Every September long weekend for the past five years, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies have walked together along the TransCanada Highway 17 to peacefully protest the proposed dumping of nuclear waste on Treaty 3 lands in northwestern Ontario.
Among the walkers at the annual Walk Against Nuclear Waste was an Anishinaabe grandmother, who started the walk in hopes that more people will “wake up” to what’s at stake with the possibility of a deep geological repository (DGR) that would contain all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste within their watershed.
“This is my last year and I feel like I’m gonna miss it, but it was a good awareness. I’m okay with that,” Darlene Necan, told Ricochet Media as vehicles zoomed by on TransCanada Highway 17, many beeping their horns in support throughout the roadside interview.
On September 1, two groups left from Ignace and Wabigoon at the same time. Over two days the group of about 30 participants walked about 40 kilometres from each direction.
They all met up at a rest stop near Revell Lake, the site where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization has done exploration drilling for the potential $26-billion DGR, which would sit at headwaters of the Wabigoon River and Turtle River watersheds. The underground facility would be used to bury and abandon millions of bundles of spent fuel from Canadian nuclear power plants.
“We cannot foresee the future, but what if it does happen? What if there’s a leak?” Necan said. “The creator gifted us this beautiful land for all of us to live, but who are these people to come here and economically destroy it? Money is never going to last.”
Necan, 65, is also known for asserting Anishinaabe title by building a cabin on her traditional territory at Savant Lake, Ontario, without permits, after she grew tired of waiting for housing from her band, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen #258. She was charged under the Public Lands Act with construction on so-called Crown land.
It’s no surprise that she took on the responsibility to alert others about the NWMO’s plan to transport, bury and abandon the waste.
There is a strong sense of urgency as the NWMO is set to finalize its chosen waste site, narrowed down from a list of 22 locations in Canada, a process that began in 2010.
By the end of the year, NWMO will choose either the Revell Lake site, near where the walk ended, or a Bruce County site in southwestern Ontario.
Rather than having the radioactive waste shipped by truck or train for the next 50 plus years —which they foresee is an accident waiting to happen — walkers say they want to see the waste all kept where it originated from, and for Canada to stop producing nuclear energy altogether.
The NWMO is an industry-funded organization made up of representatives from Canada’s nuclear power industry who’ve been looking for a way to deal with the approximately 100,000 tonnes of waste they’ve produced that will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
In a report to the Standing Committee on Environmental and Sustainable Development, a northwestern Ontario coalition “We the Nuclear Free North” describes the flaws and weaknesses of the DGR project along with the serious risks expressed by experts.
“Numerous experts in the fields of geology, chemistry and physics warn of the insufficiency of current scientific knowledge to guide a project of the nature and magnitude of the NWMO’s proposed plan,” the coalition wrote .
Their report broke down NWMO’s “conceptual” plan.
The waste would be transported by truck and received at a fuel packaging plant where it would be placed into containers.
The water used during the process to decontaminate the devices used for the waste in-transit would become contaminated with radionuclides and moved into a tailings pond, and be contained as a low-to-medium level radioactive liquid waste.
The waste in containers would be lowered to the DGR underground storage facility, made up of rooms blasted out of precambrian rock, 500 to 1000 metres below the Earth’s surface.
Since there is no way for the high-level radioactive nuclear fuel to deactivate, except for time, it would continue to generate heat, years after being stored. It could lead to pressure build-up, causing fractures in the DGR walls, where the groundwater would seep in and mix with water-soluble radionuclides.
Eventually, the free-moving contaminated water would reach the two watersheds, through cracks in the DGR, and a sump pump would need to be used to bring liquid to a surface tailings pond.
Another risk to hosting a DGR in the Revell Lake area are low magnitude earthquakes that have been documented by Environment Canada. A quake could fracture the DGR and increase flow of water into the facility and send contaminated water into the watersheds.
Sheila Krahn is a friend of Necan’s and has been attending each walk by trailing the group in her RV as a support vehicle.
“My reserve is against [the DGR]. Every reserve along the lake shore is against it, so hopefully we can stop it. We can tell the government to keep [the waste] where it is, so they don’t endanger all these lives along the route,” said Krahn, an Anishinaabekwe, whose band is Fort William First Nation at Thunder Bay.
“There’s more fresh water in this part of the country than there is in the Great Lakes, and they want to destroy that,” she said, referring to the 70,000 freshwater lakes in northwestern Ontario.
Krahn grew up in Savant Lake Ontario, knowing Necan, and lived in Ignace for the last 30 years, where she raised a family with her husband.
“This poison can’t be here. They’ve told nothing but lies.”
She says the issue has divided the local communities, with many supporting the project and the potential for “jobs” and economic prosperity.
As a result, she’s been shunned by Ignacians whom she’s tried to educate, but she’s seen mostly pushback and silence. The town has been mostly supportive of NWMO, they voted to support being the host of the underground facility.
“One of the counselor’s brothers came into my driveway and told my husband, is your wife on drugs? She’s got these ‘No Nuke Waste’ signs in her yard!” Krahn said. “Some of them, their children work for these people, so they can’t be seen with me, or they would be bullied.”
She said there’s been a lack of transparency by the town council who’ve received money from NWMO as a way to get social licensing from a town with a poor economy, in an isolated area.
“They had promised the Senior Center, well, that’s all kaput. What have they done with all these millions of dollars?” Krahn asked in an interview with Ricochet Media at the end of the walk.
About 70 kilometres west of Ignace, NWMO has engaged Wabigoon First Nation, which is the closest reserve to the Revell Lake site.
In 2010, former grand chief Diane Kelly, of the Grand Council of Treaty 3, wrote to NWMO president Ken Nash.
“The Elders had met regarding Manito Aki Inakoniaawin, our Great Earth Law for the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty 3 over the past 12 months and at every occasion they are clear — there will be no way to authorize the long term storage of Canada’s nuclear waste in the land that sustains us,” Kelly said at the time.
Despite a clear “no” from Anishinaabe Elders at GCT3 meetings, NWMO carried on with its business of borehole test drilling at the Revell Lake site.
Ricochet Media requested an interview with the GCT3 and got an emailed reply: “The current position of the Nation remains consistent with the statement released in 2022 at the renewal of the Relationship Agreement.”
In October 2022, the Treaty 3 Chiefs signed a $5.8-million “learn more” agreement with NWMO to become informed.
However, the GCT3 said in its 2022 statement that it “does not consent or imply any consent… the Chiefs in Assembly continue to support the Elders Declaration of 2011, opposing the storage of nuclear waste in Treaty 3.”
A coalition of northwestern Ontario residents worried about NWMO’s “experiment” have brought their concerns to Ottawa.
“No such facility has ever been operated in the world. In fact, no repository for nuclear fuel waste has ever been issued an operating license. There is a record of failed or withdrawn proposals; there is no record of operating success,” states We the Nuclear Free North, in its March 2024 report to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.
It’s not the first time that Canadian nuclear executives have sought a DGR for highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste.
In 1998, a proposed DGR by the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited failed an environmental assessment, according to the Environmental Assessment Report on the AECL’s Geologic Disposal Concept for High Level Radioactive Waste, commonly known as the Seaborn Panel report.
The Seaborn Panel had six criteria points of safety and acceptability for nuclear waste management projects to meet in order to be approved.
“The federal government wanted out of this nuclear waste, so they said, ‘anybody that takes over has to follow the Seaborn Panel criteria,’” said Brien Polak, a Dryden resident who walked with Necan.
One of the recommendations from the Seaborn Panel was to start an independent agency that was arms-length, non-government, and non-industry, to oversee nuclear waste management.
However, this did not happen.
Nuclear industry executives formed NWMO in 2002, under the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act. They revised their own waste management document, eliminating safety and acceptability criteria from the Seaborn Panel report’s recommendations.
At a meeting, Polak approached NWMO regional communications manager Vince Ponka and challenged him to produce the expert research.
“I said to him, ‘give me a report on your canister test that you want to bury in the ground, seven or 800 meters with high level nuclear waste in it,’ he wouldn’t answer the question,” Polak said.
Ponka then brought him over to Dr. Peter Keech, NWMO’s manager of engineered barrier science, where Polak re-asked his question. Keech gave him a “15-minute spiel.”
“I said, ‘Peter, you didn’t answer my question, a simple yes or no, anywhere in the world with nuclear — Finland, Sweden, Canada — has anybody ever done a study with high level nuclear waste in these canisters?’ He looked at me and said, ‘No.’”
Ponka was aghast at NWMO’s confidence in its conceptual, untested in real life, DGR.
He asked the NWMO reps if they knew about the Seaborn Panel report with its safety and acceptability criteria. They did not know about it.
“How can NWMO say that this is safe when they’ve never tested these canisters? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You don’t put it in an earthquake zone, and you don’t put it at the headwaters of two big watersheds. You just don’t do that. That’s just craziness,” Polak said.
Crystal Greene is the BIPOC Investigating Canada fellow for Ricochet, IndigiNews and Pivot Media, with support from Canadian Race Relations Foundation and Journalists for Human Rights.
