Blind Faith, Port Hope and Public Charity for a
Corporate Citizen: The Nuclear History of Port Hope, Ontario
Since
the 1940s, nuclear weapons tests, power plant failures and uranium mining have left
radioactive contamination at hundreds of sites around the world. Whether the
contamination is from weapons tests, accidents, or just reckless routine
operations, the story of the affected people unfolds in much the same way, as
if it were a formulaic plot for a generic television soap opera. Communities
that have been chemically contaminated follow much the same script, but
radiation adds some distinctive elements to the situation.
Radiation
is invisible, and it has always been imbued with a diverse range of magical
powers in science fiction. Ironically, in a very real sense,
radiation does make people invisible (the phenomenon is fully explained by
Robert Jacobs in Radiation
Makes People Invisible)[1].
Once groups of people have become victims of a radiological contamination, they
are, in addition to being poisoned, marginalized and forgotten. Their
traditions and communities are fragmented, and they are shamed into concealing
their trauma. When contamination occurs, there is a strong impulse even among many
victims to not admit that they have been harmed, for they know the fate that
awaits them if they do.
The
victims are helped in this denial by those who inflicted the damage on them because nuclear
technology, both for weapons and electricity production, has always been
treated as two sides of a single national security problem that requires secrecy and the
occasional sacrifice. Its workings must be hidden
from enemies, terrorists and citizens themselves. Thus governments have never
been interested in helping their citizens investigate nuclear accidents and
environmental damage left in the wake of nuclear development.
As
secretive programs of nation states, nuclear complexes operate free of any
governing body that could provide checks and balances. In this sense, they are
a more intractable problem than the corporate villains that are occasionally
held in check by government supervision. The American tobacco industry was
eventually forced into retreat by government, and it had to pay enormous
damages to state governments for health care costs, but the nuclear weapons and
energy complexes still operate free of any higher power that could restrain or
abolish them.
Thus
it is that hibakusha (the Japanese
word for radiation victims) become invisible. When a new group of people become
victims, such as in Fukushima in 2011, they feel that they have experienced unique
new kind of horror. For them, for their generation, it is new, but for those
who know the historical record, it is a familiar replay of an old story. The
people of Fukushima should know by now that they are bit players who have been
handed down a tattered script from the past.
A
case in point is Blind Faith, the superb
1981 book by journalist Penny Sanger, about the small irradiated Canadian town of
Port Hope on the shores of Lake Ontario. (See the timeline at the end of this
article)[2] In the 1970s it faced (and more often failed to face) the toxic legacy
of processing first radium, then uranium for nuclear weapons and nuclear power
plants. In a saner world this book would not be out of print and forgotten. It
would be a classic text known by everyone who has ever had to share his town
with a dangerous corporate citizen. Then there would be no surprises when a
nuclear reactor explodes or a cancer cluster appears somewhere new. It wouldn’t
be a shock to see the victims themselves fall over each other in a rush to
excuse their abuser, beg for a continuation of jobs and tax revenue, and
threaten the minority who try to break the conspiracy of silence.
Blind Faith is available on a website
dedicated to the history of Port Hope. Since it is out of print and over
thirty years old, I asked the author if she would allow its free distribution as a pdf file. She gave her permission, but of course the common sense
rules apply. If you want to sell the book, ask the author for permission. If
you redistribute it free, in whole or in part, do so with proper citation.
Read
it in a web browser:
Free
download (permitted by author):
Penny
Sanger, Blind Faith (pdf) (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1981), 135 pages.
|
On
the back cover of the 1981 paperback edition of Blind Faith there was an endorsement by the late great Canadian
writer Farley Mowat, who passed away in the spring of 2014:
Penny Sanger has written a fascinating and fearsome
account of the emotional turmoil that engulfs a small town when it discovers
that its major industry is a threat to the health of its citizens. This is a
classic account of how economic power enables industry to ride roughshod over
those who must depend on it for their daily bread.
Although
I wrote above that Blind Faith
illustrates universal truths about what happens to communities contaminated
with radiation, there are always unique aspects of the situation that come into
play. In this case, we see the extreme complacency and obliviousness of
Canadian society to the role that the country played in the development of
nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The uranium refinery in Port Hope was a key
element in the Manhattan Project. It was the main facility for refining uranium
ores from the Congo and northern Canada. However, as a subordinate nation in
the American-led war, Canada just had to go along in complete secrecy. As was
the case even in the US, there was never any debate in public or in elected
legislatures. Canada was just taking orders and didn’t have to feel
responsible. Canadians are still largely ignorant about their complicity in
making the bombs that fell on Japan, as they are about being one of the sources
of the uranium that was in the reactors of Fukushima Daiichi.
Another
factor in our sense of irresponsibility is the comfortable delusion that all
bad things are done by the evil empire south of the border. We’re the good
guys, with universal health care and multiculturalism.
The
Port Hope refinery began operations in the 1930s to produce radium from uranium
ore. The ore came from the recently discovered rich deposits in the Port Radium
mine on the shore of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. This mine
would later become one of the primary sources of uranium for the first atomic
weapons, but in the 1930s radium was the only product that had value for its
use in making luminescent paint and medical applications.
By
the 1930s it was well understood that radium and uranium mines were extremely
dangerous. The high lung cancer rates of miners in Czechoslovakia had been
noted for a long time, but there were others who failed to acknowledge any
connection. Marie Curie died in 1934 from aplastic anemia, and she never
acknowledged that her numerous health problems had been related to the vials of
radium that she carried around in her pocket or perhaps to the unshielded x-ray
machines she worked with.[3] Today her diaries and papers still have to be
stored in a lead box.
Because
there was no consensus on the dangers of radium by the early pioneers (DNA wasn’t
even understood until the 1950s), there were few safety controls in place when
radium became an industrial product. Radium paint workers got sick and died for
mysterious reasons, as did workers in processing plants like the Eldorado
Mining and Refining facility in Port Hope. Almost nothing was done to protect
workers or properly dispose of the waste product. The wastes were isolated in a
dump, but when that became problem, the dirt was sold as fill to unsuspecting
(or unscrupulous) buyers and used at construction sites all over town.
It
wasn’t until the 1970s that a few citizens of Port Hope started to notice
radioactive wastes turning up in various locations. This new awareness was the
beginning of bitter social divides that would be familiar to anyone who has
followed what has happened in Fukushima prefecture since 2011. The enormous
implications of the necessary cleanup forced political and economic powers to
downplay or ignore the dangers, and ostracize anyone who dared to threaten real
estate values and tarnish the image of the community. The mayor even boasted of
what a great role the town had played in the Cold War by refining uranium so
that America could beat back the Soviet threat, as if the contamination had
been worth it.
There
was a minimal recognition of the need to do something about the worst hot
spots, to placate critics and relocate residents in the worst danger. Everyone
agreed, for example, that something had to be done to clean up a contaminated school, but for the most part
the problem was denied in favor of keeping the town’s biggest tax payer and
employer satisfied. At the same time, the federal government was not motivated
to do anything that would set back the expansion of the nation’s nuclear energy
program. The Darlington and Pickering nuclear plants were built nearby in this
era on the shores of Lake Ontario.
By
this time, Eldorado was no longer selling uranium for American nuclear weapons,
but it had become a major player in the uranium fuel market. It would provide
the fuel for the large fleet of CANDU reactors that Ontario was building, and
by the 1980s Eldorado was privatized, turned into Cameco, and was then selling
about 80% of its output to the US where the uranium was enriched for use in
light water reactors. Thus a full acknowledgment of the extent of the problem—the
cost of cleanup and the health impacts—would have jeopardized the refinery’s
role as a major supplier in a growing nuclear energy industry. Eldorado might
have seemed like a wealthy giant to outsiders, but the uranium business was
perilous and changing rapidly. Just as the public was becoming aware of the extent
of the pollution, Eldorado was stuck in long-term contracts that were a bargain
for its customers but disastrous in a time of soaring costs.
The
situation presented especially difficult obstacles for opponents because
Eldorado was a crown (publicly owned) corporation. One obstacle was secrecy. Since
1942, the operations of Eldorado have been state secrets, and much remains
locked up in archives that are yet to be opened to historians.[4]
The
other problem was in the fact that the government had no interest in investigating
its own corporation, and because Eldorado was a federal crown corporation, the
province of Ontario had no authority to investigate it for environmental crimes.
Thus complaints from citizens ran into this dead end.
Similar
situations in the United States, such as at the Rocky Flats plutonium pit factory,
involved the Department of Energy hiring large defense contractors like
Rockwell to manage the plant. This meant there was a possibility the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations could
act if enough public pressure were applied and evidence of crimes became
apparent. As much as the American nuclear weapons complex was a monstrous crime
against nature, there is at least something redeeming in the fact that the
American system of government consisted of various institutions that could sometimes
keep the others in check. In the dying days of operations at Rocky Flats in 1989,
the EPA and the FBI raided the facility which was then operated by Rockwell
under contract for the Department of Energy. The US government essentially
raided and prosecuted itself.[5] Unfortunately, no such checks and balances
existed in Canada’s nuclear industry. The federal government and its crown
corporation had a monolithic grip on the historical records and on decisions
about environmental safety and health related to radiation. There was no
outside force that had legal authority to prosecute them and force them to
divulge information.
There
are some further details in Blind Faith
that stand out in my memory. They are unique to the Port Hope story, but also typical
of stories of other irradiated and poisoned communities.
At
one point, a doctor in a nearby town grew alarmed at the number cancer cases
that appeared in his patients from Port Hope. He tried to bring the issue to
the attention of health authorities, but was slandered and opposed by city
officials to a degree that he found alarming. He had foolishly thought that his
efforts to speak up for public health would be appreciated. Instead, city
officials made a pathetic attempt to sue him for defaming Port Hope, and when
that immediately failed, they complained to the provincial medical association.
They had thought that this would succeed in getting him stripped of his license
to practice, but they were quickly rebuffed by the medical association that
found no fault in a doctor expressing his opinion about a serious public
health concern. Such was the sophistication of the strategies of the town
fathers as they floundered for ways to preserve the tax base.
Eldorado
and the federal government, and even the Workmen’s Compensation Board were
equally combative in the lawsuits that former workers eventually managed to
bring to court. Lung cancer was the only health issue that was admitted for
consideration in the lawsuits, and once it became a legal battle, all ethical
considerations went by the wayside. It became a matter of winning at all costs,
of admitting to absolutely no wrongdoing no matter how absurd the defendants
had to appear. The government lawyers played hardball, abandoning any thought
that the government corporation owed anything to the citizens who had lost
their health working on a project so essential for national security. The government
side was not too ashamed to engage in extreme forms of legalistic
hair-splitting. For example, the victims were forced to prove their exposure,
but everyone involved knew that the only party that had the information were
the defendants, and Eldorado did its best to conceal it. One victim was denied
compensation because the records showed his cumulative exposure was 10.8
working level months. Expert witnesses were brought in to say that the
threshold of danger to health was 12 working level months.
Another
segment of the book that stands out is that in which Penny Sanger was able to discover
that at one time, before the contamination was known by townspeople, the
Canadian military had used Port Hope as a training ground for operating in the
aftermath of nuclear warfare. The military knew what the citizens of the town
didn’t know at the time: there were sizzling hot spots of various sizes all
over town, so it made for an ideal training ground for soldiers who would have
to map radiation levels and move through contaminated terrain after a nuclear
attack. After the training exercise, they might have bothered to tell the
locals about what they were living with, but the contamination remained a
secret until residents started to figure it out for themselves.
As
the years of legal struggles and activism dragged on, there were signs that the
government was tacitly admitting to the scale of the problem, even if it
refused to accept legal responsibility for health damages. The management of
Eldorado was routed, and it would eventually be privatized and turned into
Cameco. The refinery became the object of pork barrel politics when the federal
Liberals came back to power in 1980. They announced that the more dangerous
uranium trioxide operation would be relocated to Blind River, a town in the
north that had voted Liberal. Eldorado wanted the refinery kept in place close
to markets. (I wonder if anyone saw the ironic symbolism of progress in the
names; going from hope to blind—a fiction writer couldn’t have
come up with anything better).
One
stand-out account is that of a widow whose husband, a long-time Eldorado
worker, had died of lung cancer at age 50. He had worked at Eldorado for over
twenty years, during the era when workplace monitoring and standards were
non-existent. Her husband was no longer there to say whether he too was “philosophical”
about it and “couldn’t be bitter about it” like his wife and his daughter
claimed. The widow said that in spite her husband’s shortened life, they were
grateful for the good jobs and university education that the children were able
to get. Thanks to Eldorado, they had come up in the world. Thanks to dad so
agreeably sacrificing the last thirty years of his life.
Penny Sanger
passed no judgment on this thinking, but I find it to be a rather nauseating
example of working man’s Stockholm syndrome. The victim has internalized the
values of the captor, and lost self-esteem and critical thinking skills in the
process. The bereaved family slumps over and shrugs pathetically that they “can’t
be bitter about it.” They’ve internalized the value that children have to go to
university to live worthwhile lives, and it’s alright if parents have to kill
themselves to accomplish this goal. If indeed going to university is so valuable,
it’s obvious that in Canada there have been other ways to get there.
It
seemed to never occur to any of the Port Hope boosters that there were dozens
of similar towns in rural Ontario that had found ways to survive without
hosting toxic industries. I know a family of Polish immigrants who landed in
Port Hope in the 1960s, and they managed to get by without working for Cameco.
The children had the sense to leave town after high school when they saw their
friends going straight to grim lives working with the yellowcake down at the
plant. One of them managed somehow to get a couple of university degrees after
he left town.
This
lack of imagination among the terminally hopeful applies more widely. Not only
do company towns fail to imagine less toxic ways to live, but large nations
also fail to imagine new paradigms for energy and economic systems. Perhaps the
widow’s tale is a metaphor for something bigger.
Port
Hope’s troubles with its radioactive legacy didn’t end with the privatization
of the refinery and other varied forms of resolution that came about in the
1980s. A cleanup was done in the 1980s, but twenty years later hot spots were
still turning up, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission finally admitted
the extent of the problem and committed taxpayer funds to a billion-dollar
decontamination project which is presently underway—an amount that is,
ironically, about the same as the budget for the new Chernobyl sarcophagus
under construction now.[6][7]
There
is further irony in the fact that while the Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion
zones have become the famous global icons of radiation-affected communities,
the Port Hope disaster has no place in Canada’s national consciousness.[8]
There is little public awareness of the history, and the present billion-dollar
decontamination project has received scant media attention and no public alarm
over the high cost. Meanwhile, opposition parties in Ontario have focused in
recent years on stoking citizen outrage over cancelled plans to build gas-powered
electric generating stations. That loss was comparatively little, amounting to
only a few hundred million dollars. The same can be said of the province’s plan
to spend $20 billion or more to refurbish nuclear power plants to operate them beyond
their originally planned expiry dates. This issue receives little attention, as
none of the major political parties wish to use it to stoke debate with rivals.
Nuclear energy has almost completely vanished from political discourse.
Meanwhile,
Cameco has continued to practice its philosophy of good corporate citizenship
by funneling all its uranium sales through Switzerland in order to avoid Canadian
taxes. The company is in an ongoing legal battle with Canada Revenue Agency, while
it has warned stockholders it may owe as much as $850 million in back taxes[9].
Note that this amount falls a bit short of the cost of the decontamination
project in Port Hope, but it would provide a big chunk of it.
Notes:
2. From The Toronto Star, April 2011:
1930s:
Crown corporation Eldorado Nuclear Ltd. begins refining radium, used for
treating cancer, and uranium that helps the Manhattan Project develop the first
atomic bombs.
1940s-1960s:
Low-level radioactive byproducts and other toxins from the plant enter the
environment through use of contaminated fill, and to some extent through sloppy
transport, and water and wind erosion in storage areas.
1970s:
New concerns prompt the Atomic Energy Control Board to scour the town in search
of hot spots. Cleanups are undertaken in dozens of locations.
1988:
Eldorado is sold to the private sector and becomes Cameco.
1990s:
Worried about health effects, citizens begin taking an active part in nuclear
license reviews of Cameco and ask the federal government to study the effects
of radioactive waste in the town.
2001:
Ottawa pledges $260 million for cleanup. An estimated 1.2 million cubic meters
of soil contaminated with low-level radioactive waste and industrial toxins
will be dug up and trucked to a new storage facility north of the town.
2002: A
federal study finds that death rates, including cancer deaths, are no higher in
Port Hope than elsewhere in Ontario.
2004:
Families Against Radioactive Exposure (FARE) is formed to counter Cameco's plan
to produce a more potent fuel known as enriched uranium. It demands an
environmental assessment of the proposal by a review panel, but the Canadian
Nuclear Safety Commission says a screening is sufficient.
2005:
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, research director of the Uranium Medical Research Center in
Washington, D.C., agrees to carry out a study of Port Hope residents for
evidence of illness resulting from exposure to radioactive materials.
2007:
The study finds small levels of radioactive elements in the urine of four of
the nine people tested, including a child younger than 14. More calls follow to
put the town under a health microscope.
2009: In
spring, the nuclear safety commission reiterates that no adverse health effects
have occurred in Port Hope, and that its cancer rates are comparable to other
Ontario towns.
2010: In
fall, the cleanup begins with a trial dig in a backyard.
November
2010: Acclaimed anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott calls the presence of
contamination in Port Hope “a disaster” and says the only solution is to
relocate the 16,000 residents.
2011: A
full-scale cleanup will begin later this year, lasting a decade and costing at
least $260 million. The final scope and price tag are unknown. [In early 2012,
the federal government announced that it was going to cost a little more: $1.28
billion! And it was being touted by local conservative member of parliament
Rick Norlock as a fantastic job creator.]
4. Peter
van Wyck, Highway of the Atom (McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2010). This author describes the obstacles still in place for
scholars wishing to access information in the archives about Canada’s nuclear
past.
5.
Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing
Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (Broadway Books, 2012).
8. The situation
is the same in numerous places in many countries. For a sample, see the maps in
The Wall Street Journal series of
reports Waste
Lands. Every
country that has mined uranium or developed nuclear weapons and nuclear power
has a similar list of contaminated lands.
