Nuclear Reaction

Prospective local homebuyers are often given a brochure explaining aecl’s work in the town, but it can’t conceal the ubiquitous reminders of past scares and scandals. One such reminder sits in the east end. In 2004, contamination was discovered at Dr. L. B. Powers public school, an incident reminiscent of the St. Mary’s situation three decades earlier. The circumstances were routine. A parent committee was planning a soccer pitch. Before any digging or construction is done in Port Hope, an aecl technician must be called in to check for subsurface contamination that might have been missed in the 1970s sweep. In this case, the technician found an area of elevated gamma readings along the edge of the property. Pat McNamara, chair of the playground committee, got permission to look at the aecl file on the property. In it were test reports that suggested the presence of highly radioactive material under an addition to the school. A 1978 reading in the gymnasium and kindergarten area had revealed radon at up to 506 picocuries per litre — 125 times the allowable level.

The file’s contents were news to McNamara, and to the community at large. Another document, a late-1978 letter signed by Glenn Case (whom aecl had retained as a consultant), reported that the radon was no longer a problem. In other words, there may have been a problem, but until McNamara’s finding no one was the wiser for it.

Faye More, head of the Port Hope Community Health Concerns Committee (phchcc), calls what happened at Dr. Powers a terrible betrayal: parents should have been told in 1978 of the possibility that their children had been exposed, and the radioactive material should have been removed immediately. Both the school board and aecl maintained there wasn’t a problem. But in 2006, two years after McNamara’s disclosure, Dr. Powers closed. “This was something that really shook my faith in this process right to the core,” More told Case last summer when he addressed a meeting sponsored by her committee. “It’s very difficult to think that happened in a school that hundreds of children have gone through. We’re talking about an invisible, deadly gas.” As people sat awaiting Case’s response, he stared silently at the desk in front of him. “I don’t discuss private property,” he told me later. “Dr. Powers is just fine — it has been since day one, and it continues to be. It’s a situation where people have been allowed to look at the file and have taken readings completely out of context.”

Molly Mulloy attended kindergarten at Dr. Powers. She remembers romping with friends through the ravines, building forts with materials they found there, swimming in the harbour. In 1999, at the age of forty, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a maximum of a year and a half to live. She fought back — chemotherapy, surgery, yoga, herbal remedies, and “bloody bullheaded determination” — but her shattered immune system forces her to avoid public spaces, and she has had to give up teaching. Mulloy had several miscarriages and long ago abandoned hope of ever having a child. “I am convinced that in multiple ways my life has been destroyed by that industry in Port Hope,” she says.

Mulloy is the daughter of one of Port Hope’s most prominent environmentalists. Shortly after the discovery at St. Mary’s, Pat Lawson had helped start a nuclear monitoring committee, and in 1995 she founded the phchcc. Lawson’s children remember her toughing it out in the face of endless hostility from company supporters. “She was threatened many times,” Mulloy says. “She was told, ‘Why do you bother living in this town if you hate it so much?’ I remember one phone call that just scared the shit out of me: ‘Tell your mother to get out of this town.’”

AECL has a file on almost every property in Port Hope, complete with information from the initial 1970s survey, details of whatever remediation was done, and any subsequent construction-related surveys. However, only property owners have access to their own files. Faye More has challenged this, arguing that it is a public health issue, that people should be able to check the status of parks and schools, as well as former homes, schools, and places of employment, but such protests have had little effect. She is not mollified by assurances of government compensation for lost equity on homes resulting from aecl activities, and she points to new hot spots being discovered when buildings are demolished or new holes dug as evidence that concerns about property values and privacy rights ought to be reconsidered in the face of broader public health issues.

When a Port Hope property is sold, a real estate agent or lawyer typically provides the buyer with a radiological status letter from aecl. But as they are not legally obliged to do so, it doesn’t always happen. Evans-Gould is one of many who bought a home without knowing its history. In fact, the town received so many complaints from subdivision homebuyers who hadn’t been told about Cameco-Eldorado that it passed a bylaw in 2004 requiring developers to disclose the information. But the bylaw only applies to new developments and severances, not to resales.

In 2006, Evans-Gould contacted aecl. The company sent a technician to take readings, and she showed me the spot by the back fence line where the Geiger counter “went crazy.” aecl told her not to disturb the soil or allow her dog to dig there. A house on a rise adjoins her property, and she now wonders whether rainwater is carrying radiation down from her neighbour’s property, but she has no means of finding out. aecl sent a letter to reassure her, explaining that radon levels on her property were “within the normal range found within most homes,” and “below the criterion for remedial activities set by the federal-provincial task force on radioactivity.” Two exterior gamma readings were, the letter said, “slightly above the normal range of background but well within the criterion for remedial activities.” Nevertheless, Evans-Gould hasn’t grown any vegetables or let her grandchildren play in the garden since.

The aecl files document the history of nuclear contamination in Port Hope but do not address ongoing pollution. Each year, Cameco’s air emissions contain more than 100 kilograms of uranium, more than 500 kilograms of fluoride, over 30 tonnes of nitrates, and approximately 20 tonnes of ammonia. In 2002, an Ontario environment ministry audit revealed that some 60 percent of emissions escape through cracks, ducts, doors, and windows. Cameco was ordered to double the amount of uranium emissions it was reporting, but the new levels were still well within the cnsc standard.

Information on Cameco’s website attempts to put the plant’s airborne uranium emissions — 115.9 kilograms in 2006, up from 102.7 in 2002 — in context: “Please keep in mind that the international scientific consensus considers these levels safe, and that they are not large when compared to other sources,” it states. “A 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant burning 4 million tonnes of coal per year can release up to 5,000 kilo-grams of uranium to the atmosphere.” I asked Cameco spokesperson Doug Prendergast for the source of this information, and he referred me to a 1993 paper on the website of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — where the Manhattan Project achieved the world’s first self-sustaining fission reaction in 1942. It describes the hazards associated with burning coal and the relative cleanliness of nuclear power generation. But a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment told me that while coal does contain uranium it’s not all released into the air — at least not by Ontario power plants. Ministry scientists modelled the scenario described by Cameco and arrived at five to twenty-five kilograms a year.