Plan to bury nuclear waste near Lake Huron scrubbed

TORONTO — A politically fraught plan to store hazardous nuclear waste deep underground near the Lake Huron shoreline has been formally put to rest more than 15 years after it was first proposed.

In a recent letter to the federal environment minister, Ontario’s publicly owned power generator said it no longer wished to proceed with the multibillion-dollar project.

“We do not intend to carry out the project and have asked that the application for a site preparation and construction licence be withdrawn,” the letter from Ontario Power Generation states. “Similarly, OPG requests the minister to cancel the environmental assessment for the project.”

In response, federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said he accepted the request, and had terminated the ongoing assessment.

The project, estimated to cost more than $2.4 billion, had called for the storage of hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste 680 metres underground about 1.2 kilometres from Lake Huron. The bunker was to have been built at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station near Kincardine, Ont.

While Kincardine had been a “willing host,” the proposal drew years of fierce opposition from environmentalists and hundreds of communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. All argued that the threat to drinking water that serves millions of people was simply too great.

OPG, for its part, steadfastly defended the planned repository as a completely safe option for storing waste that can remain hazardous for thousands of years.