Science and Research committee  I think what we're seeing here is that the industry is coming to the government asking for accommodation to speed up the process so that they can get on with their private money-making job and also do, as they say, something about climate change. The problem is that they can't do anything about climate change for the next decade, so they want the money now, and they want to speed it up.

Science and Research committee  That's certainly important, because right now in Port Hope, Ontario, we have the largest municipal environmental cleanup in Canadian history—over $1 billion, or $1.2 billion—simply to retrieve a huge amount of radioactive waste that was dumped in the harbour. Hundreds of homes and roadways were built using this material.

Science and Research committee  One of the greatest difficulties is how to prevent chemical reactions from occurring along the intermediate-level waste. In Carlsbad, New Mexico, there was a drum that exploded and turned into a flame-thrower. Radioactive dust went 750 metres up the shaft and contaminated 22 workers.

Science and Research committee  Thank you. You've certainly touched on something very important. What we've heard from the industry is that they have visions of how these SMRs could be used if somebody wanted them. The difficulty is that they don't have customers clamouring at the door and actually signing on the dotted line and saying, “As soon as these are ready, we'll buy them.”

Science and Research committee  Generally speaking, these kinds of devices can be handled by a layperson over the short term. It's really a question of what happens afterwards. Cobalt-60 was mentioned earlier. We in Canada—OPG and Bruce Power—send cobalt-60 sources all over the world. Eighty per cent of the market is from Canada.

Science and Research committee  Yes. This is a real problem. The unanimous recommendation of the Seaborn panel, way back in 1998, was that there should be a fully independent nuclear waste agency with a board of directors that represents various stakeholders. Instead what we have is a radioactive waste management organization that represents the waste producers.

Science and Research committee  Well, I think $100 billion is more than I have heard. I've heard that it's about a $16-billion federal legacy of radioactive waste disposal. The difficulty is that we don't know how to eliminate or neutralize these wastes, so all we can do is stabilize them. The Port Hope waste, for example, consists of about two million cubic metres of radioactive waste materials.

Science and Research committee  When we come to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, this organization will be spending an anticipated $26 billion to dispose of Canada's high-level radioactive waste from the commercial nuclear power plants. However, if they, for example, were to choose a site and emplace the waste, as they did in Germany, and then discovered that the site was unsuitable, they would be faced with a tremendous dilemma, because if they have to take the waste out again and start all over again, obviously the costs mount greatly.

Science and Research committee  Really, the technology for dealing with nuclear waste has not even been implemented for high-level waste. Also, as of now, Canada does not even have a policy for dealing with post-fission intermediate-level waste. We're really still at the dawn of the age of nuclear waste, and we don't know—

Science and Research committee  Thank you, Madam Chairman. My name is Gordon Edwards. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to make a brief presentation on SMRs. I'm a retired professor of science and mathematics. I'm also a co-founder and president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and have served as a consultant on nuclear issues for many years.

Environment committee  I didn't realize that this was going to be a panel on the glories of nuclear power rather than on radioactive waste governance. I thought we were going to be focusing on radioactive waste governance. Regardless of what benefits or not that nuclear power has, the wastes are going to be here forever and they have to be dealt with.

Environment committee  What is a willing host community? If you talk about the Ignace situation, the actual disposal site they're looking at is at Revell Lake, which is not in Ignace, but is halfway between Ignace and another major city on the Trans-Canada Highway. It should be a regional matter. There's also going to be transportation of this waste on the highways leading up to that region.

Environment committee  I think there is an issue of transparency. As I say, the people who are in these small isolated communities, which oftentimes have no more than a thousand people, are being given millions of dollars just for listening to the NWMO year after year after year. But in all of the years, in all of the monthly meetings, NWMO has not bothered to explain to them exactly what the radioactive wastes are, what the radioactive materials are and why they're considered harmful.

Environment committee  I think Parliament can play an important role here. One of the important roles for Parliament is simply to bring things to public attention through parliamentary debate. Parliament has never debated the nuclear issue and has never had a full debate as to the pros and cons. In fact, when my organization started, we wrote an open letter—I'll send a copy to the committee—to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau asking precisely for a national debate on both the benefits and the risks of nuclear power for the sake of everybody, so that citizens and parliamentarians alike could understand what the upsides and the downsides were.

Environment committee  What's happened is similar to what happens at the CNSC. Everybody is given an opportunity to say what they have to say, but it's more in the spirit of getting it off your chest. These recommendations are simply not taken seriously by the government. I believe there were some 400 submissions to the nuclear waste review panel that you're talking about, the one that's looking for a new, more acceptable radioactive waste policy.