First of all thanks for all your help and donations. It was much appreciated and useful in our fight against the Nuclear Waste Management Organization's plans to bury 100,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel 500 to 700 meters below ground in our community.

The Deep Geological Repository (DGR) that has never been implemented anywhere in the world after 60 years of research and is an experiment. This DGR mine will eventually be abandon and forgotten. Our future generations will be left to deal with the potential issues and clean up costs for something that has been of no benefit to them. Only a potential risk to their environment and a liability.

The NWMO is a slick Marketing organization who are spending over $200 M annually and have now spent nearly $1 Billion dollars since it's incorporation in 2002. The NWMO sole purpose is to convince a community that they are informed and a willing host for their DGR project which will solve a problem created by the Nuclear industry that has been in the existence for over 60 years.

The current situation is as follows;

In November of 2022, the NWMO informed the world that they needed to defer the site selection decision from late 2023 to late 2024. Their rationale was that more time was needed in their communications with the communities because Covid had restricted their ability to have face to face meetings with the residents. This is the 3rd time the NWMO has changed the site selection decision and in our view if they feel that a negative answer to their proposal will occur either with the communities or the First Nation people they will delay the decision again.  

Also in November 2021, prior to the NWMO deferral of the site selection, the South Bruce council reluctantly agreed to conduct a referendum on the NWMO proposal but decided not to hold such a vote coincident with the Oct 2022 election.  Since Jan 2020, Protect our Waterways (POW), has been requesting that the residents of the community needed to have a voice on such an "forever decision" by means of a referendum and that it should occur with the Oct election.  We were disappointed by the decision of the South Bruce council to delay the referendum until sometime in late 2023 or early in 2024 and to be held as a By-Election.

As part of our strategy to ensure the new council elected in Oct 2022 would honor the decision to hold a referendum, we made this a fundamental issue with the Oct election campaign. We wanted a commitment from the candidates running for a council position and the Mayor seat that they would indeed honor the decision by the previous council. We were successful in achieving that outcome. 

The new Council passed a resolution at a late November 2022 South Bruce council meeting called a "framework for developing a hosting agreement" which will result in a Hosting Agreement between South Bruce and the NWMO for the project. The framework activities would occur over 3 phases during 2023 and would included a referendum once all the studies had been completed. The new date for a by-election for the referendum will most likely be in late 2024.

The NWMO will continue to send money to the South Bruce municipality to fund the activities associated with the project. This funding will permit the municipality to continue the employment of 3 dedicated employees who are helping the NWMO to sell their project to the residents as well as funding a lawyer to work on developing a hosting agreement with the NWMO which is currently under development but later than the end of 2023 as promised by the council. An updated funding agreement has been finalized and the level of expenditure is between $2 to 3 Million annually for 2023 and 2024. NWMO has already provided over $15M to the South Bruce Administration. 

POW and We the Free Nuclear North have created 2 new petitions and they are listed on the website.  Please sign both the online petition and the paper petition.