In the town of Deep River, Ontario, the hands of the atomic clock are ticking. Located on its territory, very close by, more than a million cubic metres of nuclear waste lie dormant, waiting to be buried a kilometre from the Ottawa River. Seven months after the project was given the green light by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission tribunal, local residents are tearing each other apart. First of three articles.
Jason Phelps’ boat thumps on the Ottawa River, leaving a trail of foam behind it. “I definitely don’t fish anymore hereI don’t eat fish anymorehere ” he says, his gaze fixed on the Ontario shore.
Before his eyes, atop a brick building that borders the choppy waters of the river, rise two two-tone chimneys. A very calm morning on the grounds of the Chalk River nuclear laboratories.
Built on an area of some 4,000 hectares, the plant has been part of the Eastern Ontario landscape for more than 80 years, so much so that Deep River, the town that encompasses it, is essentially the same age. “We were the Canadian parallel to Los Alamos,” says the town’s mayor, Suzanne D’Eon, referring to the American city that saw the birth of the “Manhattan Project” in the 1940s.
Venturing west on Highway 17, a motorist coming from Montreal will come across the town of Chalk River, then, very quickly, a road called Plant Road. After turning right, leaving behind a large facility marked with the logo of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) — a Canadian Crown corporation — he will come face to face with a heavily secured gate. This is where the Chalk River Laboratories campus begins.
It was on these lands that a team of Canadian, British and French scientists developed the first nuclear reactor outside the United States in the mid-1940s, using uranium and heavy water to generate nuclear fission.
In its early days, the plant was also used to develop methods to produce plutonium. According to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, more than 250 kilograms of the radioactive element were transferred to the United States between 1959 and 1964, to be mixed “with the remaining stocks of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.”
Since the end of World War II, the Chalk River Laboratories have gradually withdrawn from this type of activity to concentrate exclusively on the production of energy and medical isotopes. But after decades of operation, area residents now have to live with a liability they can no longer ignore: a million cubic metre (m) mound of waste.3) of radioactive waste. The Duty went there.
A nuclear city
It’s 2 p.m. in Deep River. A stifling heat has descended to the river, where sailboats pitch from left to right. At the entrance to Beach Avenue, we are greeted by a white house with a green roof and dormer windows. The neighboring trees cast their shadows on a circular sign screwed to the top of the garage. It reads “Laurence.”
The sign was placed here in memory of George C. Laurence, a Prince Edward Island scientist who arrived in Deep River in 1945 to work on the first reactors at the newly opened Chalk River plant and who became chairman of the Atomic Energy Control Board in 1961.
On this stretch of street, the Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage has identified nine homes that belonged to former nuclear workers. In Deep River, former employees of Atomic Energy of Canada are rife. Even the mayor worked there.
Kerry Burns is no exception. Sitting on a bench outside the Deep River Public Library, the nuclear chemistry expert, who holds a master’s degree and a doctorate from McGill University and worked at AECL for 25 years, looks back nostalgically on his years at the Chalk River lab. But today, it’s the riverside resident who speaks. And he’s worried.
To dispose of its decades-old nuclear liabilities, the group that now operates the Chalk River plant, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), is proposing to build a 37-hectare landfill — the size of 10 soccer fields — into the side of a hillside that would hold one million cubic metres of low-level radioactive waste. The near-surface waste management facility (NSWF), which will be located one kilometre from the river, already received approval from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in January.
The pile of debris that will be buried there will be composed of 90% protective equipment and materials, building waste or contaminated soil directly from the restoration work at Chalk River, launched in 2016. Some 10% of the waste will arrive on the site from university and hospital laboratories, or from other AECL plants, such as Gentilly-1, in Quebec.
While working at Chalk River, between stints at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kerry Burns was tasked with analyzing the waste on campus to find out how much radioactive material it contained. At the time, he says, the waste stored at the site came from all over Canada, making categorizing it extremely complex.
The LNC group, which includes AtkinsRéalis — SNC-Lavalin’s new name — assures that the waste that will be buried near its facilities corresponds to the definition of “low-intensity” residues, meaning that their radioactivity will have sufficiently diminished by the end of the IGDPS’s useful life, in 500 years. But Kerry Burns fears unpleasant surprises.
“LNC really doesn’t know what it has on hand. There’s a lot of old waste on the site, from various operations,” he points out.
“A lot of the old waste hasn’t been classified,” he continues. “I live upstream, yes. But I think there’s more work that needs to be done. We don’t know what’s going to be in there.”
And the river?
The LNC group assures that the technology it has developed meets “international best practices” for disposing of low-intensity nuclear waste. The IGDPS will have a layer of clay, sand and geotextile about 1.5 metres thick under the waste, then, above it, a protective cover about 2 metres thick, composed in particular of sand, rocks and a synthetic membrane.
During heavy rains, a wastewater treatment system must recover any liquid that may have been contaminated and treat it before releasing it into the Ottawa River watershed.
In interview with The DutyProfessor François Caron of the Royal Military College of Canada, wants to be reassuring. “There really aren’t any parts of reactors that are going to end up there,” says this expert in environmental radioactivity. “When we look at the heaviest elements, like uranium, we have to remember that it is present everywhere in nature. It is responsible, for example, for our exposure to radon.”
While there is no such thing as zero risk, the IGDPS was specifically designed so that such elements decompose before reaching waterways, says Caron. “I have no concerns,” he adds.
Nothing to convince Ole Hendrickson, Lynn Jones and Eva Schacherl. Seated at a table in an Ottawa house, these three citizens committed to opposing the project list with amazement the products that could end up in the IGDPS: uranium 238, plutonium 242, cesium 135… “They have established acceptable levels of [radioactivité]… acceptable to them,” says M.me Schacherl.
Involved for years in the fight against the IGDPS, Mme Jones and Hendrickson own a cottage in the Deep River area. And despite numerous meetings with the parties involved, they can’t shake the belief that the site will be nothing more than a “leaking dump.” “There are more and more extreme weather events,” Jones said. “There’s potential for tornadoes, wildfires. So there could be accidents that could send large amounts of waste into the river.”
A former AECL employee specializing in environmental assessment, William Turner was involved in the LNC group’s consultation process from the project’s inception in 2016. “What I discovered was that the people who were proposing this project didn’t really understand the environmental assessment process. And that bothered me,” he says.
“There are several questions about the debris [qu’ils veulent enfouir sur le nouveau site]”It’s very difficult to determine what they’re going to put in there, and how much,” he said.
In an email, the LNC group maintains that, despite its proximity to water, the project will in no way affect aquatic biodiversity and human health. “The IGDPS was designed to withstand events such as earthquakes, wildfires, sabotage and major storms. The facility is located 50 metres above the river, much higher [que le niveau] where any flooding could occur,” the conglomerate wrote.
Deep River Mayor Suzanne D’Eon says there aren’t a thousand solutions to getting rid of the nuclear waste currently stored on the Chalk River campus. “CNL comes to us with a plan B on a plan B on a plan B, multiple protective layers and a treatment system. It’s a lot better than the current state of the waste,” she says.
Jason Phelps speeds his boat along the peninsula that houses the Chalk River Laboratories. A helicopter from the Petawawa military base roars overhead. One hand on the tiller, the other pointed toward the Ontario shore, he recounts how two nuclear accidents shook the region in 1952 and again in 1958, to near-total indifference.
“At the time, the government said it was safe,” he recalls. “They’re still doing the same thing,” he says before walking away to the family cottage, on an island in the middle of the murky waters of the Ottawa River.