RADIATING PREDICAMENT SMALL CANADIAN TOWNSHIP IN A NUCLEAR WASTE TRAP

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34106, 19 March 1976, Page 12

RADIATING PREDICAMENT SMALL CANADIAN TOWNSHIP IN A NUCLEAR WASTE TRAP

(By

CLYDE SANGER,

tn the "Guardian)

(Reprinted by arrangement)

“Beautiful old Port Hope — the town that radiates friendliness.’’ ys the road sign invitingly. And certainly. Port Hope is one of the pleasantest small towns in Southern Ontario. Its homes have aged gracefully, sitting above the banks of the Ganaraska River as it tumbles into Lake Ontario from the forests where masts were cut for British sailing ships that fought the Americans in the war of 1812.

The 12,000 people of Port Hope have gained a wide reputation for fighting off most threats of modern; times. They resisted incorporation into a regional government unit stretching far along the; lake. They all turned out —; veterans of the Willow ; Beach Field Naturalists Society stiffened by masters from the private boarding school on the hill — to defeat the powers of metropolitan Toronto who had laid plans to bring down hundreds of tons of garbage every night by train and dump it in fields where such ratifies as snowy egrets have been seen. But they had yielded over the years to the arrival of a few small industries, recognising that the town’s location — 65 miles east of Toronto, beside the main railroad and highway — was too good for industrialists to ignore. And it is the earliest of those arrivals that has now put irony into the road sign and fear into many people. For Port Hope has sud-i denly become known' throughout North America as a town with high levels of radioactivity spread through it, mainly because of the lax methods of waste disposal by Eldorado Nuclear Limited. Two schools and some 40 other sites have been identified already as having alarmingly high levels of radiation. Eldorado began in 1929 in an old granaiy down by the harbour, milling radium ore brought down from the Great Bear Lake in the far north. The radium was for medical purposes, and the uranium in the ore was treated as waste and dumped in the harbour. In the 19405, the uranium

tlbecame valuable to atomic ; scientists, and Eldorado was fl part of the chain that proi duced the bomb dropped on i Hiroshima. Throughout the 119705, Eldorado was busy orders for refined ura,lnium for the American and !British nuclear programmes.! Later the Canadian Govern-: •Iment took over the plant, to! ’{refine the “yellow cake”! > brought from the uranium > mines of Elliot Lake. 1 Gas danger i The danger comes from i the radon gas that is a: > byproduct of decaying ura- [ nium. It decays to Radium! i A, a solid that clings to dust i particles and is carried considerable distances, bringing . the threat of lung cancer. i Until the 1960 s the dis- . posal regulations were far . from stringent, and Eldorado . allowed its waste to be . spread round the town and; j left in dump sites in a way > that now seems negligent. In 1959. for example, the ; year of the Queen’s visit, [ the original refinery was' r demolished and sold as! I scrap to a local wrecker. Hisj 'truck drivers carted thei i| bricks and boards to destina-l Jtions that have been mostly' : forgotten. But some of it' went into the foundations of s St Mary’s School, then beingj : built beside a ravine in the, ■ middle of town. ; There were over the years ; plenty of minor warnings < that something was wrong. . Cattle that grazed by Dickinson’s Creek lost their hair i and aborted their calves;: i ponies died on Monkey' i Mountain. These were places! i where waste from Eldorado ■ was dumped or ran down. But it was only after four 1 ■ of Mr Elliot’s cows died last June, after wandering on toj I the Port Granby dump, that; any official notice was pub-; i licly taken. Officials said

: that the cows died of chemslical poisoning, not of radi- ■ ation. but the issue was out tin the open. A Canadian Broadcasting ’Corporation team came down with two University of f Toronto staff to film the i story. One of them. Profes- ' sor Douglas Andrews, is a [! chemical engineer who nine ' years earlier had reported to 1 the Atomic Energy Control (Board that he did not think Eldorado was properly ob--1 serving the regulations for packaging and transporting nuclear materials. This time, he said the dump situation 'I was worse than before. I The story since then has {been of the media and a few Port Hope citizens battling to drag the facts from reluctant authorities and, because of divided responsibilities, sometimes the authorities did not even know crucial facts themselves. It turned out last month that neither the Ontario Health Minister nor a top official of the A.E.C.B. knew anything of radiation surIveys of Port Hope that had been done in 1951 and 1953 Iby a unit of the Royal Cana- ' dian Engineers as a test of {their geiger equipment. And ; when the A.E.C.B. did its : own study last autumn of | Eldorado’s waste disposal ; practices, it kept its conclusions to itself. By January, the troubles were difficult to hush up. St Mary’s School was closed to its 216 students because radiation in the gymnasium was acknowledged to be j dangerously high. A couple {who went for bone marrow i tests in Toronto were told | there were abnormalities. {Other families were quietly j advised to move out of their {homes into a hotel. Energy- need* ! For weeks the attitude of I most Port Hope people was I to resent the inquisitiveness of newsmen, saying that ElI dorado had been a good I employer to its 300 staff. Publicity was hurting the town; as the Mayor Cyril Hewson, complained: “House values have taken a noseidive.” But many more are now ; concerned about the genetic I effects since a public | meeting was held recently. The audience of 600 heard I health officials give 50 pico tures of radon gas per litre of air as the limit of tolerance, above which households would be moved; then they learned the limit for industrial workers in factories, presumably better ventilated than the basements of houses in Port Hope was 30 picotures. Alistair Gillespie, the Federal Minister of Energy, was pressed to the point that two weeks ago he published a list of 100 locations across Canada where radio-activity was known or suspected, and he announced that a task force from five different departments of the Federal and Ontario Governments would supervise the clean-up of Port Hope. Since Canada is moving to meet its energy needs increasingly from nuclear power. Port Hope’s troubles are no parochial problem. Ontario Hydro has plans to install six nuclear plants along the lake shore in the next quarter century. Safety measures, both m plant operation and in the disposal of waste either on land or in the lakes. *vill be questioned more closely in the wake of Port Hope.