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“No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” — Lily Tomlin

I think of Lily Tomlin almost every time I get something right.
Last Sept. I testified in Ontario against a Canadian company’s plan to bury radioactive waste next to Lake Huron. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) — which owns or leases 20 reactors across Ontario — would save loads of cash by not having to contain, monitor and repackage leaky above-ground storage casks.
OPG officially plans to let its radioactive waste canisters leak their contents 680 meters underground, even though that risks long-term contamination of the Great Lakes — a source of drinking water for 40 million people including 24 million US residents.
The Bruce nuclear complex — the world’s biggest with 8 reactors — is on the Bruce Peninsula and is now the storage site for all the radioactive waste (other than fuel rods) from all of OPG’s 20 reactors. Digging its dump right next door to Bruce simply saves the firm money — and puts the hazard out of sight, out of mind.
OPG’s public information makes clear that it intends to poison the public’s water. First, the near-lake dump would be dug into deep caverns of porous limestone. The underground tombs are to “become the container” because the company’s five-year canisters are intended to be rotted-through by the waste’s heat and corrosiveness.
(Oh, yes: On April 13 the government was shocked to learn that in its formal documentation OPG grossly understated the radioactivity of its waste material, some of which, like cesium, is 1,000 times more radioactive than OPG had claimed.)   
Second, OPG’s deliberate poisoning plan is broadcast in a December 2008 handout from — OPG! Radioactive contamination of the drinking water would not be a problem, the company says, because “The dose is predicted to be negligible initially and will continue to decay over time.”
(Emphasis on “predicted” here. The US government’s 650 meter deep Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico was predicted to hold radioactive waste for 10,000 years. On Feb. 14 it failed badly after only 15.)
OPG’s pamphlet gets even bolder in answer to its own question, “Will the [dump] contaminate the water?” The company claims, “…even if the entire waste volume were to be dissolved into Lake Huron, the corresponding drinking water dose would be a factor of 100 below the regulatory criteria initially, and decreasing with time.”
These fatuous assertions made me ask in my testimony: “Why would the government spend $1 billion on a dump when it is safe to throw all the radioactive waste in the water?”
In a Lily Tomlin moment, what I thought of then as a rhetorical outburst has now become “expert opinion.”
“Experts” unworried about industry radiation in Great Lakes
On March 25, the “Report of the Independent Expert Group” was issued to Canada’s waste review panel. The experts are Maurice Dusseault, Tom Isaacs, William Leiss and Greg Paoli.
Dusseault advises governments and teaches short courses at the Univ. of Waterloo on oil production, petroleum geomechanics, waste disposal and sand control.
Paoli founded Risk Sciences International and the company’s web site notes his position on Expert and Advisory Committees of Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy.
Isaacs, with degrees in engineering and applied physics, works at the plutonium-spewing Lawrence Livermore National Lab, studying “challenges to the effective management of the worldwide expansion of nuclear energy.” Of course, hiding radioactive waste from public scrutiny is one of his industry’s biggest challenges.
Leiss has degrees in history, accounting and philosophy, and has taught sociology, eco-research, risk communications and health risk assessment at several Canadian universities.
So what level of expertise does the group bring to the question? None of them have any background in water quality, limnology, radio-biology, medicine, health physics or even radiology, hazardous nuclides, health physics, or radiation risk.
Their report’s conclusion is that the “immense” waters of the Great Lakes would dilute any radiation-bearing plumes leaching from the site. The report says it’s possible that as much as 1,000 cubic meters a year of water contaminated with radiation might leach from the dump, but calls such pollution “highly improbable.”
As plumes of radiation spreading across the Pacific from Fukushima in Japan continue to show, the poison spreads from the source and is diluted as the plumes are dispersed by currents. Fish large and small, and other organisms, all bio-accumulate the cesium, strontium (which persist for 300 years), and cobalt (persisting for 57), etc., which also bio-concentrate as they climb the food chain.
Looking at their professional experience, Canada’s expert group’s opinion on how radioactive waste might spread and be diluted in drinking water is smugly stupid and meaningless, its cubic meter estimates and probability assessments nothing but trite fairy tales. You could call the report a rhetorical outburst.

— John LaForge works for Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.