Accumulation of radioactive waste at Chalk River: The Bloc Q

[Oscar]

Accumulation of radioactive waste at Chalk River: The Bloc Québécois wants it to stop

[ https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/ ... e-ca-cesse ] - Translation available . . .

QUOTE: "The Ottawa River is one of the "worst possible and imaginable places to decide to store nuclear waste," the party declares."

Anne Caroline Desplanques, Journal de Montréal, October 20, 2025
[ https://www.journaldemontreal.com/auteu ... esplanques ]

EXCERPT: "The Bloc Québécois is calling for an immediate halt to the transfer of radioactive waste to Chalk River, on the shores of the drinking water source for millions of Quebecers. . . . . "

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Background. October 20 2025 - Dr. Gordon Edwards [ http://www.ccnr.org ]

The accompanying article is translated from the original French; the original is copied below, following the English translation.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is not a government agency. It is owned and operated by a consortium of multinationals. It has received billions of dollars of federal taxpayers’ money as a hired contractor working for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a federal crown corporation.

There has been no audit conducted of the billions spent by CNL, no effort made to determine if these expenditures are in the public interest. For example, the cost of removing irradiated nuclear fuel from concrete silos in Quebec and transporting that high-level radioactive waste in a series of shipments over public roads, only to place that waste into newly constructed concrete silos at Chalk River, is an expensive make-work project that doubles the cost and adds significantly to overall transportation risks – because the same dangerous material will have to be moved again to a final location.

The consortium profits at public expense. Why move the same nuclear waste twice when once would suffice? And why is the public neither consulted nor notified in advance?

Kebaowek First Nation already won a federal court case on the failure of the federal government to consult them, the traditional land owners, before storing nuclear waste in their territory, as required by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Now the federal government is doubling down on its bad behaviour by bringing additional radioactive waste in to Chalk River with no respect for the rights or wishes of the Algonquins or of the Quebec municipalities (over a hundred of them) that have formally objected to the accumulation of such a wide variety of long-lived and highly toxic radioactive waste materials beside the Ottawa River, that flows down through Ottawa and then on to Montreal before joining the mighty St. Lawrence River.

- Gordon Edwards

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ENGLISH TRANSLATION . . . . Accumulation of radioactive waste at Chalk River: the Bloc Québécois wants it to stop


QUOTE: "The Ottawa River is one of the "worst possible and imaginable places to decide to store nuclear waste," the party declares."

Anne Caroline Desplanques, Journal de Montréal, October 20, 2025
[ https://www.journaldemontreal.com/auteu ... esplanques ]

The Bloc Québécois is calling for an immediate halt to the transfer of radioactive waste to Chalk River, on the shores of the drinking water source for millions of Quebecers.

The request sent to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, follows a series of reports by our Investigative Bureau, which had rare access to the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) site where the waste is stored.

In the past year, the laboratories received 62.8 tonnes of irradiated uranium fuel from the Gentilly-1 nuclear generating station in Bécancour. This high-risk material is stored in a dozen gigantic reinforced concrete silos in the middle of the forest, along the Ottawa River.

The least contaminated materials are stored nearby, in containers stacked on top of each other.

More silos and containers need to be added as CNL also wants to dismantle two other federal nuclear power plants, in Ontario and Manitoba, and bring the waste back to Chalk River, they told us.

Risk of environmental disaster

"This is probably one of the worst possible and imaginable places to decide to store nuclear waste," says the Bloc Québécois, which fears "an ecological and environmental disaster."

CNL says the storage is only temporary: the high-level radioactive waste is ultimately to be placed in a geological repository more than 650 metres deep, supposed to open by 2050 in northwestern Ontario.

But for Lance Haymond, chief of the Kebaowek First Nation, whose traditional territory includes CNL, the opening of the geological repository remains hypothetical, as construction has not even begun yet.

The repository project is expected to cost $26 billion. Chief Haymond is concerned that the federal government will not be able to afford such a bill in these times of budget restraint and therefore may abandon the silos in Chalk River.

Long legal battle ahead

As for less contaminated waste accumulated in other containers, CNL wants to bury it directly on site one kilometre from the river. But the Kebaoweks has blocked the project in court.

They won the battle in the first instance, but the war continues since Ottawa has taken the case to the Court of Appeal. The hearings began in early October. Lance Haymond, supported by the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador and the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, promises to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

The conflict is therefore likely to drag on for years. In the meantime, and whatever the courts ultimately decide, the accumulation of garbage in Chalk River must stop, argues the Bloc Québécois.

- - - -

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