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 radioactive contamination 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 Friday. “This represents approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of waste that is now stored in the engineered aboveground mound.”
The next step for remediation of this cleanup project is the ongoing removal of waste in drums, which are now kept in buildings on the pier. Afterward, the buildings will be demolished.
Contractor 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.
This project is one aspect of the much broader remediation of contamination in Port Hope and Port Granby, left by uranium and radium refining in the two communities during the 20th century.
