Michigan Radio's host of Stateside, Cynthia Canty, interviews Frank Greening, a nuclear scientist who has worked for Ontario Power Generation (OPG) at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. When Greening checked the figures for how much radioactivity OPG proposes to bury in a Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) at Bruce in Kincardine, Ontario, less than a mile from the Lake Huron shore, he found that OPG had underestimated some radionuclides by a factor of two or three, while others were low-balled by a factor of 100 or even 1,000.
[Note, Bruce Nuclear is 110 miles northeast of Port Huron, MI -- not 11 miles, as Cynthia Canty reported.]
Greening also found that OPG had depended on calculated values, rather than a vast data base of actual measurements -- many of which he himself had made.
OPG's error -- which Greening has called to the attention of the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO, which OPG dominates), the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency CEAA), and the Canadian federal Joint Review Panel (JRP) overseeing the DGR's environmental assessment -- has caused him to call for an "extent of condition," to see if additional errors have been made elsewhere on the project.
Despite OPG, NWMO and CNSC's admission that Greening is correct, they have nonetheless stood by the "safety case" of OPG's DGR proposal. Greening, however, doesn't take "trust us, we're experts" as good enough, given their admitted error on radioactivity levels.
Greening questions the wisdom of burying radioactive waste on the Great Lakes shoreline. "Why tempt fate?" he asks.