Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
8/7/2015
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories late last week awarded an $86.8 million contract to a joint venture of Amec Foster Wheeler and CB&I to construct the Port Granby long-term waste management facility, the companies announced. The contract calls for the excavation of legacy low-level radioactive waste from the Port Hope disposal area for transportation to the new construction site in Clarington, Ontario. “By combining our experience and expertise with CB&I, we are able to meet the complex needs of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories on this significant project,” said Simon Naylor, group president of Amec Foster Wheeler’s Americas unit, in a statement. “We look forward to successfully delivering this project to the benefit of the local community.”
According to the company, “the contract scope involves facility construction, waste excavation, construction of a roadway to permit transportation of the excavated material without using municipal roads, and restoration of the existing and new facility sites.” Work is expected to begin later this year, with construction of the new facility lasting five years.
The Port Granby Project is part of the Canadian government’s Port Hope Area Initiative, an undertaking for the safe long-term management of historic low-level radioactive waste in the municipalities of Port Hope and Clarington. The project will relocate approximately 450,000 cubic meters of such radioactive waste and marginally contaminated soils, located at an existing waste management facility on the shoreline of Lake Ontario, to a new, engineered aboveground mound to be built about a kilometer north of the current site, the Port Hope Area Initiative’s website says.
The legacy waste resulted from onetime Eldorado Nuclear radium and uranium refining operations in Port Hope and was deposited at the Port Granby site beginning in 1955 until the facility was closed in 1988, according to the website. That facility halted operations in 1988 after analysis indicated it was unsuitable for long-term waste storage due to instability including 400 meters of receding shoreline, 30-meter-high eroding bluffs, and porous sandy soils.
