Canada’s euphemistic search for a place to bury nuclear waste: Walkom via The Star

The plan to store nuclear waste is a mystery but whatever it is is ‘open, transparent and inclusive.’

The headline in the Lucknow Sentinel said it all.

“Conversations begin to explore connections between APM project and community well-being,” it read.

Indeed they have. As the full-page ad in the Southwestern Ontario weekly reported this month, such “conversations” have been going full-tilt in eight small Ontario communities as a federal agency searches for a place willing to store highly radioactive spent-fuel rods from Canada’s nuclear power plants.

Four of the eight are on or near Lake Huron, including the township of Huron-Kinloss, which is where Lucknow is situated.

An observer from, say, Mars might think a highly radioactive nuclear dump would be a hard sell.

But such an observer has never been to the Lake Huron coastline where the nuclear industry means jobs and where local councils vie with one another for the privilege of burying radioactive waste.

Nor has our mythical Martian had much experience with the new-age, feel-good materials produced by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, the federal body in charge of this project.

They give no indication that nuclear waste might be dangerous. Quite the reverse. The language is pure corporate bureaucratese – anodyne, euphemistic and soothing.

[…]

What is this plan? Well, it’s Adaptive Phased Management. What is Adaptive Phased Management? To answer that question our Martian might have to go to the nuclear waste organization’s website, where he would find that Adaptive Phased Management is the federal government’s plan.