Certainly.
It's a pretty complicated subject, so I'll do my best to answer in French, but I may have to switch to English, if that's easier for me.
Most of Chalk River's current waste is real estate, in other words, buildings that need to be rebuilt. A lot of the structures there will have to be rebuilt. These buildings need to be knocked down and replaced. The soil, the sand and the walls of the old buildings make up the bulk of the waste, but there is other waste as well. A lot of it comes from operations outside of Chalk River.
What matters most to us is really the oversight. What will happen, and will the waste be properly recovered when it's removed from the site?
One big concern is how the waste is going to be identified and placed into the near-surface disposal facility and how the waste-water treatment plant is going to be able to properly oversee and treat the leachate that comes off that piece.
One recommendation we had made was to have an additional treatment for the waste water. Chalk River had tested it, but they haven't seen the waste in action, so they've gone with a system that is considered adequate, but it's not necessarily able to treat the waste in an efficient and effective way, should the waste not meet their projections.
We really ask for them to move up to a more secure level of treatment so that any of the waste water that will be placed into Perch Lake and drain into the Ottawa River doesn't reach the threshold.
We also ask for the thresholds to be more conservative and to take into consideration that this is an aquatic environment and it is also the drinking water source for Ottawa, Gatineau and, in many ways, Montreal. The Ottawa River is a major source of water for Montreal. We wanted those thresholds to be a little lower. We also ask that monitoring be done in a more proactive and robust way.
There's a lot of data available about radioactive waste at Chalk River. Unfortunately, it is only available in the environmental reports or through the independent monitoring project that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, CNSC, puts out. That data is not very robust. It doesn't capture what is happening.
Some good news here is that the City of Ottawa—the municipality—tests the water weekly for radioactive waste. That's where we get some of our best data about the radioactive materials that might pop up in the Ottawa River throughout the years.