Seven Oaks Magazine.

Many Aboriginal communities in Canada refuse explicitly to endorse the consultation procedures and political direction charted thus far by the highly controversial Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). NWMO’s failure to win an audience with Aboriginal peoples clashes with the intent of recent legislation that established NWMO, and therefore jeopardizes the efforts of successive Canadian governments to contrive socially acceptable nuclear waste solutions under the political leadership of the nuclear-electric industry.

This consideration may distress the Canadian Nuclear Society, whose March 2000 CNS Bulletin review of the major Canadian book on nuclear fuel waste estimated that the likely disposal sites for this waste “are expected to lie within lands occupied by Aboriginal communities.”

In Canada, “nuclear fuel waste” usually means irradiated uranium fuel discharged from the reactors of three nuclear utilities and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

The 2002 Nuclear Fuel Waste Act requires NWMO to notify the Canadian Government within its impending triennial report, expected by 15 November 2005, the comments received during NWMO “consultations” with Canadians including Aboriginal communities.

In its May 2005 draft version of the anticipated recommendation, NWMO revealed: “The Assembly of First Nations, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Ontario Aboriginal Métis Association, the East Coast First People’s Alliance, the Western Indian Treaty Alliance, and the Atlantic Policy Conference of First Nation Chiefs all argue that our Aboriginal Dialogues do not consist of ‘consultation’ as required by their interpretation of the law.”

On 9 June, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (www.itk.ca) reinforced earlier Inuit public positions by resolving “complete opposition to the storage/ disposal and transport of nuclear fuel waste in the Canadian Arctic [including] marine areas and aerospace.”

The ITK resolution resonates with Inuit Circumpolar Conference Resolution 77-11 demanding rigorous prohibition of nuclear, chemical and biological wastes, weapons and weapon testing in the Arctic Circumpolar Zone.

Assembly of First Nations chief Phil Fontaine warned the 1989-1999 Nuclear Fuel Waste Management and Disposal Concept Environmental Assessment Panel that Aboriginal communities may contest burial of nuclear fuel waste: “Our people are not opposed to developments in our traditional lands. But if the process fails to address our vital concerns and our fundamental rights in a full and fair way, then First Nations will oppose it.”

Another chief told the Panel that he represented fifty First Nation communities including two-thirds of Ontario’s total land area, and none was prepared to accept nuclear waste.

Chief Peter Kelly of the Saugkeeng First Nation of southeastern Manitoba predicted militantly to the Panel on 16 January 1997: “You have taken our land, trees, water and pelts, and now you want to take our rocks. But we will not let you take our rocks.”

Panel member Lois Wilson, feminist theologian and past president of the Canadian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches deplored in Nuclear Waste: Exploring the Ethical Dilemmas (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2000) that “Health Canada does not have much data on the effects of radiation specifically on Aboriginal people nor on breast cancer in women of the north. Some of this is planned for future research!” (page 60)

In rejecting the nuclear industry’s deep geological repository concept, the Panel concluded that a nuclear fuel waste disposal concept that lacks the support of Aboriginal peoples is unacceptable for Canada.

This finding and the chilly reception evidently extended to NWMO emissaries thus far by Aboriginal communities will probably prevent NWMO from fulfilling the tasks reiterated in its advance draft. These undertakings include recruitment of “willing communities” to host away- from- reactor waste storage and disposal facilities; and “implementing” a NWMO scenario for nuclear fuel waste acceptance by those communities and for the hazardous transportation of fuel waste convoys by road, rail, ship or barge.

The Nuclear Fuel Waste Act does not mandate NWMO to examine Canada’s energy and nuclear policies. The same exclusion fettered the blue- ribbon Panel, whose chair Blair Seaborn petitioned successive Canadian energy ministers for such a broad review mandate (Wilson, page 108).

Mistrustful of Ottawa’s intent thus far to exclude policy concerns from environmental mandates,NuclearWaste Watch, a sharply adversarial coalition of leading environmental non governmental organizations nonetheless insists that waste reduction at source is the ideal nuclear fuel waste management option, requiring the orderly phase out of Canada’s nuclear power reactors, as already legislated in Sweden, Belgium and Germany.

Watch representative Brennain Lloyd, who intervened decisively at the Seaborn Panel (Wilson page 17) termed the “Adaptive Phased Management” approach to nuclear fuel waste proposed in NWMO’s draft “the worst of all worlds it combines all the serious problems of at-reactor site storage of the waste, ‘centralized’ storage and deep rock disposal of the waste”

Lloyd’s coalition seeks a radically new federal-provincial environmental assessment panel on the full range of nuclear waste options following the anticipated NWMO recommendation. “The federal government should guarantee a full parliamentary debate and free vote on the recommendations of the NWMO and of the federal-provincial panel we are urging,” argue the environmentalists.

Parliamentary parties must soon decide whether and how to detach from the nuclear industry-NWMO approach to nuclear waste, and at last start respecting Canada’s Aboriginal communities who live on lands earmarked for nuclear waste disposal, and their allies in Canada’s nuclear concern coalition.

Gilles Duceppe, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton: This is your chance to oppose unpopular policies for nuclear waste management.

Stephen Salaff is a Toronto-based freelance energy and environment writer. Salaff publishes regularly on intractable nuclear waste problems with industry and popular periodicals in Canada and internationally.