January 31, 2012

Former Stantec consultant to head environmental review for Kincardine, Ontario radioactive waste site

Environment Canada and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission announced Tuesday a joint panel will examine the environmental effects of an underground facility for radioactive waste storage and management that Ontario Power Generation wants to build near Kincardine, Ontario.

OGP is proposing to construct and operate a facility for low and intermediate-level nuclear waste at the Bruce Nuclear Site near the shore of Lake Huron. The utility does not plan to store used nuclear fuel.

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If approved, it would hold waste currently in interim storage on the Bruce Nuclear Site in the Western Waste Management Facility and waste produced by the operation of nuclear generating stations at Bruce, Pickering and Darlington. The Bruce nuclear plant, operated by Bruce Power, is located near the site of the proposed underground storage facility, about 270 kilometres northwest of Toronto. The Pickering and Darlington plants, operated by OPG, are, respectively, about 35 and 70 kilometres east of downtown Toronto.

The joint review panel chair is Stella Swanson, owner of Calgary-based Swanson Environmental Strategies Ltd. and a former consultant for Stantec. The other members are Queen’s University mining engineering professor James F. Archibald and Gunter Muecke, a retired Dalhousie University geology professor who worked for Shell Canada as a field geologist in the early 1960s.

“The Joint Review Panel will conduct an examination of the environmental effects of the proposed project to meet the requirements of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act,” according to a federal government press release. “The Panel will also obtain the information necessary for the consideration of the licence application under the Nuclear Safety and Control Act to prepare a site and to construct the deep geologic repository facility.”

The press release stated: “Low level waste includes industrial items that have become contaminated with low levels of radioactivity during routine clean-up and maintenance activities at nuclear generating stations. Intermediate level radioactive waste consists primarily of used nuclear reactor components, ion-exchange resins and filters used to purify reactor systems.”

The government stated that Swanson has assessed the impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle (including nuclear waste storage) on human health and the environment. She has also conducted human health and ecological risk assessments of contaminated sites, operating industrial facilities and proposed future developments.

According to the Queen’s University website, Archibald's research includes the design of spray-on coatings, the utilization of total mill waste for in-situ support, replacement of cement binder materials in backfill using ground landfill waste glass and the application of spray polyurethane coatings for reducing acid mine drainage from surface tailings storage sites.

Muecke, who got his doctorate in geochemistry from Oxford University in 1969, has written papers on geology, geochemistry, petrogenesis, geochronology and stratigraphic and magmatic evolution. He was a member of the review panel for the White Point Quarry and Marine Terminal project in 2004 and of the review panel for the Kelly’s Mountain Coast Superquarry project in 1991.

DCN DIGITAL MEDIA

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