The Port Hope Area Initiative has completed transport of radioactively contaminated soil from the Center Pier in Port Hope, Ontario, to a nearby long-term holding facility.
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories-managed cleanup program last week tweeted before and after photos of the pier – the first showing the tarp that previously covered the soil and the last the pier with the material and tarp gone.
“The removal of the historic waste and the tarp that has been on the pier since 2003 was completed on the week of August 23,” Port Hope Area Initiative spokesman Bill Daly said by email on Sept. 7. “This represents approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of waste that is now stored in the engineered aboveground mound.”
The project is one aspect of the much broader remediation of radioactive contamination left in Port Hope and nearby Port Granby by uranium and radium refining during the 20th century. The entire remediation project is project to cost $1.3 billion CAD ($990 million).
The next step for remediation of the pier is the ongoing removal of waste in drums, which are now kept in buildings on the pier. Afterward, the buildings will be demolished. That work is being conducted by Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp. under its “Vision in Motion” program to remediate the area around its uranium conversion facility in Port Hope. The project is separate from the Port Hope Area Initiative.
Cameco is expected to complete that work before the end of 2018, and all that waste will also go to the Long-Term Waste Management Facility in Port Hope. With that milestone, the five-year remediation of the harbor itself will begin through a CAD $95 million (U.S. $72.1 million) contract awarded to Ottawa-based Milestone Environmental Contracting Inc.
Some early work in the harbor has already begun, including deployment of a turbidity curtain to restrict movement of sediment and capture of fish for release in Lake Ontario.
The pier will be the staging zone for dredging about 120,000 cubic meters of contaminated sediment in the harbor for storage in the waste management facility. The harbor and pier will also be restored.
The 17,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil now removed from the pier is one of three piles around Port Hope due to be transported to the Long-Term Waste Management Facility by this fall. Roughly 12,200 cubic meters will be removed from the Pine Street Extension over a three-week period starting later this month, followed by disposal of 2,200 cubic meters now at a sewage treatment plant. The work in total is expected to cost $2.6 million CAD ($1.98 million).
The Port Hope Area Initiative also tweeted this week that it has begun cleanup of residential properties in the municipality.
In July, close to 800 properties had been found to need some amount of remediation – primarily waste removal. Testing of 4,800 properties is now close to 70 percent complete, with cleanup at two starting this month.
“The first residential property cleanup in Port Hope is now underway,” Daly wrote. “We are planning to start remediation on an additional 25 properties during this season, with the number of private property cleanups expected to ramp-up significantly over the next five construction seasons.”
Cleanup at Port Hope is scheduled to be completed by 2023, but that end date could be pushed back based on the number of properties that must be addressed, Daly has said.
