nuclear-news

As many as 76 transport truckloads of high-level nuclear waste could journey along the Trans-Canada Highway over the coming four years in an effort to ship decades’ worth of radioactive rubbish from Chalk River to a U.S. repro-cessing site.

The magnitude of the task is revealed in documents and statements from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Initial details were first reported by the Citizen last week.

Additional details show the plan calls for an anticipated 40 to 50 payloads of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium (HEU) liquid secured in fortified steel casks.

A total of about 23,000 litres of the solution would be moved in batches of a few hundreds litres at a time, the first attempt to truck liquid HEU in Canada.

The shipments would begin moving under armed guard through Eastern Ontario late this summer, pending approvals from Canadian and U.S. nuclear safety regulators, according to the NNSA.

“An initial agreement has been reached (with consignor Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.) but more preparations must occur before shipments and processing of the solutions can begin,” at the U.S. energy department’s Savannah River Site for nuclear waste reprocessing, Robert Middaugh, a NNSA spokesman in Washington, said in a Wednesday email.

Once there, the solution is to be downblended to low enriched uranium (LEU) and used as fuel in U.S. commercial power reactors.

The estimated $60-million cost will be paid by AECL, which operates Chalk River, Middaugh said.

As well, under a separate proposed plan, several thousand spent fuel rods also made from U.S.-origin HEU and used to drive Chalk River’s NRU and NRX research reactors since the 1960s are to be trucked to the Savannah River Site.

Those shipments are to begin late this summer, again pending approvals from regulators, according to 2012 NNSA documents. (NRX was shuttered in 1993 and NRU has used LEU since the early 1990s.)

The NNSA is preparing for approximately 26 spent fuel shipments over about four years, or an average of 6.5 trips a year in non-winter months. Additional details from NNSA were not available Wednesday. Canadian officials are remaining tight-lipped.

The plans follow Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s commitment at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul to return additional U.S.-origin HEU inventories to the U.S. by 2018 to lessen the risk of nuclear terrorism.

As the world’s leading producer of medical isotopes, Canada has weathered mounting criticism in recent years over the use and stockpiling of HEU from the U.S. for isotope production at the Chalk River nuclear laboratories, two hours northwest of Ottawa.

Non-proliferation advocates fear terrorists could strike and steal the material to build a weapon, or carry out an act of radiological sabotage at the Upper Ottawa Valley site. A nuclear accident and environmental disaster is also a concern.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) is reviewing an application from a U.S. nuclear materials transport company to approve the cask design for transport of the liquid HEU. It has yet to receive an application from AECL for a transport licence.

Both CNSC and AECL officials were circumspect when the issue was raised during a public CNSC meeting Wednesday.

“I don’t think it’s a state secret that there’s been a commitment to allow for some of the (HEU liquid) material to get repatriated by the U.S.,” said commission president Michael Binder.

“I’m just stating the obvious that, until we get an application, there’s nothing we are interested in saying. When we get an application, it’ll be processed according to all the rules and obligations of both Canada and the U.S.

“So I assume that you’re going to send an application in the fullness of time,” he said to Robert Walker, AECL president and CEO.

“That would be exactly the case,” Walker replied.

According to the NNSA, the plan to move the HEU-bearing liquid calls for one payload a week to be trucked to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which is about 2,000 kilometres from Chalk River. Each cask would carry up to 257 litres and, based on 50 trips, about two caskloads per trip would be required to move all 23,000 litres.

The shipments, says NNSA, are to cross into New York State, presumably over one of five Canada-U.S. bridges or a Quebec-New York land crossing. The exact route, timing and security details are proscribed under Canadian and U.S. law. The shipments are to halt in winter and presumably resume in the spring of 2014.

The solution is from the Fissile Solution Storage Tank, or FISST, which holds about 23,000 litres of an intensely radioactive nitric acid solution from the production of mo-lybdenum-99, a vital medical isotope.

Suspended in the solution are an estimated 175 kilograms of HEU, enough to produce as many as seven nuclear bombs. Also present are plutonium, tritium, other fission products and mercury.

The separate plan for the solid spent fuel waste calls for about 1,000 spent fuel bundles, each about the size of a fireplace log, to be moved inside shielded casks hauled by transports, according to NNSA documents.

The spent fuel is now securely stored at Chalk River inside shielded concrete cylindrical tile holes 4.9 metres deep. A single NRU fuel bundle or “assembly” contains 12 HEU fuel rods, while NRX bundles contain seven, placing the total number of spent rods to be moved at 7,000 to 12,000.

Radiation has innumerable intensities and spent nuclear fuel ranks among the fiercest. Direct exposure to a single irradiated uranium fuel bundle fresh out of a reactor is almost instantly fatal. Environmental contamination can be just as damaging.

There has never been a major accident in North America involving the transport of nuclear materials. Small amounts of HEU in solid form have long been exported, without incident, by the U.S. to Canada and turned into “targets” that are irradiated to produce medical isotopes. More than a million packages containing other radioactive material are transported in Canada each year.

The nuclear material handling company for the Chalk River shipments is Atlanta-based NAC International, which has experience transporting 3,600 cask loads over more than nine million kilometres.

Its NAC-LWT (legal weigh truck) cask is considered the workhorse of the nuclear transport trade. The cylindrical stainless steel container measures five metres in length with an overall diameter of 1.1 metres and is designed to withstand intense impacts, crushing, puncturing, fire and immersion in water.

Both the CNSC and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have separate reviews underway of NAC International applications to approve that the cask design meets International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) transport safety standards.

Theft and sabotage seem unlikely given each shipment will require approved Canadian and U.S. security plans and move under armed police guard.

If the cask design is approved, AECL will have to submit a transport security plan for CNSC approval, satisfy Canada’s Transportation of Dangerous Goods regulation, and secure a CNSC transport licence. Similar authorizations are required for the U.S. legs of the shipments.

“The CNSC will not allow the shipment of any nuclear materials unless they are convinced the safety of Canadians will be protected,” it said in a statement.

Likewise, “the material will only be transported after the completion of design modifications to the transport packages and licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other stakeholders as required by U.S. and international regulations,” said Middaugh.

The repatriation falls under the NNSA’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative. It supports permanent nuclear threat reduction by eliminating stockpiles of excess nuclear materials that could be used for weapons at civilian sites around the world. It also supports reducing and, to the extent possible, eliminating the use of HEU from civilian nuclear applications, notably by encouraging medical isotope producers to use LEU.

The initiative has repatriated more than 3.4 metric tons of HEU and plutonium from more than 30 countries over the past 17 years.

In December 2011, the Citizen revealed the FISST sprang three internal pinhole leaks in recent years and is under constant surveillance by the IAEA for any hint of an accidental atomic chain reaction called criticality.

The noxious liquid must be carefully monitored, mixed and warmed to prevent it from solidifying and – in a worst-case scenario – potentially achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction of fissioning atoms. If such an event occurred, there would be no nuclear explosion, but the tank could rupture and cause catastrophic contamination of a wide area, including the nearby Ottawa River.

At the time of the article, AECL had no firm plans to empty the contents of the tank, which it insists is safe.

Three months later at the Seoul summit, Harper unexpectedly announced that “HEU-bearing liquid” from Chalk River would be repatriated to the U.S.

The estimated $60-million cost of moving the FISST solution is expected to be funded by the federal Nuclear Legacy Liabilities Program. AECL is in the eighth year of the estimated $7-billion, 70-year federal cleanup of its “legacy” wastes across the country.

As Canada’s leading nuclear science establishment for 68 years, Chalk River harbours 70 per cent of all the radioactive waste ever produced by AECL and its predecessor, the National Research Council of Canada.

The bulk of Canada’s 44,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste is contained in more than two million spent uranium fuel bundles stored at the sites of Ontario’s big power-producing reactors.

A LONG HAUL

Highly radioactive material is being shipped from Chalk River to a reprocessing facility in South Carolina. The shipment will pass through New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virgina and North Carolina to South Carolina. Distance for the route shown is about 2,050 kilometres.