PORT HOPE, ONT. — Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has awarded a contract to complete construction of the remaining storage cells at the Port Hope Project Long-Term Waste Management Facility east of Toronto.
The successful bidder, ECC/Quantum Murray LP of Toronto, was announced in a media statement issued mid-March.
The contractor will also operate the facility during the upcoming cleanup of low-level radioactive waste in Port Hope.
ECC/Quantum Murray was involved in construction of the first cell of the engineered above-ground mound at the Port Hope facility that will store waste from the cleanup of various sites in the community.
Contamination of the Port Hope and nearby Port Granby townsites resulted from lax disposal practices on the part of Eldorado Gold Mines and its successors beginning in 1932, when the producer opened radium-refining facilities in Port Hope, through to the 1970s.
The federal government committed $1.28 billion to pay for permanent storage facilities in Port Hope and Port Granby in 2012.
The Historic Waste Program Management Office (HWPMO, formerly the Port Hope Area Initiative Management Office), administered by CNL, overseas the project on behalf of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, a federal Crown corporation.
"With the completion of Cell 1 scheduled this fall and the contract to operate the facility now in place, the site will be ready to receive waste, and remediation in Port Hope can begin early next year," said Craig Hebert, the HWPMO general manager, in a statement.
Work to be completed under the contract, which is the largest that the Port Hope Area Initiative will undertake, includes construction of the three remaining storage cells designed to safely isolate low-level radioactive waste by encasing the waste with multi-layer base liner and surface cover systems.
The contractor will also complete the supporting infrastructure required at the site, including internal waste haul roads, vehicle portal monitors to measure radiation levels and weigh scales to track waste volumes. A decontamination station will be built to ensure that trucks are free of contamination before leaving the site.
Under previous contracts, work completed at the long-term waste management facility included construction of a dedicated access road built to municipal standards and an advanced technology wastewater treatment plant that is discharging treated effluent to Lake Ontario.
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