February 18, 2024

Chalk River Laboratories is owned by the Government of Canada. Cleanup of the site was originally estimated to cost $8 billion in 2015 when a multinational consortium called “Canadian National Energy Alliance” was contracted by the Harper government to manage the Chalk River site and clean up the radioactive waste there and at other federally owned facilities. 

Since the consortium took over, costs to Canadian taxpayers for the operation and cleanup at Canada’s nuclear labs have ballooned from $336 million dollars per year to over $1.5 billion per year.

Current members in the consortium are: AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin,) which was debarred by the World Bank for 10 years and faced charges in Canada of fraud, bribery and corruption; Texas-based Fluor Corporation, which paid $4 million to resolve allegations of financial fraud related to nuclear waste cleanup work at a U.S. site; and Texas-based Jacobs Engineering, which recently acquired CH2M, an original consortium member that agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle federal criminal charges at a nuclear cleanup site in the U.S.

A 2016 access to information request revealed that nine senior CNL executives were paid an average of $722,000 per person per year and twenty-eight senior contractors were paid an average of $377,275 per year per person. Almost all of these senior executives and senior contractors were non-Canadian.

There has been no decrease in the federal nuclear waste liabilities since the consortium took over control of Chalk River Laboratories.