Science and Research committee  I think what we're seeing here is that the industry is coming to the government asking for accommodation to speed up the process so that they can get on with their private money-making job and also do, as they say, something about climate change. The problem is that they can't do

Science and Research committee  That's certainly important, because right now in Port Hope, Ontario, we have the largest municipal environmental cleanup in Canadian history—over $1 billion, or $1.2 billion—simply to retrieve a huge amount of radioactive waste that was dumped in the harbour. Hundreds of homes an

Science and Research committee  One of the greatest difficulties is how to prevent chemical reactions from occurring along the intermediate-level waste. In Carlsbad, New Mexico, there was a drum that exploded and turned into a flame-thrower. Radioactive dust went 750 metres up the shaft and contaminated 22 work

Science and Research committee  Thank you. You've certainly touched on something very important. What we've heard from the industry is that they have visions of how these SMRs could be used if somebody wanted them. The difficulty is that they don't have customers clamouring at the door and actually signing on

Science and Research committee  Generally speaking, these kinds of devices can be handled by a layperson over the short term. It's really a question of what happens afterwards. Cobalt-60 was mentioned earlier. We in Canada—OPG and Bruce Power—send cobalt-60 sources all over the world. Eighty per cent of the mar

Science and Research committee  Yes. This is a real problem. The unanimous recommendation of the Seaborn panel, way back in 1998, was that there should be a fully independent nuclear waste agency with a board of directors that represents various stakeholders. Instead what we have is a radioactive waste manageme

Science and Research committee  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

Science and Research committee  When we come to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, this organization will be spending an anticipated $26 billion to dispose of Canada's high-level radioactive waste from the commercial nuclear power plants. However, if they, for example, were to choose a site and emplace

Science and Research committee  Really, the technology for dealing with nuclear waste has not even been implemented for high-level waste. Also, as of now, Canada does not even have a policy for dealing with post-fission intermediate-level waste. We're really still at the dawn of the age of nuclear waste, and we

Science and Research committee  Thank you, Madam Chairman. My name is Gordon Edwards. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to make a brief presentation on SMRs. I'm a retired professor of science and mathematics. I'm also a co-founder and president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and ha

Environment committee  I didn't realize that this was going to be a panel on the glories of nuclear power rather than on radioactive waste governance. I thought we were going to be focusing on radioactive waste governance. Regardless of what benefits or not that nuclear power has, the wastes are going

Environment committee  What is a willing host community? If you talk about the Ignace situation, the actual disposal site they're looking at is at Revell Lake, which is not in Ignace, but is halfway between Ignace and another major city on the Trans-Canada Highway. It should be a regional matter. Ther

Environment committee  I think there is an issue of transparency. As I say, the people who are in these small isolated communities, which oftentimes have no more than a thousand people, are being given millions of dollars just for listening to the NWMO year after year after year. But in all of the year

Environment committee  I think Parliament can play an important role here. One of the important roles for Parliament is simply to bring things to public attention through parliamentary debate. Parliament has never debated the nuclear issue and has never had a full debate as to the pros and cons. In fac

Environment committee  What's happened is similar to what happens at the CNSC. Everybody is given an opportunity to say what they have to say, but it's more in the spirit of getting it off your chest. These recommendations are simply not taken seriously by the government. I believe there were some 40