Residents of Ontario town pondering nuclear crypt take fully paid trip to Finland to see the potential future

Residents of an Ontario farm community that may become the site for a deep underground facility housing Canada's radioactive waste were given an all-expenses-paid trip to Finland to see first hand what that future might look like.

The municipality of South Bruce has been engaged in a years-long process to decide whether it wants to become host for a $23-billion facility that aims to safely seal away Canada's huge stockpile of nuclear waste for millennia.

The municipality (which includes the farming towns of Teeswater, Mildmay, Formosa and Salem) along with the Ontario community of Ignace, about a four-hour drive northwest of Thunder Bay, are the only two Canadian communities being considered for the nuclear industry's possible underground vault, which may go as deep as 550 metres underground.

For years, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the agency in charge of finding a safe place to put Canada's spent nuclear fuel, has been spending millions of dollars in "goodwill money" in both Ignace and South Bruce. 

The trip earlier this month to Onkalo, Finland, is the latest example.  

Group ventured deep into a nuclear crypt

Dave Wood, a 30-year resident of the village of Mildmay, was a member of the 19-member South Bruce delegation who made the descent into the bowels of the nuclear crypt, via a road carved out of the Earth. 

"It was a 30-minute ride to the deepest part of the cavern," said Wood.

"I have a bit of claustrophobia and to feel that you're 450 metres underground, at times it was kind of eerie." 

Dave Rushton, a municipal project manager who works for South Bruce, was also part of the delegation in Finland.

Rushton said he was amazed by what he saw so far below the earth. 

"They've got electricity and lights. They have big service areas, people milling around doing work," he said, adding the tunnels and catacombs were large enough to fit a full-size dump truck. 

"That was strange, to see people driving around. They get used to it and were a little more cautious about how fast they're going through these tunnels because you could be meeting a dump truck," he said. 

"They have systems where they radio and stuff, but it's still a little unnerving." 

The delegation was allowed into the facility because it is still under construction and won't start receiving nuclear waste for long-term storage until at least 2024. 

"You could hear the drilling and the machines around us, and everyone was dressed as if they were working on a deep mine," said Wood. 

Delegation studying 'community willingness'

The trip underground was the last leg of a three-part tour, which also included:

• The Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant 
• An encapsulation plant where radioactive waste is sealed in containers before long-term storage.
• The Onkalo Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository, a facility similar to what the NWMO has proposed for either Ignace or South Bruce.

Wood said the delegation was there to study "community willingness," to get a better idea of how the Finns used a 40-year marketing and education campaign to pave the way for the repository, by telling people the storage facility was safe and would bring economic prosperity. 

He said he's seen a similar version of that campaign unfold in his community. 

"People want it," he said. "They want to see the accelerated economic development they've seen ... they want it to come here." 

Like South Bruce, Onkalo has deep roots in the nuclear industry, one that put food on the table of generations of families. The proposed expansion of the Bruce nuclear generating station may signal nearby South Bruce could become the site for the deep underground nuclear waste facility. 

But an NWMO spokesperson told CBC News in an email that the decision has yet to be made. 

"We are on track to decide on a site in late 2024," Shereen Dhagstani wrote in an email. "The site selection process is community driven. It is designed to ensure, above all, that the site selected is safe, secure, and has informed and willing hosts."

The trip to Finland, although impressive, didn't change Wood's mind.

He said he's opposed to it, but believes most people in his community will support it, something he argues will fundamentally alter the fabric of the community he's been a part of for 30 years. 

"It would change the entire character," he said. "There's a certain small-town quality of life that you have in a small-town area like Mildmay and South Bruce, and I don't think it will be there if they go ahead."