On Sunday over 150 people piled aboard boats and formed a flotilla on the Ottawa River to protest a proposed disposal site for radioactive materials at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) property in Chalk River, Ont.
The near surface disposal facility (NSDF) spans 16 hectares and is designed to take on one million cubic meters of low- to intermediate-level waste over the next 50 years. It comes with a price tag of $325 million and is located one kilometer from the Ottawa River.
The engineered containment mound will feature two meters of base liner, made up of layers of stone, compacted clay and geomembranes to prevent leakage into the surrounding area. Once an area of the mound is filled, a two meter cap of liners, stone and other materials will cover the waste.
The overwhelming majority of the waste stored at the NSDF site will be demolition debris from aging buildings on site as well as other materials such as contaminated soil. Construction is slated to begin in 2018 in order to have the site operational by 2020.
CNL has hosted several public information sessions in the surrounding area and even invited several local mayors and officials to take a tour of the proposed site. During these sessions, they stressed the environmental protections they have in place.
According to CNL’s Jim Buckley, who works directly on the project, the NSDF has been engineered to withstand a seismic event up to 6.0 on the Richter scale and has enough capacity to contain 15,000 cubic meters of waste water in the event of a 100-year storm (no small consideration after this spring’s floods).
CNL also monitors the area extensively, collecting roughly 5,000 air, water and soil samples annually both on site and downstream.
As this weekend’s protests demonstrated however, there are many critics of the project. In addition to the low-level construction waste, the site will also take on small amounts of intermediate-level waste, which encompasses a broad range of substances and radioactivity. Ten per cent of the waste will also be shipped in from other CNL sites such as Whiteshell Laboratories in Manitoba.
David Winfield, a former senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), the crown corporation that oversees CNL, expressed concern over the site’s location, as well as the inclusion of intermediate-level waste.
Several other former AECL scientists have put forward their concerns as well, questioning the timeline as well as the safety measures in place.
Local groups such as the Old Fort William Cottager’s Association and the Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area have been very vocal in their opposition to the project, mainly due to its proximity to the Ottawa River.
These groups should be commended for their efforts to increase public awareness of the project, regardless of your stance on the NSDF site. Without these tenacious citizens, complex and important issues like this could have fallen to the wayside or been ignored by the vast majority of the population.
By exercising their constitutional right to protest, they have brought the issue to the attention of local politicians and stakeholders. Without people willing to put in the time and do the research, most of us would be in the dark.
So bravo to the local activists that keep digging for answers. Thanks for sticking to your guns.
Caleb Nickerson
