Two American politicians made the trip to Kincardine Monday to share their opposition to burying nuclear waste near the Great Lakes.
"It's just really astonishing to me that they would consider putting this type of nuclear waste so close to Lake Huron and to our Great Lakes. As I look out here, it's just even more compelling of a case for me," says Michigan State Representative Sarah Roberts.
Roberts and Michigan State Senator Hoon Yung Hopgood travelled to Bruce County to say Michigan doesn't want nuclear waste permanently stored within 1.2 kilometres of the lake their share with Ontario.
"In Michigan, every single person that I have talked to says 'I cannot believe they are considering doing that,'" says Roberts.
Ontario Power Generation wants to bury 200,000 cubic metres of its low and intermediate level nuclear waste in an underground facility on the Bruce Power site.
It says a decade worth of studies proves burying the radioactive waste in centuries-old rock should be safe, safe enough to eventually abandon the facility.
But OPG cannot move forward until it convinces a federal review panel and the local native group, that the DGR plan is a good one.
Hopgood believes it's not the right plan.
"So if in your very limited outreach that you've done to Michigan, most of the people are saying we have concerns or outright opposition, that should ring some alarms. That should be taken very seriously."
But Kincardine Mayor Larry Kraemer says "The area that it's going into has been stable and isolated for a half-a-billion years, that's 500 million, that's a really, really long time."
It's still not worth the risk according the Michigan politicians, who say they'll go beyond the joint review panel if OPG gets the green light to start digging.
"We're going to petition the cabinet in Canada to reject that," says Hopgood.
The hearings are expected to continue for another two weeks and a decision from the joint review panel is expected by next spring.
