Pat McNamara writes in Nuclear Genocide in Canada (Part 4, "Nuclear Costs to Date"):
"The Canadian Government's estimate of projected cleanup costs [for radioactive wastes] has no basis in reality. They have allocated $240 million to clean up 3.5 million cubic metres of radioactive waste in Port Hope. By contrast, the Americans spent $4.4 billion on a similar sized, but far less complicated cleanup at the Fernald site in Ohio.
Radioactive tailings from the 12 mines in Elliot Lake were dumped into ten lakes. All the lakes are dead and leaching contaminants into the watershed all the way to Lake Huron. The Serpent River watershed has been destroyed. There is no cost estimate to fix this disaster.
It will cost another $25 billion to dispose of spent reactor fuel currently being stored at reactor sites and probably $25 billion more to clean up Chalk River, Pinawa, Port Hope and other contaminated towns and mine sites."
Given the fact that many of Canada's 20 reactors are being "refurbished," to enable them to keep running and generating radioactive waste for years or even decades into the future, and that new reactors are proposed, the price tag for irradiated nuclear fuel management will only continue to climb.