Skip to content

Northern frontrunners emerge for nuke waste site

The Northern Ontario towns of Ignace, Hornepayne and Schreiber are moving on to the next round in a government process to find a long-term home to store nuclear fuel waste.
NuclearCasks_Cropped
The Northern Ontario towns of Ignace, Hornepayne and Schreiber are moving on to the next round in a government process to find a long-term home to store nuclear fuel waste.

The Northern Ontario towns of Ignace, Hornepayne and Schreiber are moving on to the next round in a government process to find a long-term home to store nuclear fuel waste.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) announced a short list of four communities that are deemed desirable to host an underground waste repository.

Those three towns join Creighton, Sask. as having passed the first phase of preliminary assessment to meet the site selection requirements. The process will continue over several years with more technical and social studies.

Dropping out of contention are Ear Falls and Wawa, along with the Saskatchewan communities of English River First Nation and Pinehouse.

Initially, 21 communities expressed an interest – mostly in Northern Ontario and central Ontario – when the site selection process began in 2010.

The NWMO reports there are other interested communities still in the pipeline. Preliminary assessements are expected to be complete by 2014 on 12 more communities in Ontario, including Blind River, Elliot Lake, Manitouwadge, the Municipality of the North Shore, Nipigon, Spanish and White River.