Well, I think $100 billion is more than I have heard. I've heard that it's about a $16-billion federal legacy of radioactive waste disposal.
The difficulty is that we don't know how to eliminate or neutralize these wastes, so all we can do is stabilize them. The Port Hope waste, for example, consists of about two million cubic metres of radioactive waste materials. After eight years of trying to find a home for these wastes all over Ontario, they came up empty-handed. This was called the “siting task force” of the federal government.
Now, as a kind of booby prize, they have two large mounds right near Port Hope that will hold about one million cubic metres each. They're now using that temporary facility at Port Hope, which was never the goal in the first place. They're now using that model at Chalk River to have a giant mound of post-fission radioactive waste right beside the Ottawa River, about a kilometre away, with half-lives in it. Half of the radioactive materials in that mound have half-lives of over 100,000 years.