AECL's Waste Management and Decommissioning Program

Canada has developed significant expertise in radioactive waste management since the mid 1940's, when the Canadian nuclear program commenced activities at Chalk River Laboratories (CRL). Created as a Federal Crown Corporation in 1952, AECL continues to manage wastes from those early days, as well as other radioactive wastes that Canadian hospitals, universities, and industry continue to produce, together with wastes from AECL's own ongoing operations. To support AECL's operations, serve the Canadian power reactor utilities and manage the federal nuclear legacy liabilities, AECL conducts RandD programs investigating technical and engineering matters on the handling, storage and disposal of the radioactive wastes associated with the CANDU reactor. Canada's historical low-level radioactive wastes, for which the federal government has taken responsibility, are being managed by the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office (LLRWMO). The LLRWMO, managed by AECL since 1982, is now in the preparatory stages of establishing new long-term waste management facilities at Port Hope and Port Granby, Ontario that will receive wastes associated with past uranium refining activities in the area. To facilitate both the short- and long-term management of radioactive wastes at CRL, several major waste management initiatives are being underway. The Liquid Waste Transfer and Storage (LWTS) Project will recover highly radioactive liquid wastes that are currently stored in underground tanks that, in some cases, date back to the initial operations at the site. The Fuel Packaging and Storage (FPS) Project, will recover and condition degraded used research reactor fuel that is currently stored in below-ground standpipes of an early design. Development work is also under way to increase the storage density of AECL's MACSTORTM modular dry storage for used fuel, and to extend its application to the storage of intermediate-level radioactive waste arising from upcoming reactor refurbishment activities in Canada and overseas. Under contract to Ontario Power Generation (OPG), AECL also continues RandD on deep geologic repository technology in support of the long-term management of Canada's nuclear fuel waste. Many of the facilities first established at CRL in the 1940s and 1950s are now redundant and need to be safely dismantled and the resulting wastes managed. Several such decommissioning projects are now under way. Whiteshell Laboratories is AECL's second Nuclear Research and Test Establishment located near Winnipeg, Manitoba. WL has been operated by AECL since the early 1960s, and the entire site is now in the first stage of decommissioning. In 2005 in conjunction with the Canadian government, AECL established a Liability Management Unit (LMU) to manage the decommissioning and waste management liability associated with AECL sites. Decommissioning activities at AECL's sites will accelerate significantly with the announcement by the federal government in 2006 June of increased funding for this work over the next five years. This paper provides an overview and selected examples of AECL's current waste management and decommissioning activities, and provides references to papers where additional details may be found.

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