I found this pop can in the ice bin out there, and I brought it to sit with me, because this is the amount of nuclear waste that you would produce if, during your entire life as a member of an OECD country, all of your energy was produced by nuclear energy. We produce very little waste, and all of the waste that Canada's produced in the last 60 years could be stored in one hockey rink piled 32 feet high, or the height of one telephone pole. It's incredibly energy-dense and therefore produces very little waste, and we have a good, permanent solution for that, which is the deep geologic repository. There's one being built in Finland right now, and that can store waste on geologic time frames.
The challenge that anti-nuclear people have when it comes to nuclear waste is demonstrating a mechanism for it to get out and harm people. The geology that we are looking at contains water; water can only move one metre per million years through that rock, and that's the mechanism by which any of this waste could ever get out. We have excellent geology here; we have a proven way to deal with nuclear waste on a long-term basis.
Those were some of my comments at the NRC committee last month.