Two recent Federal Court judgments put brakes on giant Ottawa River nuclear waste dump

This is a reprint of the latest Watershed Ways column published July 2025 by the Ottawa River Institute, a non-profit, charitable organization based in the Ottawa Valley that aims to foster sustainable communities and ecological integrity in the Ottawa River watershed. You can find it published in the Hill Times, here.

Since it was first announced in February 2016, the giant Ottawa River radioactive waste dump has met with widespread opposition from Algonquin First Nations, the Assembly of First Nations, citizens’ groups and more than 140 downstream municipalities including Pontiac County, Gatineau, Ottawa, and Montreal.

Opponents had reason to celebrate earlier this year as the Federal Court of Canada upheld two legal challenges to the giant dump.

The seven-storey radioactive megadump, known as the NSDF, is planned to hold one million tons of radioactive and other hazardous waste from eight decades of operations of the Chalk River Laboratories (CRL) along with imported waste from other provinces and commercial sources.

 CRL is a heavily contaminated federal nuclear research facility beside the Ottawa River, 180 km northwest of Canada’s capital, directly across from Quebec. The facility is currently operated by SNC-Lavalin and two Texas based engineering firms under a contract with the federal government.

The site chosen for the NSDF by SNC-Lavalin and its corporate partners is on Chalk River Laboratories property, less than one kilometre from the Ottawa River in unceded Algonquin territory. Studies show the mound would leak during operation and break down due to erosion after a few hundred years, contaminating the Ottawa River—the source of drinking water for millions of Canadians. All exposures to radioactive materials in drinking water increase risks of cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations.

The materials destined for the NSDF include man-made radioactive materials such as plutonium that will remain hazardous to humans and other living things for millennia. The NSDF is the first ever attempt in Canada to dispose of materials created in a nuclear reactor. The dump proponent and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission have persisted in calling the waste “low level,” despite copious evidence to the contrary from industry experts, thus confusing the public and decision makers.

After a long and highly flawed environmental assessment process, the NSDF received a greenlight in January 2024 from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). The CNSC is widely perceived to be captured by the nuclear industry and to promote the projects it is supposed to regulate, as reported by a federal Expert Panel in 2017. Soon after the greenlight from the CNSC, Environment and Climate Change Canada issued a permit that would allow destruction of species at risk and their habitats and residences during construction of the dump.

Both decisions, the one to license the facility and the one to issue the species-at-risk permit were successfully challenged in Federal Court. Both cases are potentially precedent-setting.

The first successful court challenge was brought by Kebaowek First Nation (KFN). KFN lawyers argued that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission failed to secure Algonquin First Nations' free, prior and informed consent for disposal of hazardous waste in their territory as mandated by Canada’s United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. This is the first test of the new law in Canada and the result will have implications for future projects on Indigenous lands. 

In her judgment issued on Feb. 19, Justice Julie Blackhawk ordered the Commission and CNL to resume consultations with Kebaowek "in a robust manner," while properly considering the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The consultation must be adapted to address Indigenous laws, knowledge and be aimed at reaching an agreement, to be completed by Sept. 30, 2026.

The second successful court challenge was brought by KFN, Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and Sierra Club Canada Foundation. The applicants challenged the decision by Environment and Climate Change Canada to issue a permit to destroy species-at-risk and their residences during construction of the dump.

This is the first time that a decision to issue a species-at-risk permit has been challenged in Federal Court. The lawyer for the applicants presented evidence that the proponent failed to choose the location that would be least harmful to biodiversity and species at risk as required under the Species at Risk Act, and chose instead a location that it knew to be richer in biodiversity and potentially more damaging to species-at-risk because it would reduce its costs for transporting waste.

 In his ruling issued on March 14, 2025, Justice Russel Zinn said the environment minister’s issuing of the species-at-risk permit was “unreasonable due to fatal flaws” in interpreting and applying the federal Species at Risk Act, adding that the issuing of the permit must be reconsidered.

 Species-at-risk that make their homes in the proposed NSDF location include Blanding’s turtles, eastern wolves, Canada warblers, golden-winged warblers, whip-poor-wills, and two bat species—little brown myotis and northern myotis. As a no-go zone for 80 years, the Chalk River Laboratories site has become very rich in biodiversity, much richer than alternative federal sites at Whiteshell and Rolphton that were rejected by the proponent.

These two successful court challenges are fuelling concerns about whether or not privatizing Canada’s federal nuclear laboratories in 2015 was a good move for Canadian taxpayers. A recent op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen noted that since privatization, costs to taxpayers have ballooned by 300 per cent to $1.4-billion annually, more than the budget of the CBC. Yet little progress has been made to reduce the multi-billion dollar nuclear waste liability that was purported to be the main purpose of the contract. In fact, the liabilities have grown, from $7.5-billion in 2015 to $9.8-billion in 2024. Now the NSDF project, put forward by SNC-Lavalin and partners as the solution to Canada’s nuclear waste liabilities, is tied up in legal wrangling that could go on for years.

Both federal court decisions have been appealed by the dump proponent, therefore the battle will continue. For now though, opponents are celebrating these federal court decisions that are applying the brakes to the NSDF project.

Lynn Jones is a founding member of the Ottawa River Institute, a non-profit, charitable organization based in the Ottawa Valley. ORI’s mission is to foster sustainable communities and ecological integrity in the Ottawa River watershed.