By Mel Luymes

I’m late to the game, I know. By the time you read this, the date for South Bruce’s referendum on hosting a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) for spent nuclear fuel will have passed. It was agreed that the referendum needed more than half of the residents to vote in order to decide, otherwise council would make the decision on their behalf. 
Regardless of how the vote went, the 5,500 residents of South Bruce still need to live with each other. 
With such a critical decision on their hands, perhaps it was inevitable this was going to divide the community. For those that may have been living under a rock (and I don’t blame you!), I don’t have space here to outline the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) and their ten-year process that decided on a DGR and another 10 years engaging potential host sites. You can read that for yourself at www.southbruce.ca/DGR or www.nwmo.ca. 
The NWMO has been engaging stakeholders and doing geological exploration in South Bruce for over 10 years. The plan in question is to spend the next decade designing (2025-2035), then excavate hallways 1,400 feet deep, below the groundwater zone, karst and shale layers and into solid bedrock (2036-2042), in which robots would be placing geosphere containers (2043-2092). Spent nuclear fuel pellets would be kept in their bundles, stored in a large copper coated tube encased in bentonite clay inside a rock geosphere. After another 70 years of monitoring, the site would be decommissioned over the next 30 years, bringing us to the year 2192.
I can’t even comprehend this expanse of time. The engineering team is building for forever, essentially. They are designing for a time when humans are extinct from this planet, to carry the weight of the next few Ice Ages. It is hard not to be emotional when we consider the project and its potential for future risk. 
South Bruce residents that voted in favour of hosting the DGR believe the NWMO is putting community safety above all else, and they feel that the thousands of local jobs created, and millions invested in their community, will ultimately benefit South Bruce residents. 
However, many residents instead voted no, over concerns of community safety and the belief that the NWMO had manipulated the decision-making process itself. At a Protect Our Waterways-No Nuclear Waste event in early October, Dr. David Suzuki received an uproar of applause when he suggested that the DGR be built where most of the cheap power is going, under the city of Toronto. 
Like an iceberg, conflict runs deeper than the issues that lie at the surface. Often, we argue only from our surface positions (for or against the DGR, in this case), and it is easy to dismiss those with the opposite opinion as either uneducated or evil. This is even more tricky when the issue is extremely technical and requires a degree in nuclear science to understand it. South Bruce’s Willing to Listen group (whoever they are) state on their website that they offer “Facts Not Fear”. With just that phrase, they have positioned themselves as correct and any other side as irrational and emotional. Yes, they may be scientists, but clearly not social scientists! 
Polarizing into sides is human nature, I get that. We feel safer in our tribes when there is an easy enemy as our target, but it didn’t help the community of South Bruce. 
Something more interesting happens when we move below the surface of a conflict. (And I’m taking this from a Foundations in Understanding Conflict course I took at Conrad Grebel University College, developed by Credence & Co.)
First, we can explore not the what, but the how. I don’t know how exactly the community consultations unfolded over the last decade, but many at the anti-DGR event did not feel that their concerns were being acknowledged and they felt the big nuclear money had bought off the South Bruce Council. As well, attendee Dr. Erika Simpson, political science professor at Western, argued that it was undemocratic that 5,500 residents were deciding something that could have a tremendous impact on surrounding communities, and across Canada and the U.S. as well. At this point, we’re not debating science, we’re talking about fairness and transparency of the process – and that is a different conversation altogether.
Then there are the deeper levels that we can try to understand each other from, and those are our shared needs as humans: Belonging, Meaning, Recognition, Self-Determination and Security. When we get triggered and argumentative, it can be because we don’t feel safe or that we don’t feel we have control or choice over what is happening to us. It is completely understandable that people on all sides of the South Bruce DGR issue have felt that their basic needs have been being threatened.
If South Bruce residents or council voted yes, it still needs to go to the Saugeen Ojibway Nation and the NWMO. And if they voted no, then the decade-long engagement process is now over and there will be no DGR in Southern Ontario. 
Either way, there is an emotional fallout and a divided community around South Bruce that will need some long-term mending. A sense of belonging, to place and to community, is a foundational human need and now begins the clean-up process. ◊