Lessons Learned From the Cesium Pond Soil Shipping Campaign at Whiteshell Laboratories - 18206

Conference · Sun Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2018

OSTI ID:22975379

Smith, Miles ^[1]; Luke, Adriana; Gamley, Sean ^[2]

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1. Atkins Nuclear Secured (United States)
2. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (Canada)

Whiteshell Laboratories (WL), located in Manitoba, Canada is the first major decommissioning project of a nuclear research establishment in Canada. With the focus now active remediation to return the site to green state, the majority of legacy radioactive waste and waste generated from decommissioning and demolition of nuclear facilities must be transported off site to Chalk River Laboratories (CRL), located in Ontario, Canada. No large radioactive waste shipment campaigns have been undertaken by WL until now. A newly established Waste Management Program specifically designed to support the WL Closure Project has executed its first major shipping campaign of radioactive material, making approximately one hundred shipments and reducing WL's total volume of low-level radioactive waste to transport by seven percent. The shipped waste was approximately 1800 m{sup 3} (2600 metric tons) of known Cs-137 contaminated soil material generated from the excavation of an Experimental Cesium Pond Project designed to study the distribution of dose received by organisms living at the mud-water interface from Cs-137 contamination. This paper outlines the cost benefit analysis undertaken to determine the most cost effective method for transporting the radioactively contaminated soil to CRL, storage challenges experienced by both WL and CRL, the selection of the most appropriate waste package, training of shippers, and the continual optimization of increasing the number of generated waste packages and the number of waste packages shipped and accepted at CRL. (authors)

• Research Organization: WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22975379
• Report Number(s): INIS-US--20-WM-18206
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
BIOLOGICAL RADIATION EFFECTS
CESIUM 137
CHALK RIVER NUCLEAR LABS
COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS
LOW-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTES
MANITOBA
PACKAGING
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT
REACTOR DECOMMISSIONING
REACTOR DISMANTLING
RECOMMENDATIONS
REMEDIAL ACTION
SOILS
SURFACE CONTAMINATION
WASTE TRANSPORTATION
WNRE