Case Study

Transportation Improvements

When it comes to ensuring the safe transport of its materials and products, Cameco continues to strive for improvement.

Case in point: In 2011, two small incidents involving the transport of company materials spurred on the centralization and streamlining of all our transportation activities.

The result was a series of corporate transportation standards written in 2013 which set out all of Cameco’s transport requirements, whether by sea, land or rail. These will be rolled out to all the company’s sites and operations in 2014.

“The system wasn’t broken, but we looked at some of these incidents and we knew we could improve,” said Marc-Andre Charette, director, transportation, SHEQ. “They’re not huge deviations from what we were doing, but we examined ourselves and we refined things to be safer.”

Shipping more of our product to burgeoning nuclear countries such as China is the future for Cameco, so the enhancements couldn’t be timelier.

For example, when shipping by sea Cameco is now equipped with oversight throughout the shipping process, from the moment material is loaded onto a ship to its undocking at its final destination.

“We knew we needed to have an awareness of what was happening throughout the process,” said Marc-Andre. “In the past, we relied on the freight forwarder’s experience to ensure proper loading of the sea containers in the charter’s cargo hold, but we wanted to go further than that.”

Today, Cameco’s shipments follow a strict set of protocols when using a charter vessel. A third party represents our interests and is present when the containers are loaded/unloaded. Cameco has also incorporated suggestions made by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to increase the level of safety. We have also put restrictions on the age and condition of the containers in which its material will be shipped.

“We put a lot of measures in place to make sure we’re doing things as safely as possible,” said Marc-Andre. “With the current system we have in place and the work we’ve done to get better, I feel quite confident that we have a solid system in place to make sure we safely deliver our product to China and wherever we do business in the future.”