Opposition - Citizen of Thunder Bay, ON

As a lifelong resident of Thunder Bay, ON, residing only a few kilometers from HWY 11/17, transportation from the waste sites to the proposed DGR site must be included in the scope of the IPD. 

The vast distance it must travel, should have been assessed and considered as a part of the site selection decision.  Given the vast distance this waste must travel to the proposed DGR site, the risks of transporting this dangerous waste must be critically assessed and include consultation with every potentially impacted city, municipality, and First Nations traditional territory it will pass through, to fully understand the possible risks to human health, the environment, culture and lost economic development opportunities. This must include an assessment of the watersheds this waste will travel through to fully comprehend the scope of risk associated with a project of this magnitude, with the potential for impacts that could last hundreds of thousands of years, both from an accident in transport or from the proposed DGR site itself. The emergency response is limited at best in remote regions of NW Ontario and highways are often closed, year round, due to major accidents and many times fatal collisions involving Commercial Motor Vehicles.  Responding to an accident in these remote regions will most definitely require the support of nearby cities, municipalities and First Nations, requiring the need to consult on this aspect, among many, to ensure all possible mitigation efforts are considered and emergency response plans involve all parties along the transportation route to ensure a timely response and containment of any waste. This must consider training, PPE, vehicle identification aspects, etc., and include being prepared for extreme response and recovery efforts, such as water retrieval. This region lacks safe, divided highways and has frequent severe weather events, not to mention the numerous gaps in Ontario's Commercial Driver Training.

The IPD is also missing a viable plan for retrievability of the waste at the proposed DGR site, both in the case of an emergency, and/or to maintain the integrity of the storage containers over 1000's of years.  Instead, the plan appears to be abandonment...how can we abandon anything that dangerous in less than 200 years? 

The IPD is also missing the emergency management aspects of natural disasters and what mitigation efforts will be in place to respond to a wildfire at surface of the proposed DGR site, potentially impacting access to the facility or the repackaging plant, or flooding, or tornadoes, or even seismic activity, which does occur within the Canadian Shield.

The timeline this waste will remain dangerous for, exceeds human life on earth, how can we ethically make such an impactful decision for future civilizations, not just generations.  I believe there are many unanswered questions at this stage, which shows the lack of public engagement and education. How can the general public be expected to respond in a 30 day window, to a 1200 page document, many lacking technical expertise in this field, and lacking even basic knowledge of the full lifecycle of nuclear power, from uranium mining to managing the dangerous waste for hundreds of thousands of years.  It’s time to consider as a country, why we have gone down this path.  With waste piling up at reactor sites, the pressure to move it out of sight is apparent, and ultimately necessary to win the public opinion of continuing to invest in nuclear power, resulting in continuous waste production into the future, with no concrete, proven, or safe method of managing it.