Canadian Friends and Colleagues:
There is a great documentary film, “Atomic Reaction”, that can be viewed on CBC Gem as of January 10.
It features Gordon Edwards, Robert Del Tredici, Faye More, Peter Van Wyck, Cindy Gilday and other notable Canadians.
It tells the story of Canada’s involvement in the development of the world’s first atomic bombs, and the subsequent buildup in nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
In particular it focuses on the town of Port Hope, Ontario, where (in the early years of World War II) a radium refinery was converted into a uranium refinery to meet the military needs of the World War II Atomic Bomb Project, called “The Manhattan Project” by the USA and “Tube Alloys” by Great Britain. The radioactive ore was mined on the Eastern end of Great Bear Lake — a place that came to be known as Port Radium — starting in 1931. The ore was carried on the backs of Indigenous men from the Sahtu Dene nation, loaded onto a barge for the eight-hour trip across the Lake to the western end. The Indigenous ore carriers rested on the sacks of radioactive material and then unmopaded the ore from the Lake barge onto a river barge, eventually being shipped over 3000 kilometres to the Eldorado company headquarters at Port Hope on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Atomic Reaction is 89 minutes long.
Atomic Reaction | Films | CBC Gem
Unfortunately, CBC Gem is not available to viewers outside of Canada! (INSERT, sandra: for political reasons)
In the film, the story of the bomb is interspersed with the ongoing radioactive cleanup of the town of Port Hope following massive and widespread radioactive contamination caused by the careless dumping of refinery waste into the Port Hope harbour, the town’s public beach, several deep ravines freely accessible to children and pets, as well as the use of huge quantities of radioactive waste material in the construction of roadways, over 1000 homes, several schools, civic buildings, and municipal dumps such as the one at Port Granby, as well as the Monkey Mountain and Welcome dumps. At a cost of 1.2 billion dollars which has now escalated to more than twice that amount, the federal “cleanup” of Port Hope has recently had its licence extended for another 10 years, as tens of thousands of trees are being cleared to access and remove the arsenic and uranium contamination underneath them.
Of course, radioactive waste cannot be destroyed or neutralized by any practical and affordable method known to science, it can only be moved from one place to another and repackaged or consolidated to make it less available to the environment. The end result is two gigantic earthen mounds — one at Port Hope and one at Port Granby — containing most of the township’s radioactive and other toxic waste, in so-called “engineered mounds” that are designed to last for about 500 years. The wastes themselves remain dangerous for much longer periods of time, many millennia. It is acknowledged that the mounds are not a permanent solution. After a few centuries a decision will have to be made as to what should be done next.
The documentary does not address the story of the federal government’s Siting Task Force, which spent 8 years and several millions of dollars trying to find a “willing host community” somewhere in Ontario to receive all of Port Hope’s radioactive waste for a more permanent disposal (never clearly specified). This was considered necessary because an Environmental Assessment Panel had determined that the geography and geology of the Port Hope area was not acceptable for permanent storage of long-lived radioactive waste. The search for a willing host community involved many potential candidates, willing to learn more about the concept, including many communities in Northwestern Ontario such as Atikokan.
Ultimately, the Siting Task Force came up empty-handed. There was not a single community that was willing to accept the Port Hope wastes, except for the nuclear “bedroom community” of Chalk River/Deep River on the Ottawa River. However, the geology/ geography was not much better than that off Port Hope, and the Chalk River folks drove too hard a bargain that the Siting Task Force found unacceptable. So the “two mounds” solution is really a kind of “booby prize” — a fallback approach because the first plan flopped.
Now the two giant radioactive mounds for the naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) of Port Hope/Port Granby are being used by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to build a similar enormous “engineered mound” to house about a million tons of toxic waste, much of it human0-made post-fission radioactive waste, about one kilometre from the Ottawa River. CNL: (which is also in charge of the Port Hope “cleanup”) is owned and run by a consortium of multinational corporations headed by Atkins-Réalis (the latter-day reincarnation of SNC-Lavalin) and two Texas giants, Fluor and Jacibs, that are deeply involved in military nuclear projects as well as intractable radioactive contamination nightmares such as those at Hanford Washington and Sellafiield England. In 2023, the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) estimated the cost off the Hanford Cleanuop to be somewhere between $300 billion and $640 billion! Yet the Canadian Government calls nuclear energy “clean”.
But I digress. “Atomic Reaction” is a fine documentaly film that does a great job of breaking the surface of the profound and complex nuclear saga of Port Hope Ontario.
To view the film on CBC Gem you have to establish an account on the internet. It’s free.
Gordon Edwards.