"Our community must be clear in our message to city council that we do not want this type of storage in our community," he said. "There is no dollar figure, no salary and no number of jobs that would be worth risking the health of our children, our landscape and our future."

Bartolucci alleged NWMO is proposing a large-scale, deep geological repository be built in Greater Sudbury that would store some of Canada's nuclear waste.

"I am urging all Sudburians to say no to this proposal and to urge city council to pass a resolution indicating they do not support this idea either," he said.

"We are not the dumping ground for Canada's nuclear waste nor do we ever want to be."

A NWMO spokesman said last week that Greater Sudbury has not been targeted for a nuclear waste storage site.

"There is not, and has never been, a proposal to bury nuclear waste in Sudbury," Mike Krizanc said. "We're simply visiting the major regions of the nuclear provinces to ask for the public to comment on our process for finding a site."

Jamie Robinson, NWMO's director of strategic communications, said the amount of jobs that would be created with the proposed storage site is considerable.

"We are talking about hundreds of direct jobs in the community and maybe indirectly thousands of jobs in the community," he said, in an interview Monday.

Robinson said that once a site is selected, a "site characterization building" will be constructed and operated over a period of five years. If everything goes well with that building, he said, the construction of the actual storage facility will follow and take 10 years to complete.

The nuclear waste storage facility project is a national infrastructure project that carries an estimated price tag of $16-24 billion.

Brennain Lloyd, of Northwatch, who travelled to the city from North Bay for the information session, said the best solution for nuclear waste is to store it where it is produced.

"In any other industry, you deal with waste at source," she said. "Reduce it as much as possible."

Lloyd said that creating a nuclear waste storage site in a remote part of Northern Ontario would not be a good move for many reasons.

"If you move it in Northern Ontario, you have increased transportation," she said. "And you create the risk of remoteness. You add this out of sight and out of mind quality to it. It's not the ingredient we want in a waste management solution. In 100-200-300 years when the reactors are shut down, the expertise (in dealing with nuclear waste) will become more and more scarce."

Gord Harris, who ran for the Green Party in the Sudbury riding in the October 2008 federal election, said he doesn't like the fact that the Ontario government plans to increase the amount of nuclear-generated power.

"It only expands the problem (of dealing with nuclear waste)," he said. "That $20 billion could be better spent expanding renewable power."

Harris said he does find that the NWMO is doing it right and proceeding very slowly with its plans.

"I studied this in university," he said. " I have always been aware of the challenges we have in disposing of nuclear waste. It is one of the biggest challenges we have ever faced. These things will be here 100 million years from now."

The Greater Sudbury session is one of 13 NWMO is holding across Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

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Disposal

Uranium fuel rod bundles are not like a dead household battery.

* a uranium-dioxide rod bundle is about .5 metres long, about 13 centimetres in diameter and weighs about 20 kilograms;

* a rod bundle has a working life of about 18 months;

* a spent rod bundle then gets stored in a water tank for 10 years, the water helping to both cool the rod bundle down and help shield against radiation emission;

* next up is storage in a dry container;

* a spent rod bundle will continue to emit radiation for thousands of years;

* about 90 per cent of the spent nuclear rod bundles in Canada to date were produced in Ontario;

* at the moment, spent rod bundles in Canada are stored on site at nuclear power reactors and at research stations where they were used;

* the proposed underground storage of spent nuclear bundles would see some 300 bundles stored in a copper container surrounded by bentamite clay and bedrock;

* storage would occur some 500 metres below the surface;

* if all the spent rod bundles in Canada were collected and stacked like cordwood, they would fill six hockey rinks from ice level to the top of the boards.

-- source: Nuclear Waste Management Organization