Nuclear Reaction

Transport trucks thunder over- head on Highway 401, but it’s strangely quiet here by the glorious Ganaraska River. A well-worn footpath leads through waist-high ferns in fields naturalized by the local conservation authority. Nearby, young girls are being coached on the finer points of baseball. As I walk, a sign warns of danger ahead. Around a bend, the hazard is revealed — a dam, the waters noisy, cascading, beautiful. The river pushes its way south and follows Cavan Street downtown, past modest dwellings and an old industrial building, gorgeous in its faded brick decrepitude. Walton Street, the main drag, is nineteenth-century picturesque. To the west, up the hill, there are elegant homes, meticulously renovated, some converted into bed and breakfasts. Port Hope was once a major transportation hub — both a Great Lakes port and a railroad junction — and substantial public and commercial buildings remain. To the east, across the river and on another hill, sits the prestigious Trinity College School. Founded in 1865 to educate the male scions of the privileged, it is now a co-educational boarding school that commands an annual fee of almost $40,000.

Many small Ontario towns feature main streets that look like an old man’s mouth, with large gaps where once-harmonious streetscapes are interrupted by vacant lots, strip malls, and dollar stores. Port Hope has escaped this ugly fate. Films are made here; visitors flock to the boutiques, restaurants, and antique shops; and a growing community of well-heeled Toronto exiles adds an edge of sophistication to the small-town charm. Stagnant during the 1990s, Port Hope’s population jumped almost 10 percent between 2001 and 2006, to over 16,000, and it is now finally giving its neighbour and perennial rival, Cobourg, a run for its money. On the outskirts of town, sprouting from the fertile soil first farmed by the Iroquois 1,000 years ago, is a new crop: row upon row of neat brick homes.

The juncture of the Ganaraska River and Lake Ontario is rich in trout and salmon. When the fish return each fall to their spawning grounds, they must run a gauntlet of anglers on both sides of the river — all in the shadow of a nuclear refinery. Owned by Cameco, the world’s largest uranium producer, the plant stands in the middle of the town’s waterfront, minutes from busy Walton Street. It’s the first thing commuters see when they step off the train, and it looms over the harbour’s inner basin, by the yacht club. If a new nuclear facility were proposed for this setting, a buffer zone of at least 1,000 metres would be required as a precaution, and to protect neighbours from the heaviest emissions.

“We are the buffer zone,” Paula Evans-Gould tells me as we sit in her small two-storey home on a quiet, tree-lined street about 200 metres from the plant. A widow and grandmother, Evans-Gould lives here with her friend and caregiver, Rose Bungaro, a retired postal worker. In the fall of 2006, the women received a flyer from the Port Hope fire department that shocked them: “In the event of an emergency, such as the accidental or intentional release of dangerous goods into the atmosphere (e.g., chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear contaminants), persons in the threatened area may be instructed to Shelter-in-Place.”

The advice that followed included locking windows and exterior doors and, if an explosion was a possibility, closing all window coverings. The kicker: for additional protection, townspeople were advised to seal all of their windows and doors with plastic sheeting secured with duct tape. Evans-Gould looked around her small kitchen: “How long would we be safe in this duct-taped room? ”

It doesn’t take an emergency for people to be exposed to contaminants in Port Hope. The town is riddled with radioactivity, many residents say, the result of decades during which uranium waste was used as fill or dumped here and there, and of the incorporation of building materials scavenged from the nuclear plant in construction projects. In 1933, the Eldorado Mining and Refining Company began producing radium here; by 1942, it had converted to uranium production for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That year, the federal government assumed control of Eldorado, holding onto it until 1988, when the company was reprivatized and merged with the Saskatchewan Mining Development Co. to form Cameco. The plant is the oldest extant nuclear facility in the world, and today it is an essential cog in a global nuclear network. It’s the only commercial supplier of fuel-grade unenriched uranium dioxide (UO₂), used in heavy-water candureactors, and an important source of uranium hexafluoride (UF₆), used for light-water reactors all over the world. Down the road from the main plant, Zircatec, another Cameco-owned company, manufactures fuel bundles for candu reactors, using the uranium dioxide from the waterfront plant. In some respects, Port Hope is at the core of Canada’s nuclear industry.

Complacency about nuclear power marked Eldorado’s first four decades. Then, in 1975, high levels of poisonous radon gas were detected in an addition to St. Mary’s elementary school, built a decade earlier over radioactive fill from the plant. The discovery sparked a scandal, and by 1982 almost every property in Port Hope had been surveyed, foundations of homes and buildings dug up, and 200,000 tonnes of the most severely contaminated soil and materials removed from 400 properties and transported to Chalk River (north of Petawawa, Ontario), where the federal Crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (aecl) has its research station.

At that point, in 1982, the cleanup stopped. The Chalk River site was full, and the federal government could find no other willing host. The partial meltdown of the tmi-2 reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 1979 had caused storms of protest, sent a chill through the nuclear industry, and made the issue of nuclear waste storage highly contentious. In Port Hope, contaminants that had already been excavated were simply left — some in tarp-covered piles around town, others fenced off in dumps and ravines — and considerable waste remained in the ground and trapped in the harbour’s sediment.

For nearly twenty years, nothing happened — the stasis and problems afflicting the nuclear industry no doubt compounded by the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine, the subsequent evacuation, and general unease about nuclear power generation (and waste) through the 1990s. Then, in 2001, after the federal government and Port Hope reached an agreement for the waste to be stored locally, aecl’s Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office (llrwmo) began working on criteria for a long-term waste management facility. The process and subsequent development is being overseen by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (cnsc), the federally appointed nuclear industry watchdog; Natural Resources Canada; and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The $260-million undertaking — one of the largest such projects in the world — is expected to start in 2009. Over the following seven years, nearly 1.4 million cubic metres of contaminated soil will be dug up and transported to relative safety. According to Glenn Case, a branch manager at the llrwmo, the stigma that has hung over Port Hope for so long will be eliminated. “It’s an honourable legacy,” he says.

Not everybody is so sanguine, however. While welcoming the move, critics maintain that there will still be over 2 million cubic metres of contaminated soil in and around Port Hope after the cleanup.