Remediation of radioactively contaminated residential properties in the Canadian municipality of Port Hope is expected to begin no later than summer, the Port Hope Area Initiative said this week.
The property cleanup project is one part of a much broader program of remediation and disposal of low-level radioactive waste in Port Hope and nearby Port Granby, Ontario. The contamination is the byproduct of uranium and radium refining operations in the region in past decades.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) plans to survey 4,800 public and private properties, primarily residential, in Port Hope. Since surveys began in 2012, historic waste has already been identified in 220 properties, largely radium, uranium, and arsenic, according to Bill Daly, spokesman for the Port Hope Area Initiative. “In previous decades, the historic waste was used as fill and building material for private and public properties in Port Hope,” he said Tuesday by email.
In planning the Port Hope Project, CNL anticipated it would find 375 contaminated properties in the municipality. That number is now up to 800, which has pushed back anticipated completion of property remediation to 2023. But that has not changed the projected full $1.28 billion (CAN) price tag for overall work in Port Hope and Port Granby, Daly noted.
Actual property cleanup could involve anything from excavation of limited amounts of tainted soil to remediation of structure exteriors, or even extraction of building materials from a home’s interior.
The project also anticipates by spring or summer 2018 to begin remediation of the Port Hope waterfront on Lake Ontario, once CNL awards the contract for the work,” Daly wrote. “The waterfront area, which includes the Port Hope Harbour, is the single largest major site to be remediated through the PHAI and will take approximately five years to complete.”
The waste would be trucked to the Long-Term Waste Management Facility that opened in December at Port Hope. The facility’s first storage cell already holds about 65,000 metric tons of waste previously kept in a legacy storage facility, Daly said.
