agencies of the nuclear establishment, such as AECL, the CNSC, and the NWMO, were called upon to report regularly to a parliamentary committee at least once per session. This would allow parliamentarians to gain a better understanding of why the spending estimates for AECL have tripled from last year to this, going from $327 million to $969 million, or why the estimated radioactive cleanup costs for the town of Port Hope increased overnight from $800 million to $1.2 billion. That, by the way, is a federal program.
The safe, long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste is one of the world's major unsolved problems. There we're talking about the irradiated fuel, which is much more radioactive than the Port Hope waste or other waste.
In 1978 the Porter commission, the Ontario Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning, recommended a moratorium on any new nuclear power plants in Canada if the solutions to the nuclear waste problem were not forthcoming by 1985. We have surpassed that deadline by more than 30 years.
After 10 years of intense deliberations and public hearings in five provinces, the Seaborn panel unanimously recommended, in 1998, the formation of a nuclear fuel waste management agency that is independent of the nuclear industry, whose board includes representation from the stakeholders and indigenous peoples, and that reports directly to Parliament.
Instead, the Government of Canada created the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, an agency that is totally owned and operated by the nuclear industry, in particular by the nuclear fuel waste producers. There is a built-in conflict of interest in such an arrangement that may seriously undermine the public trust that is needed for a successful long-term nuclear fuel waste program.
In order to dramatize the scope of the nuclear fuel waste program, the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning published a graph in 1978 showing the radiotoxicity of irradiated nuclear fuel over a period of 10 million years. The graph shows the radiotoxicity declining for the first 50,000 years or so and then going back up again, not to the top: it becomes more toxic after that 50,000-year period. So it doesn't just simply go down and down. The radiotoxicity begins to increase again due to internal radiological changes in the fuel waste, which I could elaborate on, if you like.
For purposes of illustration, the graph also shows how much water would be required to dilute the irradiated nuclear fuel from one CANDU reactor produced in one year to the maximum allowed concentration of radioactive contamination for drinking water. For one year's worth of irradiated fuel from one CANDU reactor, the amount of water needed would be almost exactly equal to the volume of Lake Superior. By this calculation, if Ontario were considering 20 reactors operating for 30 years, we'd be talking something in the neighbourhood of 600 Lake Superiors.
Now, this is a totally theoretical calculation, but the purpose of it is to highlight the extreme toxicity of this material and the reason why it simply cannot be treated the way even other very long-lived, highly dangerous materials are treated. It has to be stored with virtual perfection, which is something humans are not so good at.
This brings me back to the question of siting. At the present time, the NWMO is looking for a willing host community in the vicinity of Lake Huron. Given the extraordinary radiotoxicity of irradiated nuclear fuel, and given the fact that these wastes will remain highly radiotoxic for literally millions of years, is it wise to store them right beside the Great Lakes, the source of drinking water for tens of millions of people?
The industry and the regulator plan to abandon these nuclear wastes after a certain finite period of time. In other words, monitoring and retrievability of the waste will not last forever. The intention is to cut the industry's liability and to terminate the regulator's obligations vis-à-vis the highly toxic material. Abandonment implies that amnesia will set in. At some point in the not-so-distant future, the dangerous nature of this waste will be forgotten. If it does start to leak after abandonment, people will be ill prepared to deal with the situation.
The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility believes it is essential to have parliamentary oversight of the nuclear industry, especially in matters of nuclear waste. Without a proper mechanism of accountability, monumental mistakes can be made. In the continental U.S.A., there have been eight separate attempts to locate a deep geological repository for irradiated nuclear fuel, and all of these attempts have ended in failure.
On a more positive note, there's going to be a multi-billion dollar industry in the field of nuclear demolition, particularly the dismantling of defunct nuclear power plants at a cost of about $1 billion each. The expense of decommissioning is due to the high levels of radioactivity found in the primary cooling system of the reactor due to contamination in the pipes spread from defective fuel bundles. In addition, there are radioactive activation products, such as cobalt-60 and many others, that build up in the entire core area of the reactor. The structural materials themselves become radioactive waste.
At one time it was believed that it would be better to wait 40 years or more after a reactor is shut down to begin the dismantling of a structure. However, European authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency are now recommending immediate dismantling to take advantage of the expertise and experience of those workers who know the plant inside out as a result of years of working there. Besides, there are potential contamination dangers that will not be alleviated by waiting 40 years. For example, carbon-14 dust, which contaminated a lot of Pickering workers at one point in time—