If Creighton becomes the national drop-off point for nuclear waste, it will take about four decades to bring all of the accumulated radioactive material to town.
That’s 40 years of waste-toting semi-trucks traversing millions of kilometres of road, passing by dozens, if not hundreds, of communities on a constant schedule.
It’s possible that at some point, perhaps many of them, one of those trucks will veer off the road, smash into another vehicle or jackknife on an icy highway. So then what?
The Nuclear Waste Management Organization isn’t sparing any expense in answering that question.
During Trout Festival, NWMO brought to the area one of the stainless steel containers that would transport the waste in a heavy-duty semi-trailer.
“You can see that it’s an extremely robust container,” said NWMO spokesperson Mike Krizanc as he stood beside the massive box.
“It’s one solid block of stainless steel about 10 inches thick.”
Krizanc is a grown man, but he seemed diminutive next to this industrial marvel.
If you can imagine nine refrigerators lined up in rows of three, you can visualize the rough size of the container. If you can picture three school buses, you can appreciate its approximate weight of 30 tonnes.
The container – it contained no actual radioactive waste, of course – was the star of an NWMO display featured on the back of a semi-trailer parked in downtown Flin Flon for Main Street Days.
Throughout the day, curious passersby, including children, treaded up the metal steps to get a closer look and ask questions of NWMO officials.
To the right of the container was its bulky lid, its boundaries dotted with perfect holes. The holes accommodate 32 massive bolts, each weighing 15 pounds, that jut out from the top of the container.
Once the lid is on, the container is topped yet again with what is called an impact limiter. It’s another colossal hunk of steel, but its centre is made of redwood blocks.
“In the case of some kind of a mishap – if this was to be dropped or was to fall – the impact limiter would absorb the force of the fall,” said Krizanc.
Contain payload
Indeed the container was fabricated to contain and isolate its radioactive payload in even the most extreme, if not unimaginable, of mishaps.
Krizanc noted that this style of container has passed muster on tests where it falls 30 metres onto an unyielding surface, withstands an 800-degree fire for half an hour and is submerged in deep water.
“And those three tests have to be done in sequence, one after another,” he said.
Krizanc said research has even shown that the container could have withstood being rammed with the same jets that brought down the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
When it comes to the transport of nuclear waste, the most common query Krizanc hears is obvious: What if there’s an accident?
Through the display, he not only shows people the impressive sight of the container, but also educational videos on a nearby monitor.
One of the more spectacular clips features an unmanned locomotive chugging along at 160 kilometres an hour into a nuclear waste container approved in Europe. The container survives with none of its contents released.
Such visuals are meant to allay public fears that the movement of nuclear waste is inherently hazardous, and to help NWMO pinpoint a willing host community for an underground waste repository in the coming years.
Wherever the repository is built, it will receive shipments of nuclear waste about five tonnes at a time, as that is how much the containers can hold.
Since the full containers will weigh about 35 tonnes, there will only be room for one unit per trailer per trip.
The units will be securely bolted to the floor of the trailer, again meeting some of the most stringent safety standards conceivable.
Between the seals on the lid, each container will include a test port to be used for pressure testing. This makes sure each unit is indeed air tight.
“That is done prior to every single shipment,” said Ulf Stahmer, a senior engineer with NWMO, who was also at the Main Street display.
The nuclear waste containers will be used over and over again, but since carrying a load may leave low-level contamination inside, even an empty unit will be treated as a radioactive shipment.
That said, “the walls are thick enough to shield any remnant contamination that might be inside,” assured Stahmer.
As an added precaution, Stahmer said GPS units will keep real-time tabs on each waste shipment.
“There would be continuous live monitorings through a satellite tracking system and that would all be tracked through a central command centre,” he said.
The command centre could shut down a shipment if something goes wrong, Stahmer said, and a security escort would travel with each load of waste.
First responders along all routes will be made aware of the shipments. They will receive training so they know what the containers look like and are comfortable responding to any accidents.
“We would want them to respond to the accident as if it were a conventional accident, because the radiological hazard is all securely dealt with through [the container’s] design,” said Stahmer.
Once the containers arrive at the site of the waste repository – be it in Creighton or some other location – they will be meticulously emptied of their contents.
Every container would bring 192 so-called bundles – each about the size of a fire log – of spent nuclear fuel rods. The repository would accept about two containers a day, five days a week for about 40 years.
“The idea is that they wouldn’t have a bunch of it stockpiled at the surface – they would process it as it arrives,” said Krizanc.
