On-site work on nuclear waste disposal in NW Ontario suspended due to coronavirus pandemic concerns

As reported by TBNewsWatch.com.

The site, midway between Ignace, Ontario and the Wabigoon Ojibway First Nation, is being targeted for Canada's high-level radioactive waste dump. It is "in competition" with South Bruce, Ontario, very near the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station as well as the Saugeen Ojibwe First Nation, for the dubious distinction.

During Honor the Earth concert tours nearly two decades ago, Ojibwe environmental activist Winona "No Nukes" LaDuke said on stage that "The best minds in nuclear science have been hard at work for fifty years for a solution to the nuclear waste problem, and they finally got one: haul it down a dirt road and dump it on an Indian reservation."

At the time, she was referring to U.S. nuclear power industry and U.S. government schemes to dump high-level radioactive waste on the Skull Valley Goshutes Reservation in Utah (a so-called "consolidated interim storage facility"), as well as permanent disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nevada on Western Shoshone land.

But her words apply equally well today, re: the Canadian government and nuclear industry's attempt to dump high-level radioactive waste in Anishinaabe aki, Ojibwe country.

In recent months, the Saugeen Ojibwe Nation voted -- by an 86% to 14% margin -- against a proposed "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive waste dump, also targeted at their homeland.

See a 2013 map by Anna Tilden of IICPH (International Institute of Concern for Pubilc Health) showing the radioactive hot spots on the Great Lakes Basin, including (inset, upper right), the two-dozen sites then under consideration for Canada's high-level radioactive waste dump. That has now been whittled down to Ignace/Wabigoon Ojibway First Nation in extreme w. Ontario (150 miles from Lake Superior), and South Bruce/Saugeen Ojibwe Nation in s. Ontario (on the Lake Huron shore).