Using Geographical Information Systems in Planning Nllp Decommissioning and Environmental Restoration Activities

Abstract

The Nuclear Legacy Liabilities Program (NLLP) manages Canada's nuclear legacy liabilities at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) sites and is funded by the Government of Canada through Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). Through the first five years of the Program these two organizations have worked collaboratively to bring numerous projects to completion. In addition to the diversity of facilities and waste dealt with under the NLLP, the Program involves seven sites in three different provinces. The breadth of the Program encompasses over 20 different projects at AECL's Chalk River Laboratories (CRL) site alone, with new projects evolving as work continues.

Nuclear legacy liabilities are the result of over 60 years of nuclear research and development conducted by the National Research Council of Canada (1944 to 1952) and AECL (1952 to 2006) on behalf of the Government of Canada. The liabilities consist of outdated and unused research facilities and buildings, a wide variety of buried and stored radioactive waste, and affected lands.

Since 1952, AECL has safely and cost effectively managed Canada's nuclear research facilities and the waste generated by their operation. During this time AECL improved waste management technologies and developed expertise in best practices.

All projects undertaken by the NLLP contain a spatial, or geographically referenced, component that can be captured in a geographic information system (GIS). From the decommissioning of a single building within the plant itself (e.g. the building location itself or spaces within the building) to the process of locating a new facility within the CRL site (e.g. location within the CRL property in three dimensions and adjacency to other communities) all these projects contain spatially referenced information. This spatial information can be captured, organized and used by the GIS software to analyze and model any number of questions.

The paper will discuss projects that address a variety of GIS data sets, tools, and techniques and how the discipline of geomatics can and should be used as another tool in the decision making process. In most projects the process can be categorized into five major steps; ask, acquire, examine, analyze, and act. The presentation provides examples, and includes a discussion of the four steps in which the GIS process has been used in NLLP projects: ask, acquire, examine and analyze.

The projects to be discussed include:

• Analysis to Determine the Most Efficient Groupings for the Decommissioning of Buildings at CRL Subject to Environmental Assessments;


• Study of the Chalk River Site to Determine its Suitability to host a Geologic Waste Management Facility for Low and Intermediate Level Waste;


• Geophysical Surveys of the Ottawa Riverbed Adjacent to CRL.