The Montreal Metropolitan Community (CMM) reiterated Monday its opposition to the Chalk River nuclear waste storage project, 300 kilometers upstream from its territory, due to fears about the quality of its drinking water.
The project currently proposed by the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) “still raises questions and concerns” despite the improvements made compared to previous versions, judges the CMM, which is based on an analysis prepared by French nuclear experts.
Maja Vodanovic, the mayor of the borough of Lachine, in Montreal, and the representative of the CMM in this file, spoke on Monday at the public hearings held by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). This federal body could give the green light for the start of work within a few months. The CMM had already taken a position against the project in 2018.
CNL wishes to build a surface “installation”, that is to say a pile of multiple layers of gravel, sand, rocks and geomembranes, to permanently contain up to one million cubic meters of radioactive waste from low activity, which are currently temporarily stored on site.
The project, which has been in the works for years, is raising concerns among area residents. The private consortium that manages these federal facilities is struggling to convince the populations of Pontiac (Quebec) and Renfrew County (Ontario) of the safety of its game plan.
The issue is not only local: if the waste dump were to contaminate the water at Chalk River, traces of this radioactivity could spread into the Ottawa River – which is one kilometer from the planned mound – and, further downstream, in the St. Lawrence River, where millions of people draw their drinking water.
In its brief submitted to the CNSC, the CMM sets out 23 recommendations aimed at making the project more acceptable to it.
In particular, it asks to cover the waste from bad weather during its treatment, to strengthen the monitoring of radioactivity in the local environment, to improve the transparency of the environmental information collected and to undertake an “in-depth and independent” study of the potential contamination. waters.
A 48-page report from the Association for the Control of Radioactivity in the West, a citizen association for information and radioactivity monitoring established in Normandy, France, is appended to the brief filed by the CMM. This was updated following changes made to the project and presented by CNL last February.
Dozens of intervenors are speaking out this week in Pembroke, Ontario, on the Chalk River nuclear waste management project as part of public hearings organized by the CNSC.