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Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area (CCRCA) is a non-governmental, volunteer organization that has been working for the clean-up and prevention of radioactive pollution from the nuclear industry in the Ottawa Valley for 40+ years. Our current focus is nuclear waste, in particular the proposed giant mound for one million cubic meters of radioactive waste at Chalk River, Ontario and the proposed “entombment” of the Nuclear Power Demonstration reactor at Rolphton, Ontario. Both of these proposed nuclear waste disposal projects risk contaminating the Ottawa River, a drinking water source for millions of Canadians. Check out our popular one-page fact sheets  here
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Islands and rapids in the Ottawa River downstream of Chalk River~photo by Ray Nash

Protest canoe(2)

“No Nuke Dump on the Ottawa River”, Riverkeeper Parade, September 10, 2017

 “The incredibly complex and messy radioactive contamination at the Chalk River site has gone largely ignored for almost 70 years – see http://ccnr.org/crl_sacrifice.pdf ]. Now, within the span of a few years, we have the prospect of foreign companies making profits at Canadian taxpayer expense by building a “quick and dirty” gigantic mound of radioactive waste that will be difficult or impossible to remediate when it starts falling apart. The mound would include fission products like cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-129, transuranic actinides like plutonium, neptunium and americium, and activation products like tritium, nickel-59 and carbon-14, along with 14 tons of asbestos and lots of toxic chemicals, in a hopelessly entangled mix that will be poorly characterized and impossibly difficult for future generations to try to deal with.”

Read the submission: goo.gl/9io9Vq

Gordon Edwards, CCNR, excerpt from “A Heap of Trouble” submission to the CNSC August 16, 2017

“The EIS does absolutely nothing to address the very long-term implications of the project. For example, the NSDF is intended to house approximately 1000 tonnes of uranium-238, a primordial radioactive element with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. As time goes by, the disintegration of uranium-238 atoms creates a dozen other radioactive “decay products”, all of them much more radiotoxic than uranium-238 itself. Thus the uranium-238 “family” becomes increasingly more radioactive, not less radioactive, as the centuries tick by.

In the first year alone the radioactivity from uranium-238 in the NSDF will just about triple, due to the inbreeding of thorium-234 and protactinium-234. The total radioactivity of the uranium-238 family will continue to increase until it ends up being more than seven times as radioactive as the original uranium-238. The amount of radon gas generated inside the NSDF will steadily increase, year after year, virtually forever, as will the radium-226 content. In fact the NSDF facility will eventually hold the radioactive equivalent of 500,000 tonnes of Elliot Lake uranium tailings, just due to the uranium-238 family alone. ”

Read the submission: goo.gl/9io9Vq

Dr. Gordon Edwards, CCNR