Radioactive Substances and the Great Lakes:Should we be concerned?

This post by Great Lakes Together editor, Jane Elder, is the second in a three-part series on radionuclides in the Great Lakes region. Please note that there was an error in last week’s post, where the Three Mile Island incident was erroneously dated as 1973, but the correct date is 1979. We corrected the Substack post and the GLEN website post as soon as we discovered the error.

One of the uncomfortable topics of living in the nuclear age is how to manage radioactive materials and their waste streams. In a region that holds one-fifth of the world’s surface fresh water, we have a responsibility to safeguard the Great Lakes and the life within and around them, and that includes any risks from radionuclides (the generic name for radioactive substances).

One of my mentors, Lee Botts, led the fight in the 1970s to improve the licensing requirements for the rapidly expanding nuclear power development on and near the shores of the Great Lakes. The legal battle over the licensing of Michigan’s Palisades nuclear power plant eventually resulted in new requirements for all U.S. plants, including thermal pollution controls and Environmental Impact Statements. No licenses have been issued for new nuclear power plants near the Great Lakes in the United States since.

Palisades nuclear power plant Creative Commons photo licensed under Create Commons By-SA

Today, within the Great Lakes basin watershed there are 17 U.S. plants (12 operating and five “retired,” or shut down) and 21 Canadian ones (18 operating and three shut down). There are active proposals to fire up some retired U.S. plants, and the Palisades plant on Lake Michigan’s shores, which was retired in 2022, just received its first supply of new nuclear fuel with plans to reopen later this fall. On the Canadian side, there are proposals to extend the life of some existing plants and to build new plants.

Without a long-term storage solution in place for spent fuel and other radioactive wastes in either the U.S. or Canada, every operating, aging, and retired plant around the Great Lakes basin is a de facto radioactive waste storage site – something for which they were never originally designed. These sites will need vigilance for centuries, which no one seems to want to discuss. In addition to nuclear energy, medical uses and some industrial uses also generate radionuclides that require very careful handling.

After more than 60 years of commercial use of radioactive materials for energy generation, our democracies can’t figure out what to do with the stuff over the long haul. Even if there were approved long-term waste storage sites, how safe would those sites be for the very long-term? Both the U.S. and Canadian governments have said that high-level nuclear fuel waste must be separated from the environment, essentially forever.

Different isotopes have different risks. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) notes that “Radioactive isotopes eventually decay, or disintegrate, to harmless materials. Some isotopes decay in hours or even minutes, but others decay very slowly. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.” That’s a long planning horizon.

I wasn’t reassured when I noticed this message on the NRC website: “Due to a lapse in appropriations, the NRC has ceased normal operations. However, excepted and exempted activities necessary to maintain critical health and safety functions—as well as essential progress on designated critical activities, including those specified in Executive Order 14300—will continue, consistent with the OMB-Approved NRC Lapse Plan.”

If we can’t even support normal operations due to one administration’s or Congress’ policies, how will we manage 30 years, or 24,000? (And remember, those are just half-lives.) In addition, safely transporting materials to disposal sites raises many other questions. So, regardless of where you fall along the scale of enthusiasm or dread for nuclear power, the waste problem comes along for the ride.

Ten years ago, concerned organizations across the region requested that the federal governments designate radionuclides as a “Chemical of Mutual Concern” (CMC) for the Great Lakes, under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canada. A CMC designation could help raise the level of vigilance about these substances and materials in both nations, including heightened oversight and research by each nation’s leading environmental agencies and research institutions. The governments have raised objections to such a designation from the paternalistic, “we don’t want to alarm the public” to a dismissal of the need, “everything already in place in domestic policy is working, so why bother?” Here we are, a decade later, and finally the governments are saying that they will make a decision by the end of 2025.

More than half a century into the nuclear energy experiment, we’ve learned across the world that tragically, every now and then, things go wrong. We have learned a lot from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. The latter disaster resulted in radioactive water being released into the ocean, and isotopes were not only detected in marine life in the near-shore waters of Japan, but even as far as the North American west coast in bluefin tuna.

While many groups in the region are justifiably focused on the risk of oil spills from the Line 5 pipeline, imagine what even a small-scale nuclear accident could mean for drinking water for 40 million people and fish and wildlife in the Great Lakes basin. Among other things, in some lakes, the water, and thus contaminants in it, can remain in the lake for up to two hundred years.

There’s a difference between wisdom and alarm. Recommending vigilance on radionuclides in the Great Lakes region is not alarmist; it is thoughtful and wise. We have chosen as a society to live with the pros and cons of radioactive technologies. Let us then also choose to practice diligent safeguards, now. For the centuries and potentially millennia ahead, radionuclides will remain a human responsibility.

To learn more about the decision-making process for CMCs, including how to express your concerns, visit GLEN’s website. https://www.greatlakesecoregion.org/toxics-radionuclides-team Look for our final post in this series in the coming weeks.

GLEN welcomes diverse perspectives on Great Lakes protection. Please note that the views in our posts are those of the author. To learn more about GLEN please visit and explore our website at https://www.greatlakesecoregion.org/.