Ryden’s Border Store, located about 800 metres from the U.S./Canada border in Grand Portage, Minn., has been run by the Ryden clan since 1947 and still does a brisk business in currency exchange, parcel pickup, beer and T-shirt sales and such.

Two years ago Larry Ryden’s daughter, Lori Boomer, took over the place. Everyone calls her Sam. Summertime is super busy with fishermen headed north to the “wild blue yonder,” she says. (Canadian beer is expensive, she notes.) Christmases are always crazy with thousands of parcels needing to be processed for pickup.

Here’s a question Ms. Boomer is ill-equipped to handle: if Ontario were to ship 150,000 cubic metres of low level and intermediate level nuclear waste her way, would she have a place to bury it? “Well, one, I’m not going to accept it obviously. Two, my government’s not going to accept it. It’s absurd.”

The hunt for an appropriate site for a Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) to house waste from Ontario’s nuclear facilities is not a subject to be taken lightly. Everything from mops to materials close to the reactor core, such as ion exchange resins that bear a “significant amount” of Carbon-14, a radionuclide that has a half life of more than 5,700 years, is slated for permanent burial.

And let’s be clear — Ms. Boomer has not been contacted on a whim. A report recently released by OPG cites Ryden’s GPS co-ordinates as one of the plot points in one of two contemplated alternate locations for the DGR. Equally curious, the co-ordinates for the second alternate include a stately two story brick home in Chaplin Estates, near Yonge St. and Davisville Ave.

This is worth digging into.

On Dec. 28, Ontario Power Generation submitted the results of its federally mandated assignment to present technically and economically feasible alternate locations for the DGR — alternate, that is, to OPG’s preferred strategy to inter the waste from the Bruce, Darlington and Pickering nuclear power plants at Bruce Nuclear near Kincardine.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency will take until Jan. 16 to determine “whether OPG’s information is complete and that it conforms to the Minister’s information request.” A 30-day public comment period will follow.

When the federal Environment Ministry requested the study, 11 months ago, it sought details as to “specific reference to actual locations.” While OPG responded in April that it intended to assess two feasible “geological regions” in the province, “without providing specific reference to actual locations,” it says now that in this document and the main submission it is using specific references to actual locations.

The common reader may see the word “location” to mean, as it is conventionally defined, a particular or exact place.

OPG has provided something quite different and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna now must decide whether the power giant has come up with an evaluation that is good enough.

Let’s remember that the proposed Bruce site will be dug nearly 700 metres deep in limestone host rock a distance of 1.2 km from Lake Huron. The town of Kincardine is on side. Opposition voices on both sides of the border have been loud, particularly as it concerns protecting the Great Lakes.

The dominant question: is Bruce the best spot? And a corollary: wasn’t granite — the Canadian Shield in northern Ontario — discussed long ago as potentially the appropriate geology for toxic waste? The issue may pertain not just to low and intermediate waste, but ultimately the disposal of spent fuel rods, a headache for the generations that has yet to be effectively addressed.

OPG has defined two alternate locations — one a “crystalline” rock location, which OPG has used interchangeably with granite, and the other a sedimentary rock location. Fourteen GPS co-ordinates, including Ryden’s Border Store and a spot in Lake Erie, have been provided to define the first of these. When mapped, the 14 form the perimeter of this so-called “crystalline alternate location.” Plotted by the Star’s Matthew Cole, the result is a 726,052-square-kilometre land mass covering roughly 73 per cent of the province.

OPG makes the accurate assertion that taken to a finer decimal point, which is not noted in the report, the location perimeter moves just a titch this side of Canadian border. So Ryden’s is off the hook. What this should spur in McKenna’s office is an examination of how carefully OPG undertook the assignment and whether the vast result is of much use.

Jerry Keto, the OPG vice-president who signed off on the reports, was unavailable for comment. In his stead, OPG spokesperson Kevin Powers responded to the question as to whether OPG has fulfilled its mandate. “We do believe we have met the minister’s expectations,” Powers says. “The minister asked for a study of the environmental effects of two technically and economically feasible alternate locations. We distinguish between sites and locations. A site would be identified through a multiyear, multiphase, consent based exercise, which would be the equivalent of starting over again to find a willing host community. Instead we approached this as we would as if this were the early screening step of a siting process, so what geological locations are technically and economically feasible. But ultimately it will be up to the minister to determine whether or not this has met her expectations.”

In making its case for the Bruce site, the report estimates that it could take two decades to secure an alternate location, a process of marrying evidence-based science to a willing host community. It additionally projects increased costs should an alternate site be chosen, including transportation costs, depending on distance, of between $380 million and $1.4 billion.

As to the geology, the report raises the possibility that a crystalline location could be more fractured and thereby more permeable than Bruce. This is of particular importance with the intermediate waste, concluding that a “likely” result would be sooner groundwater contact, releasing, by example, Carbon-14 “sooner than expected in sedimentary rock.”

Yet a companion report on the potential environmental effects prepared by Golder Associates states that “the deep bedrock zones are expected to exhibit very low permeability.” Just like the Bruce site.

Rod McLeod, provincial deputy environment minister in the David Peterson government and the province’s chief Crown prosecutor before that, is a director of SOS Great Lakes, the group that has been loudest in its opposition to the Bruce DGR. “OPG has never answered the question,” McLeod says of the years-long location discussion. He spools all the way back to 2003. “They didn’t answer it then, they didn’t answer it at the first hearing in 2013, they were given a second chance at a new hearing in 2014. They are simply stalling.”

Will McKenna ultimately relieve OPG of the traditional requirement to identify, study, analyze and reject alternate options? And if so, on what basis, besides expediency?

Rod McLeod’s view is that it’s “absolute madness” to “dig this hole beside the drinking water source for 40 million Canadians and Americans.”

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OPG insists that, at least according to its own social media analysis, Ontarians aren’t bothered. “The topic is not a popular one, nor is it generating large volumes of curiosity,” the report states, adding that interest in the DGR has “flatlined.”

The public now has little more than a month to change that perception, should it care to.