Submission to Industry and Trade Committee Study on the Development and Support of the Electronics, Metals and Plastics Recycling Industry.

The government of Canada, in its recently released radioactive waste policy, stated that “Reprocessing, the purpose of which would be to extract fissile material from nuclear fuel waste for further use, is not presently employed in Canada, and so is outside the scope of this Policy; if ever brought forward, the radioactive waste from such a project would fall within the scope of this Policy.” Acco. [...] CELA submits to this Committee, that as part of its study on the circular economy, it should recommend to the government that this issue should not deferred to the future; rather an outright clear ban on reprocessing must be expressed as current policy of the Government of Canada. [...] In light of current projects and research which are proceeding with federal funding support regarding small modular reactors, some of which would conduct reprocessing and utilize reprocessed nuclear waste, we urge that the time is now for Canada to explicitly express a policy to ban reprocessing of nuclear waste in Canada, and to reconfirm the decades-long informal ban on nuclear waste processing. [...] Many of the radioactive constituents of the post-reprocessing waste are extremely long-lived, on the scale of millions of years. [...] Some nuclear power advocates argue that the reprocessing technologies they have adopted are “proliferation resistant” because of the presence of other radioactive elements and the lack of “purity” of plutonium in the reprocessed fuel.