On May 12 Duluth’s City Council went on record opposing a proposed radioactive waste dump on the eastern end of Lake Huron a plan now under consideration by the Canadian government. You wouldn’t know this from the local paper or TV ‘news,’ since their reporters had left by then.

Ontario Power Generation or OPG, the biggest reactor operator in Canada, wants to dump 200,000 cubic meters of its radioactive waste in barrels near the shore of Bruce Peninsula on the east end of Lake Huron.
Councilors Joel Sipress and Sharla Gardner successfully introduced the opposing resolution, “… to protect the Great Lakes and its tributaries.” The resolution rejects the so-called Deep Geologic Repository and “any other proposition for the construction of a nuclear waste repository within the Great Lakes Basin.”
The resolution’s additional sweep is a reference to ongoing Canadian consideration of four other potential radioactive waste dumps along the St. Lawrence Seaway.
The Council’s resolution was adopted by a vote of 8-to-1, as Council President Linda Krug voted against, and makes Duluth the 53rd city or county government in the Great Lakes watershed to formally reject the dump plan. The campaign against burying radioactive waste in the watershed has won the support of the State Senate, 12 cities and three County Boards in Michigan; three cities in Ohio; and one city each in Indiana, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In addition, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative ? a group of over 100 cities in the US and Canada ? agreed last May that “the project should not move forward at this time.” The GL&SL Cities Initiative, chaired by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, complained there was insufficient time to study the dump proposal and to prepare detailed comments; it also criticized Canada’s inadequate outreach to the Great Lakes communities. The Cities Initiative concluded that “consideration of only one site that is one kilometer from Lake Huron” makes the plan unsupportable.
On the Canadian side of the Seaway, 25 cities have resolved their opposition, including Niagara Falls, Sault St. Marie, Thunder Bay and Toronto.
Back in Duluth’s Council chambers May 12th, Councilor Jay Fosle spoke against the resolution while voting for it. Fosle said he could imagine similarly unenforceable resolutions being brought against the shipping of crude oil on the Lakes with tankers.
    
Radioactive Waste Producer
Caught Faking Numbers

The Lake Huron dump plan is said to be for “low- and intermediate-level” radioactive materials, not the unapproachable and remote-control-handled-only waste fuel rods. (However, Canadian officials have said publicly that high-level waste fuel could eventually be placed in the L. Huron dump if proper applications were submitted.)
Still, this February, the Canadian government and the public were shocked to learn that OPG had grossly understated or lied about the dangerousness of intermediate-level wastes. A former OPG scientist, Dr. Frank R. Greening, reported that OPG’s official submissions had “severely underestimated” the level of radioactivity of material destined for the site. (Toronto Star, Feb. 28, 2014)
Canada has 21 commercial power reactors (20 on the Great Lakes) and six university research or isotope-production reactors. Twenty of the commercial reactors are owned or operated by OPG (eight at Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron; four at Darlington and eight at Pickering on Lake Ontario). This company is the principle mover behind the dump proposal, and its preferred location is adjacent to its giant Bruce reactor complex and one kilometer from the water’s edge.
So-called “intermediate” wastes are chock full of highly radioactive materials like cesium-137 and strontium-90. John Spears reporting in the Toronto Star April 18 noted that intermediate-level waste includes “highly-radioactive components from reactor cores which can remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000 years or more.”    
While one set of analysts said radiation leaking into the Great Lakes would be diluted (Reader, May 1), an August 30, 2013 critique of the company’s dump rationale found that its environmental impact statement was “not credible,” “not defensible,” and “not reliable.” The study by Peter Duinker was commissioned by the government’s Joint Review Panel itself.
We can all urge the Canada’s JRP to heed the precautionary advice.

John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin.