Canada’s controversial nuclear waste disposal design for Chalk River

How safe is the Ottawa River from nuclear waste? Canada’s National Observer By Lauren Hicks, Dana Hatherly, Christian Paas-Lang, Mateo Peralta & Adam van der Zwan April 8th 2019 “……..Nuclear disposal site design

The proposed Near Surface Disposal Facility is not new technology, according to its proponents. The same technology set for Chalk River has also been adopted in the U.K. and Belgium, the company says.

The key component is an engineered containment mound. It is contained by a large cover system designed to keep out rain and other elements. Below the cover, a liner system is meant to collect contaminated water — and alert monitoring systems to leaks — and direct the effluent to treatment systems.

The timeline for the project is monumental. The mound will be filled with low-level nuclear waste that is currently held on site at Chalk River, as well as a small amount of waste that will be transported to the facility from other locations such as hospitals, universities and other nuclear facilities in Canada. Five per cent of the total waste will come from Whiteshell Laboratories in Manitoba, which is undergoing its own decommissioning process.

The waste in the mound would be split into cells according to contaminants or time for decay. A temporary cover would allow time to add radioactive waste for 50 years. When the site is full it would be permanently sealed.

The site would be monitored for 300 years after the permanent cover is installed at which point the radioactive material will have decayed. The facility is designed to last 550 years, the company says.

The radioactive waste inside the mound will break down. The half-life for tritium is around 12 years, and the half-life for strontium-90 is about 29 years. That means half of the tritium or strontium stored on the site decays during that period, with half of the remainder taking a further 12 or 29 years to decay. The process keeps repeating itself until ultimately all the material has broken down.

The engineered containment mound is CNL’s preferred nuclear waste storage option. In its draft environmental impact statement, CNL includes a discussion of the various other types of disposal options and techniques including deep-underground repositories, above-ground cement vaults and different on-and off-site locations.

In an opinion article in the Ottawa Citizen in April 2018, Eva Schacherl, a former executive director of the Canadian Environmental Network, argued the project was “the wrong plan at the wrong site,” and a vault buried hundreds of metres deep below the grounds should have been chosen.

In a draft environmental assessment, the lab did not conduct geological tests far below the surface. Although the deep-underground method provides additional protections against leakage, CNL says there is not enough evidence to outweigh the benefits of its chosen model.

A deep-underground vault would be much more expensive to monitor and maintain over its life cycle, according to CNL’s analysis. CNL has made several changes to the proposal since public consultations began in May 2016, in response to some of the hundreds of initial comments by the public during an ongoing environmental assessment.

Ottawa Riverkeeper advocates a type of facility that does not come into contact with water. “We want a solution that will safeguard all species from the radioactive waste that is currently onsite at Chalk River and Rolphton,” Riverkeeper said in a Nov. 1 update. “We would like to see Canada look to countries like Finland who have constructed siloed geological repositories to safeguard all levels of radioactive waste. We want a disposal facility where radioactive waste does not come into contact with water.”

CNL acknowledged during an interview for this story that it was not transparent enough during the environmental impact statement process in explaining why the particular location near the Ottawa River on the CRL site was the best choice.

Subsequent studies, analyses and updates to the document are part of the delay that will push the delivery of CNL’s final environmental impact statement to the CNSC for approval back to around spring 2020, according to the company. The delay was also caused by technical questions from provincial and government agencies that have required additional study, including a notable point where nuclear waste is discharged into Perch Lake.

The public comment process has led to other significant changes to the project design. The original project was meant to hold predominantly low-level intermediate waste, but also allowed for about one per cent intermediate-level waste or mixed wastes. The company has now decided to restrict the waste going into the storage facility to only the low-level category.

The change was purely driven by feedback from the community, the company representatives said. The site was never intended to hold high-level waste, such as spent nuclear fuel from a reactor.

“It’s in response to concerns from the public or interest groups,” said Meggan Vickerd, director of the nuclear waste facility project for CNL. “Intermediate-level waste was only a fraction of the inventory, plus it was not all of the intermediate-level waste, so we knew we still needed another facility.”

Controversy over near-surface disposal

The company says the project prompted hundreds of public comments during its opening consultation phase. Pat Quinn, CNL’s communications director, says the company is dedicated to transparency and open communication.

Activist organizations and Indigenous groups have raised a number of red flags about the suggested nuclear waste site and the overall security of decommissioning, including its construction about one kilometre away from the river.

Riverkeeper has also emphasized that despite the Canadian government’s rhetoric about the importance of a Nation to Nation relationship, “there has been no consultation with Indigenous Governments to develop a radioactive waste policy on terms that would be acceptable to Indigenous peoples.

“Likewise, there has been no consultation with the Algonquin Anishinaabe people about consolidating all federal radioactive wastes within their traditional, unsurrendered territory.”

Some local farmers have also expressed concern. One is Taylor Hanrath, an organic pork farmer and the owner of Butternutty Farm who lives downstream in Pembroke.

“If there’s a leak at all, in some way, shape, or form it would have the pretty big Ottawa River right beside it to transport it quickly and there’s always going to be the potential for human error, on top of a possible earthquake or tornado.” Hanrath said. “Even right now I don’t know what the plan would be for my farm if a leak were to happen at the current site.”

………The International Atomic Energy Agency indicates better ways to store nuclear waste are to bury it in “caverns, vaults, or silos, at least a few tens of metres below ground level, and up to a few hundred metres below ground level.” It does state, however, that a near-surface facility would be sufficient for low-level waste, such as decommissioned structures, old laboratory materials and soil.

Another issue is how extreme weather events may affect the storage facility during construction, the 50-year operation period, and in the hundreds of years after its closure.

Following the devastation from tornadoes in and around Ottawa in late September 2018, the Concerned Citizens and 86 other groups including First Nations and citizens groups from across Canada signed a collective call for an inquiry into how the Canadian government handles its radioactive waste.

Wait and see?

CNL devotes an extensive section to extreme weather preparedness in its nearly 1,000-page environmental impact statement. The project is designed to maintain wastewater treatment flow in the worst-case scenario of two back-to-back 100-year rainfall events. The lab says it believes the design will do well enough to avoid overflows and leaks of contaminated water or erosion of the engineered containment mound.

CNL acknowledges that tornados could damage buildings and other infrastructure, including the nuclear waste storage mound. The project design estimates a minute chance of a tornado strike. It says tornado protocols are already built into their emergency preparedness plan.

During the construction phase, CNL says, high winds could increase the amount of dust kicked up. The biggest concerns were tied to high winds during waste transfers and when the cells were covered with the temporary covers.

The environmental assessment considers climate change could contribute to the increased frequency of violent storms or tornadoes. That needs to be factored in to the project design, CNL says.

The lab maintains there is a low risk from low-level waste.

However, some 60,000 tons of dangerous radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel reported on the shores of the Great Lakes at the Bruce, Pickering and Darlington nuclear generating stations is an unfriendly reminder that Canada has yet to figure out how to deal with its medium- and high-level radioactive junk………

CNL’s environmental impact assessment is expected to be ready for review this spring, three years after the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission launched the environmental assessment process. Public hearings are to follow.

A final environmental assessment report must then be completed. CNL will then submit its license application to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, followed by public hearings. The commission will likely issue its final decison in 2020 or 2021.

Editor’s note: This article was produced by the Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication, in collaboration with the Institute for Investigative Journalism, Concordia University. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/08/features/how-safe-ottawa-river-nuclear-waste