This morning the Peterborough paper had a small opinion article that highlighted 30 years of safe nuclear energy in Ontario. 30 years of safe radioactive waste production is what I thought to myself. Anybody, as my friend Jeremy tells me, who has been employed long term with the maintainance of these facilities knows somebody who has died prematurely. Safe?

It's fine to do what we're doing safely, as this video shows, but why not push this moment in time to account for the safety of the whole process, the vast strip mining and ecological catastrophe to acquire Uranium in the first place (click here to read about a contested mining proposal near peterborough in Sharbot Lake) and then the residual radioactive waste that will be here for as short as 2 000 years and as long as 17 000 000 years!?

honestly, we can't sit this one out.

As copied from Wikipedia
Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 17 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life two million years) and Pu-239 (half life 24,000 years).^[20] Nuclear waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.^[21] Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management solutions.<sup>[22]


Watch the CBC clip here

Lastly, Joanna Macy writes well about this immediate situation from her involvement in nuclear education over the last number of decades.</sup>