Surprisingly little controversy erupted when the Town of Creighton first expressed interest in learning about nuclear waste storage.
Nearly four years later, however, opposition is mounting to perhaps the most contentious economic-development concept in the history of the region.
From anti-waste signs to rapidly growing petitions, it is clear that radioactive-waste proponents face stiff competition in the battle for public opinion.
“I don’t believe there’s a safe way to store nuclear waste,” says Nadine Smart, one of the leaders of the local anti-waste movement.
When Smart first began researching nuclear waste, what she learned – and the answers she could not get – fuelled her resistance.
Rather than starting her own protest group, she, along with other like-minded residents, formed an alliance with the Committee for Future Generations.
The committee stands against nuclear waste storage in northern Saskatchewan. Now that two other potential
Saskatchewan sites are out of the running, Creighton is its sole focus.
Smart says a petition to keep the waste out of Creighton now has over 2,500 signatures from across Canada’s five westernmost provinces.
She says she has personally collected up to 1,000 signatures from Flin Flon and Creighton, with more untabulated in Denare Beach.
Having taken the petition door-to-door on a handful of Flin Flon streets, Smart says only one person outright rejected her.
She estimates that a third of the population is for nuclear waste, a third is against and a third is on the fence or apathetic.
“But I’m also seeing a lot more people wanting to sign [the petition] than not sign,” Smart adds.
Such statements may disappoint advocates of nuclear waste storage who genuinely view the proposal as the region’s best hope to finally shed its one-industry town status.
The plan would see a highly secure underground storage facility – known as a deep geological repository (DGR) – be established near Creighton.
The DGR would be built 500 metres below the ground, requiring about one square kilometre at surface and two square kilometres at depth.
The overseer of the project, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, projects 400 to 1,200 jobs during a construction phase of up to a decade.
After that, it will take upwards of 40 years to truck waste to the DGR, a process that will create 600 to 800 jobs, in NWMO’s estimate.
Once that procedure concludes, roughly 200 people will be needed to maintain the DGR for an undetermined period of time.
But Smart, who was born, raised and remains in Flin Flon, believes it’s time to investigate other economy-boosting measures.
“I do not feel that this is the way for Flin Flon to get economic growth,” she says. “I’m sorry, we can do something better than this, I’m sure.”
Smart, a great-grandmother who works a half-dozen jobs, is literally frightened by radioactive waste. She fears leakage, the lack of an active DGR anywhere else in the world and decades of radioactive shipments.
“Look how many truck accidents there are in a year,” she says.
Of course NWMO counters that it is relying on the best available science and that the DGR will need approval from independent safety regulators.
As for the movement of waste, each roughly 30-tonne transport container that would be used has been fabricated to contain and isolate its radioactive payload in the most extreme, if not unimaginable, mishaps.
Smart is not averse to people learning more from NWMO, but she wants to ensure that information from multiple sources is painting as complete a picture as possible.
That’s why the Committee for Future Generations established its own Facebook page, though Smart admits the site is open to the same criticisms as nuclear-waste opponents have of NWMO.
“The people that are for it think we’re full of doo-doo and the people that are against it think that [the NWMO is] full of doo-doo,” she says. “So you take it from there. I have not told anybody, ‘You have to listen to this’ or, ‘You have to do that.’
“I tell everybody, ‘Study both sides and make your own opinion.’”
Smart’s opinion as to what should be done with Canada’s extensive stockpile of nuclear waste is not all that complicated.
She wants the material casketed where it currently sits so researchers can spend the coming decades studying methods for safe disposal and even neutralization.
According to CBC, the waste is currently stored at seven sites across Canada, including at the reactors it once powered. Ninety per cent of it is in Ontario.
“Why does it have to go somewhere?” Smart asks.
At the same time, Smart is calling for a study to measure the potential negative economic implications the DGR would have on the Flin Flon region.
“They’re talking about economic growth, they’re talking about people moving here, [but] what about the people that are going to leave?” she says. “I for one will leave. [If] I find out it’s coming here, I’m putting my house up for sale and I’m out of here as fast as I can get out of here.”
For now, Smart remains dedicated to gathering as many petition signatures as she can. Copies will eventually go to Creighton town council and the Saskatchewan legislature.
“We’re fighting it here hard and we won’t stop,” she says. “We’ll keep fighting.”
