Province continues to work toward approval for Boat Harbour cleanup

The person overseeing the Nova Scotia government effort to clean up Boat Harbour says a recently released third-party report is proof the province is on the right track.

This week, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada released the external technical review report of the province's plan to remove hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of contaminated waste from the body of water that served for decades as the effluent treatment site for the pulp mill in Pictou County. The waste will be encased in a containment cell already on site.

Boat Harbour was closed to effluent from the Northern Pulp mill at the end of January 2020, at which point the companyceased operations because it failed to secure approval for a new effluent treatment facility.

The report says it considers the method and process the province is using to be reasonable, although it notes more consideration could be given to alternative methods. It also says the plan to expand the existing containment cell requires more information before an assessment could be provided about whether the new design would meet requirements.

Ken Swain, the person leading the clean-up project for the province, said he's happy to have the extra scrutiny as his team works toward securing approval from the federal government to begin the remediation work.

"We, in fact, see it as confirmation of the plan and moving forward with the project," he said. "It kind of verifies that we've appropriately designed it."

Swain said there were no surprises in the conclusions from the report.

The province is dealing with the waste on site because the next-closest approved disposal site is in Quebec, and sending 18,000 trailer loads of the waste by road several provinces awaywas quickly ruled out as an option for multiple reasons, including environmental concerns and cost.

As for the containment cell, while they'll be working with one that's already at the Boat Harbour site, Swain said it's being strengthened and further secured under the watchof a design engineer with expertise in containment cell and landfill construction.

"Basically upgrading it to today's standard, although we know it functions well now," he said."We feel we've effectively examined all the alternatives in arriving where we've landed with the use of the containment cell on site."

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As part of that work, everything in the cell will be temporarily removed so the liner system can be completely rebuilt with a leachate control system at the bottom. The vertical walls will be increased by a few metres.

Swain said under a worst-case scenario there will be about 900,000 cubic metres of waste to deal with, when the amount to be scooped outof Boat Harbour is combined with what's already in the cell. Theexpansion will mean the containment cell could accommodate about 150,000 cubic metres above that, although he thinks the final total volume of waste will be lower.

Alongwith thethird-party review, Swain said the project design is under rigorous examination by both the team'sown design engineer and experts at Environment and Climate Change Canada. Ultimately, the province will do what the regulator tells them, said Swain.

The province expects an approval decision some time in the coming months.

Right now they anticipate issuing two requests for proposals to do the work once they have an approval decision. The hope is the RFPs would be out in 2022, with the construction work running four to seven years, beginning around 2023.

When construction is complete, there will be "perpetual maintenance and monitoring," said Swain.

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