ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study showing how civil society has been working to prevent an environmental disaster that could arise from Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) proposal to construct a Deep Geologic Respository (DGR) for burying low and medium nuclear waste adjacent to Lake Huron at Kincardine, Ontario. The proposal also involves transportation of hazardous waste from other nuclear generating stations in Ontario, including Pickering and Darlington, through heavily populated areas to the DGR. In This Changes Everything (2014), Naomi Klein notes that civil society organizations have developed over the last decade in response to the duplicitous strategies of the business community to slow government progress in addressing climate change and environmental disasters. For decades, this discussion revolved around trying to balance actions necessary to reduce environmental disasters against the risk that such actions would pose for gross domestic product. This discussion has been replaced by protests aimed at politicians and other decision makers. The chapter concludes that civil society has identified the DGR proposal as one that ignores a significant possibility of a nuclear disaster that could affect millions of people living in the Great Lakes basin and in communities in Ontario through which nuclear waste is to be transported to the DGR.
