It will be early next year before the third and final appeal is heard against the Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) at the Chalk River labs.
The Federal Court of Canada has set February 5-6 as the date for a two-day hearing of an application filed by the Kebaowek First Nation (KFN), the Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), and the Sierra Club Canada Foundation.
Together they filed an application last spring for a judicial review of the decision by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change to issue a permit for the NSDF project under the Species at Risk Act.
In their filing, KFN, the Concerned Citizens, CCNR and the Sierra Club say the NSDF will be built on land “that is home to several endangered and threatened species, protected under the Species at Risk Act (SARA).”
They say the decision by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change to issue a permit under SARA to allow the NSDF to go ahead anyway is “unreasonable.”
“CNL’s application (to build the NSDF) sets out facts showing that it did not consider all reasonable alternative locations for the NSDF; it only considered seven properties already owned by Atomic Energy of Canda Limited (AECL), and it did so because of a mere ‘preference’,” they say.
“CNL also told Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) that it did not choose the best location to protect species at risk; after creating a short-list of three feasible locations, CNL chose the location it predicted would have the greatest impact on species at risk.”
They say the decision is also unreasonable “because the Minister failed to account for evidence indicating that CNL’s mitigation measures might not ensure the survival of the endangered turtles and bats,” and “omitted the endangered Monarch butterfly from his analysis (completely), since he erroneously identified the Monarch as a species of special concern instead of an endangered species”…
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