How close are we to a solution to the growing stockpile of nuclear waste?

Canada gets only about 15 per cent of its electric power from nuclear energy but the radioactive waste produce by that 15 per cent is causing an outsized headache for the utilities involved.

Hearings begin this week in Ontario that may give some clue on whether we'll see a solution to the dilemma anytime soon.

Ontario and New Brunswick are the only provinces with active nuclear power plants feeding electricity into the grid after Quebec began decommissioning Gentilly-2, Hydro-Quebec's last reactor, last December.

All except New Brunswick's Point Lepreau generating station are in Ontario.

But they share the same problem; no place to store the highly radioactive spent fuel rods safely and permanently. Point Lepreau maintains an on-site waste-management facility, as do Ontario Power Generation's (OPG) three big nuclear plants, Bruce A and B, Pickering and Darlington.

The Bruce site, on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, has become Ground Zero in one closely-watched battle over disposing of radioactive waste.

[ Related: Plans to bury nuclear waste near Lake Huron face binational opposition ]

Local residents, many of them retirees with cottages by the lake, are fighting plans to bury low- and intermediate-level waste deep underground on what proponents say is a geologically stable rock formation.

The nuclear tomb would contain things like workers' protective suits and mops and towels used to clean up spills of contaminated water in a vault 680 metres underground. Despite its designation, the material's radioactivity wouldn't be down to safe levels for 100,000 years.

The proposal presages a second plan to create a similar deep repository for high-level reactor waste.

Although municipal officials welcome the jobs the projects would bring, many residents have come down with a bad case of the NIMBYs (not in my back yard).

One of them is retired school administrator Marti McFadzean, whose cottage has been in her family since 1928, sits two kilometres from the proposed site of OPG's $1-billion low-level disposal site.

“We’re not anti-nuclear,” McFadzean told the Globe and Mail. “We’re just saying: Do it right. If you bury the waste, it is going to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ but remain there for generations.”

McFadzean is readying or hearings by a federal review panel on the project, which are scheduled to begin in Kincardine, Ont., on Monday.

The proposal calls for up to 200,000 cubic metres of waste now housed on the surface to be buried more than half a kilometre deep in limestone that OPG experts say is highly impermeable and has not shifted in a million years, the Globe said.

Meanwhile, the federally-commissioned Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), which is made up OPG, Hydro-Quebec, New Brunswick Power Corp. and Atomic Energy of Canada, is proceeding with a decade-long effort to house permanently the growing stockpile of spent fuel rods now stashed at nuclear plants, dubbed Adapted Phased Management.

Bruce County municipalities, the Globe noted, are vying for the right to host the site despite opposition from some residents.

Both waste-management proposals are also opposed by Americans living on the other side of the lake, concerned any escaping radioactivity would contaminate drinking-water sources.

Opposition or no, the stuff will have to go somewhere and the problem just keeps growing.

[ Related: German nuclear waste train gets by protests ]

A CBC News report in 2009 said some two million radioactive fuel bundles are in temporary storage at Canadian nuclear sites while the NWMO looks for a community to host a permanent storage site. It's estimated that the cost of creating a facility could be up to $24 billion.

The problem of what to do with spent fuel is as old as the nuclear industry in Canada. CBC News noted a 1998 federal environmental assessment review rejected the concept of a central storage facility because of public fears of an accident that could release the nuclear waste.

The issue dragged on until 2002, when Ottawa commissioned the NWMO to search for a suitable location.

Of course the problem is not limited to Canada. In the United States, opposition from environmentalists and local residents effectively killed a plan to create an underground nuclear waste dump deep inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The site had been studied since the 1980s and is still technically alive but the project has been starved of research funds, since 2008, a recent report in Forbes Magazine said.