Schacherl and Hendrickson: Is the nuclear-waste dump project at Chalk River really giving taxpayers value for money?

Demonstrators rally on Parliament Hill a year ago against a proposed nuclear waste dump at Chalk River. Photo by DAVE CHAN /AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESArticle content

Recently, Ottawans learned that SNC-Lavalin, now AtkinsRéalis, is being sued for $100 million over its management of the Trillium Line light-rail construction. But few taxpayers know of SNC-Lavalin’s leading role in another contract that is costing them billions.

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In 2015, an SNC-led consortium landed a 10-year, $10-billion federal contract to manage nuclear facilities. The jewel in that crown is Chalk River, home to laboratories and two defunct nuclear reactors on the shores of the Ottawa River, 180 kilometres upstream from the national capital. SNC-Lavalin runs the operation along with two Texas-based companies, Fluor and Jacobs.

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Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) is the public face of this government-owned, contractor-operated (Go-Co) deal. A Go-Co model was also used to manage nuclear waste liabilities in the United Kingdom, until it was cancelled after a scandal and a parliamentary inquiry.

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The Canadian Go-Co is currently costing taxpayers more than $1.4 billion a year — more than the annual budget of the CBC. The cost of these operations to Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) has ballooned by almost 300 per cent in the past 10 years, making it now among the feds’ most expensive contracts

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What has been accomplished in that decade; what is the value for money for Canadian taxpayers? The Go-Co was supposed to bring private-sector managerial skills into cleaning up the Canadian government’s huge nuclear waste liabilities. But on the government’s estimates, those liabilities have actually grown, from $7.5 billion in 2015 to $9.8 billion in 2024.

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And why have the contract’s costs gone up so much? Well, plans at the Chalk River campus include, like the Trillium Line, an ambitious construction project: a 107,000 sq.-ft. “state-of-the-art research complex” slated to be completed in 2028. It’s also described as “a modern, efficient, world-class nuclear lab to serve the needs of the Government of Canada and the Canadian nuclear industry.”

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But those are not the only costs. CNL is managed by 14 executives and 30 management contract staff, with an average salary and expenses of $510,000 a year, for a total of $22.5 million in 2023. Two-thirds of the managers and executives are non-Canadians. CNL’s current president and CEO is Jack Craig, who started as an engineer with the U.S. Navy, had a long career with the U.S. Department of Energy, and had a stint as the Chief Operating Officer of SNC-Lavalin’s U.S. nuclear division from 2021 to 2024, before stepping into the CNL role last April.

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CNL has spent seven years defending a contentious plan to create a million-cubic-metre mound of radioactive waste at Chalk River, dubbed the Near Surface Disposal Facility, designed to dispose of contaminated buildings, soil and equipment from 80 years of laboratory and reactor operations, which it says is for low-level radioactive waste. Citizen groups dispute this: It will contain dozens of radionuclides including tritium, uranium, plutonium and the gamma-ray emitters cobalt-60 and cesium-137, as well as toxins like PCBs, mercury, arsenic and lead.