Ours is a perfect family cottage, with a soft sandy beach, spectacular sunsets, and, if we’re lucky, a nuclear waste site somewhere out back.

My grandparents probably didn’t count on the waste site when they built the cottage at Bruce Beach, south of Kincardine, 90 years ago.

But it’s the reason why my sister, her husband and I have gathered with a couple of dozen other cottagers and a few local farmers in the community centre in nearby Ripley on a Saturday morning.

It’s actually not one waste site. It’s two. Ontario Power Generation wants to excavate a storage site for low and mid-level nuclear waste at the Bruce nuclear station, 20 kilometers to the north.

As well, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization is seeking a site for high-level waste — used nuclear fuel — somewhere in Canada. They haven’t picked a winner yet, but our local township of Huron-Kinloss is a candidate.

Inevitably, the two sites get blurred, despite the best efforts of the OPG staff who have organized the meeting. It is, they say, only about the low and mid-level waste.

“They’re two different projects,” we are told. “They are two different processes.”

There’s a glitch at the start: The computer with the power point presentation balks.

“This is proven technology,” groans a beacher under his breath.

Officials describe the geology at the Bruce site as ideal for a waste repository. At the depths where the waste is to be stored, the rock is thick and stable. Analysis of water trapped in the limestone shows that it hasn’t been disturbed in 200 million years.

The geology expert is asked whether the geology that makes this site ideal for low-level waste would also make it ideal for high-level waste. The answer is direct and unvarnished:

“Yes.”

But another official quickly jumps up to repeat the mantra that the two projects are unrelated. Used fuel will not be piled in with the low and mid-level waste.

Another cottager brings up the “elephant in the room” that hasn’t been mentioned: The proposed U.S. nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. President Barack Obama spiked the project in 2010, but the U.S. hasn’t yet come up with an alternative.

The waste experts, who have given up a summer Saturday to talk to the group, are open, and stay long after the formal session to answer questions.

But afterward, there’s some apprehension.

Bruce McKelvey, who heads the local cottagers’ association, laments the fact that any forum to discuss nuclear waste seems to be run by advocates in favour of a specific site, or opposed.

“They just come and all they want to do is sell you on their view,” says McKelvey.

Underground storage may be the best option. What, he wonders, would have happened if the tornado that ripped through Goderich last year had torn through the current storage sites?

Len Stam, who farms 1,200 acres in the area and has dropped in to listen, takes a more jaundiced view of proceedings.

He thinks the fix is in because of the power of the nuclear industry in the region, where Bruce Power is the dominant employer.

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“Whatever big Bruce says, we get it,” says Stam. “Whatever nuclear energy says, it comes here.”

The nuclear business doesn’t benefit everyone, he says: “I know people who will not buy property here. Farmers.”

Why not? “Because of the nuclear plant. They don’t want to live that close.”