Shallow Depths: Reproductions of Nuclear Landscapes and Anomalies of Consent at Chalk River

Abstract

Scholars and Indigenous communities increasingly urge courts and regulators to uphold the principle of “free, prior, and informed consent” (FPIC) as articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Canada, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has ostensibly embraced FPIC through its “willing host model,” designed to identify potential sites for a deep geological repository (DGR) to house radioactive waste. In this doctoral research, I examined the siting process for a Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) in Chalk River, Ontario. I attended public hearings and community meetings as part of close empirical work documenting opposition to the proposed NSDF. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how opposition, and Indigenous refusal in particular, is generative in terms of political and regulatory shifts toward asserting and advancing Indigenous rights.

The research raises the question of why the willing host model is appropriate for the DGR, but not the NSDF. I argue that consent, in this framework, is used a tool to manage and generate legitimacy in order to secure a bare minimum social license to operate. In practice, the willing host model exhibits the hallmarks of a “divide and conquer” strategy, with people in neighbouring communities being pitted against each other as they weigh the very uncertain costs and benefits of nuclear waste storage proposals.

My research demonstrates that a major barrier to workable consent processes is the significant time and resources required to implement them. Effective frameworks must account for the complex and differentiated geographies of risk and impact, the intergenerational effects, and the cumulative social and financial costs, including the exacerbation of intra- and inter-community divisions. This dissertation disentangles tensions of the NWMO's willing host model, with the ultimate vision of 'scaling up' consent-processes to broader extractive contexts.

This research advances critical human geography and environmental justice literatures by teasing out how spatial and local political-economic-social contexts shape both decision-making and its outcomes—specifically, how these contexts influence the operationalization of consent-based policies, the mechanisms through which consent is negotiated, and the extent to which the nuclear waste siting process is deliberative, fair, and just.