Radioactive Waste Management

Sometimes the cure is worse than the illness. And just as the use of powerful drugs to alleviate symptoms of disease or to manage chronic medical conditions often result in other, disturbing symptoms and sometimes lead to the onset of other serious conditions, so does that translate in other areas.

The world has an absolute need for energy resources to power our lifestyles. Much of that is for quite necessary uses; heating of homes, operation of machinery and the production of goods, much less transportation. Everything comes at a cost. We've been tardy in recognizing the full sum total of the costs involved, but we're getting there.

The international community has been transfixed with the realization that the global climate has been in flux and is changing, irrevocably becoming, over time, other than what it has been for a very long period of time. Climate change may be due to many things, including solar activity, but humankind too has doubtless had a hand in changing atmospheric conditions.

Before nations became concerned about carbon dioxide emissions and their possible role in changing climate, they were concerned about the safety of nuclear installations in producing a clean, reliable power source. Canada was a world leader in nuclear energy. Even fifty years ago when nuclear power was in its adolescence, concerns about how to dispose of nuclear waste became an important issue.

At that time disposal was considered to be temporary until such time as technical scientific advances in understanding how to best dispose of spent fuel rods and contaminated soil could be accomplished. Now, years of accumulated nuclear waste is staring us in the face and must be finally properly disposed of. It makes one shudder to think that early researchers simply tossed radioactive waste into open sand trenches not too distant from rivers.

And the spent uranium fuel rods that were stored in underground containers have been breached by water, because of the inadequate depth of storage, and some of those containers have begun to deteriorate. "It is quite a considerable challenge, but I don't think that we're alone in this, there are a lot of lessons learned from other countries", advised the director of uranium and radioactive waste division at Natural Resources Canada.

"The key challenge that we face moving forward is public outreach, public education, public confidence. You need that to move forward on these solutions." The interim storage facilities for spent fuel bundles in cooling water pools and massive cement casks happen to be located at reactor sites. In Ontario alone, nuclear power generates 58% of its electrical energy.

But Canada does have the experience now of witnessing what can occur when nuclear waste is stored close to operating nuclear plants. When the Fukushima nuclear plant was rocked by an immense 9.0 earthquake, followed by a horrendous tsunami, the result imperilled not only the nuclear reactors themselves, three of which went into meltdown mode, but impacted on the stability of the stored waste which had the potential of spewing additional radiation into the atmosphere.

Long-term plans for Canada - 25 years into the future - will be deep geological burial in the Canadian Shield, and it will take 30 years to accomplish that burial of millions of bundles. In the meantime, Ontario Power Generation plans a 680-metre-deep repository for permanent disposal of 200,000 cubic metres of low- and intermediate wastes from Darlington, Pickering and Bruce reactors.

Canada's first radium and uranium mines began operation in the early 1930s in the Northwest Territories. About 1.2-million cubic metres of low-level 'historic' waste in the form of radium- and uranium-contaminated soil must be cleaned up, a process begun in the 1970s, and still ongoing under the government's Historic Waste Program operated by AECL's Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office.

Life, it is abundantly clear, is complicated. Our need for energy resources is an ongoing affair. One not readily solved, since for every energy source there is a concomitant complication that might or might not have been fully envisioned. Solving the problem of spewing carbon into the atmosphere through the ongoing use of fossil fuels is headache-inducing.

But the 'clean' energy derived from nuclear has its own migraine-inducing problems; radioactive waste management is a nightmare of logistics, time and treasury.