There are extensive online documents from the Canadian government online about Radioactive Waste, and describe 4 general classes of radioactive waste.  It is my understanding that the nuclear waste destined for an underground site in Northwestern Ontario falls under high-level radioactive waste or HLW. 

A document on the cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca website states:  "Based on the "polluter pays" principle, the waste producers and owners are responsible for funding, organizing, managing and operating the disposal facilities and other types of facilities required for their wastes.  This principle recognizes that arrangments may be different for nuclear fuel waste, low level radioactive waste and uranium mine and mill tailings.  The CNSC is responsible for the regulatory oversight of the management of radioactive waste, including as applicable, handling procesing, transport, storge and disposal of that waste."

Until the current project, there has not been an abundance of nuclear waste transport in Canada.  When the project is operational, there will be an abundance of nuclear waste transport in Canada.  If the proponents of the project assume that the current standards for transport are sufficient, and therefore do not need to be included in their environmental impact statements, they are mistaken. This is because the number of transportation vehicles involved will become substantial overtime, which means that the current emergency procedures in place for the existing nuclear industry transportation requirements are insufficient.  

It is  easy to imagine that the current nuclear waste stockpiles are in known locations.  If there is an emergency spill, there are contingency plans for dealing with this, at known sites.  however, with the expansive plans for transporting high level nuclear waste through highways in Northern Ontario to reach the final storage site, the locations of nuclear waste in the country is greatly inflated.  To ignore this fact, and not include transportation concerns in the proposal for the burial of high level nuclear waste, is to create higher risk.  The proponents are not including consideration of transportation of high level nuclear waste in their plans for underground storage.  This like saying we are opening up a new corridor of trucks with nuclear waste on them, 1700 km long from reactor sites to burial site, but we don't think of this as a risk.   If they did think of this as a risk, they would soon find that they are failing to understand that the nuclear risk is lower when the waste is contained at reactor sites, where expertise exists, and higher when the nuclear waste is dispatched along northern Ontario highways, where we will rely on the police agencies, the hazardous materials programs designed for earlier generations when there was not an army of trucks carrying nuclear waste. 

We would ask that the Canadian government insist that the concerns regarding transportation of Nuclear waste is important to be included in the proposal for nuclear waste disposal, as outlined in their own publications. And in this case, because the volume of nuclear material to be transported will be expanded far beyond current demands for controls and emergency response measures, the government needs to insist on a thorough engineering and risk management plan that does not ignore transportation of multiple annual shipments nuclear waste through the watersheds and communities of northern Ontario. 

Respectfully, 

Cal Orok

Resident of White River