In
the summer of 1998, representatives of the Dene people of Great Bear Lake went
to Hiroshima to express their remorse for having hauled ore from the Port
Radium mine to supply fuel for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. They had no
foreknowledge of what they were participating in, and they suffered horribly
afterwards from the effects of radiation, but still they felt responsible.
Until
the 1990s, because of their isolation and neglect by the Canadian government,
they had little understanding of where those “money rocks” had gone, and little
awareness of the rocks’ connection to numerous deaths among them from strange
new illnesses. But then journalists, academics and filmmakers began to appear
with questions about the past and information about the causes of those
illnesses. The Dene were dismayed by the neglect they had suffered, but were
equally burdened by the new awareness of what they had helped to bring upon
Japanese people. Their sense of responsibility knew nothing of the civilized impulse
toward self-exculpation. They felt responsible for not having asked questions
about what they had agreed to work on, for not having made every effort to
understand the implications of their participation. That’s an ethical standard
that few people could live up to.
In
1998, Canadian journalists shed light on the story of the Port Radium mine, and
in 1999 the documentary film Village
of Widows
covered the story and the trip by the Dene to Japan. Peter van Wyck returned to
it more recently in his book Highway of
the Atom (2010). Nonetheless, the story is forgotten (or never-known)
history for most Canadians. When a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite
crashed over the Northwest Territories in 1978, widely dispersing radioactive
waste in the region, it was an irony lost on everyone.
The
most interesting twist in the story is that in 2005-06, during the peak of the so-called
“nuclear renaissance,” a film director, David Henningson, headed up to Great
Bear Lake to make a film called Somba
ke: The Money Place about the relations between the Dene and Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (watch it on youtube here). During preparations he found that attitudes had shifted, and he ended
up making a film very different from the one he had set out to make. The Dene
were now reluctant to speak of the past because a mining company called Alberta Star had concluded an
agreement with them to reopen the mine. Canadian author Douglas Coupland was a
major shareholder, along with his brother, the CEO. This time, of course, the
Dene were promised that things would be different. The next year, in 2008, the Deline Land Corporation (Dene controlled)
announced they would oppose all future uranium development until remaining
issues with the old Port Radium mine were resolved. Alberta Star's stock was $3 in the days of the "nuclear renaissance," but today (Feb. 23, 2014) in the post-Fukushima world, it trades at $0.21.
At other active uranium
mine sites in Northern Canada, aboriginal communities are divided on their
support for nuclear energy(1), but for the most part they have made peace with the
atom and are working for and with uranium mining companies. As far as I know,
none of them have offered apologies for Fukushima Daiichi.
The
article below gives a good overview of the history of Port Radium from the 1930s
to 1990s. It no longer exists on the Calgary
Herald website, though the journalist who wrote it, Andrew Nikiforuk, has been active since,
covering the Alberta Tar Sands and the energy crisis. A few versions of this
article are posted on web pages that seem to have not been attended to since
the 1990s. I’ve tried to restore it to a readable version that does not have
each sentence and quotation formatted as a separate paragraph.
(1) Andrew Loewen. "Legal action seeks transparency from Northern Village of Pinehouse regarding uranium contracts." Briarpatch Magazine. January 27, 2014.
http://briarpatchmagazine.com/announcements/view/legal-action-pinehouse
__________________________________
Echoes
of the Atomic Age: Cancer kills fourteen aboriginal uranium workers
by Andrew Nikiforuk
Calgary Herald, Alberta,
Canada
originally
published on Saturday, March 14, 1998
At
the dawn of the nuclear age, Paul Baton and more than 30 Dene hunters and
trappers innocently called uranium “the money rock.” Paid $3 a day by their
white employers, the Dene hauled and ferried burlap sacks of the grimy ore from
the world’s first uranium mine at Port Radium, across the Northwest Territories
to Fort McMurray. Since then, at least 14 Dene who worked at the mine between
1942 and 1960 have died of lung, colon and kidney cancers, according to
documents obtained through the N.W.T. Cancer Registry.
The
Port Radium mine supplied the uranium to fuel the $2-billion effort to make the
first atomic bombs. “Before the mine, you never heard of cancer,” said Baton,
83. “Now, lots of people have died of cancer.” Charged Cindy Gilday, chairwoman
of the Deline’s Uranium Committee: “In my mind it’s a war crime that has been
well hidden. The Dene were the first civilian victims of the war and are the
last to be addressed.”
The
Dene, who say they were never told of uranium’s hazards, will decide next
weekend whether to sue or seek a settlement with the federal government.
Declassified U.S. documents show that the U.S. government, which was the buyer,
and Ottawa, then the world’s largest supplier, withheld health and safety
information from miners, as well as natives.
Robie
Chatterjee, head of health physics and risk with the Atomic Energy Control
Board, responded to the news of the high incidence of cancers among the Dene by
saying: “We were not aware of this (the cancers). It definitely deserves more
investigation.”
The
federal government owned Eldorado Mining and Refining and regulated the uranium
industry. It privatized the firm in 1988.
During
the mine’s heyday in the 1950s, many Dene slept on the ore, ate fish from water
contaminated by radioactive tailings and breathed radioactive dust while on the
barges, docks and portages. More than a dozen men carried sacks of ore weighing
more than 45 kilograms for 12 hours a day, six days a week, four months a year.
“That might be comparable to taking a chest X-ray every week for a year with an
old machine,” said Dr. David Bates, an environmental health analyst and chair
of British Columbia’s royal commission on uranium in 1980.
“The
people at the time didn’t speak English,” said Shirley Baton-Modest, 33, a
Deline resident. “I think my people were used as guinea-pigs. They were never
informed of the dangers.” A 1991 federal aboriginal health survey found the
Deline community reporting twice as much illness as any other Canadian
aboriginal community. But the federal government has never studied the Dene’s
health-related concerns -- specifically cancer.
André
Corriveau, the Northwest Territories’ chief medical officer of health, noted
that high cancer rates among the Dene don’t differ significantly from the
overall territorial profile. However, the death rate is skewed by high rates of
smoking among the Inuit, he said.
Andy
Orkin, an Ontario lawyer who deals with aboriginal and environmental issues,
will present a brief to the Dene next week. “We left them to die and hoped they
would never ask any questions,” he said.
Fourteen
of the 30 Dene who worked at the Port Radium, N.W.T. uranium mine have died of
cancer. Declassified documents on the U.S. atomic weapons and energy program
reveal that both the Canadian and American governments knew in the early 1940s
of the deadly hazards of uranium extraction. Yet for two decades Ottawa failed
to warn thousands of miners and natives of the risks they faced daily. Now, the
elders of Deline must decide whether to seek a settlement -- or sue for
compensation.
Just
south of the Arctic Circle on the shores of Great Bear Lake, the surviving
elders of Deline now say the Prophet warned them. These are the people whose
dead husbands and brothers hauled the raw uranium ore that helped make the
bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the ones who still have no word
for radiation.
In
immaculate white-walled bungalows, the elders nod at a stark photograph of a
bearded figure and say in hushed and saddened tones, “Yes, Grandfather told us.”
Until his death in 1940, Louis Ayah, one of the North’s great aboriginal seers,
repeatedly warned his people that the waters in Great Bear Lake would turn a
foul yellow. According to “Grandfather,” the yellow poison would flow toward
the village, recalls Madelaine Bayha, one of a dozen scarfed and skirted “uranium
widows” in the village. “The prophet spoke about that poison. He said that
there would be sickness and that people would go through hard times and that
there would be deaths,” says Bayha, 82. Her husband, Joseph, worked for years
at the uranium mine and died as many white miners did: coughing himself to
death.
Fifty
years after the first atomic bomb, the Cold War and the economic boom that was
uranium, the elders in this community of 600 people are beginning to understand
the meaning of that disturbing vision. They realize that the ore mined from
their ancestral hunting grounds became the ingredient of mass destruction; that
the poison was none other than radiation and its deadly progeny; and that the
source was Port Radium, the world’s first uranium mine -- a primitive and often
secret Crown company called Eldorado Mining and Refining, run by the federal
government from 1942 to 1960.
They
also suspect that many of the 18 deaths caused by cancer or lung diseases in
the community in the past 30 years may be all part of the forgotten mine’s radioactive
legacy and that of its transport arm, Northern Transportation Co. Ltd. And they
have many questions. Why did the federal government, their guardian, and
Eldorado, a defunct Crown corporation, never tell them of the dangers of
uranium mining? Why, in a community where cancers were unknown and elders once
lived into their 90s, have so many men died in their 60s and 70s?
“Something’s
wrong. A lot of people have died of cancer in the last 15 years,” says Paul
Baton, 83. As a young man he and more than 30 other Dene men barged or hauled
100-pound bags of uranium ore concentrate along a 2,100-kilometre
transportation web of rivers, rapids and portages known as the “Highway of the
Atom.” In addition to serving as coolies for the war effort, the Dene ate fish
from contaminated dredging ponds. Their children played with the dusty ore at
river docks and portage landings. And their women sewed tents from used uranium
sacks.
The
boatmen often slept atop ore-filled barges and nearly a dozen families
regularly hunted, camped and fished at areas that a federal government study on
radioactive wastes identified in 1994 as having “elevated gamma radiation, due
to spillage of uranium ore.”
“Before
the mine, you never heard of cancer,” says Baton, a small man with clear eyes
and a strong face. “Not once. . . . The river pilots I knew all died of cancer.
The families that cut logs for the mine are all gone. Something is wrong.”
Although
proving that a specific radioactive dose caused a specific individual cancer is
problematic, scientists generally agree that there is no safe threshold for
radiation exposure. All exposures carry some risk of cancer or genetic effects
and there is no doubt that the many Dene were routinely exposed to gamma
radiation and radioactive dust over a period of 20 years.
The
first Dene to die of cancer, or what elders still call “the incurable disease,”
was Old Man Ferdinand in 1960. He had worked at the mine site as a logger,
guide and stevedore for nearly a decade. “It was Christmastime and he wanted to
shake hands with all the people as they came back from hunting,” recalls Rene
Fumoleau, then an Oblate missionary working in Deline. After saying goodbye to
the last family that came in, Ferdinand declared: “‘Well, I guess I shook hands
with everyone now,’ and he died three hours later.”
Others
followed in the next decade. Victor Dolphus’ arm came off when he tried to
start an outboard motor. Dolphus, who had worked at the mine site for years,
needed a contraption to hold up his neck before the cancer finished him. Joe
Kenny, a boat pilot, died of colon cancer. His son, Napoleon, a deck hand, died
of stomach cancer. And so on. The premature death of so many men has not only
left many widows but interrupted the handing down of culture. “In Dene society
it is the grandfather who passes on the traditions and now there are too many
men with no uncles, fathers or grandfathers to advise them,” says Cindy Gilday,
Joe Kenny’s daughter, and chair of Deline Uranium Committee. “It’s the most
vicious example of cultural genocide I have ever seen and it’s in my own home.”
Although
the Atomic Energy Control Board and uranium companies have long argued that
little was known about uranium’s hazards, evidence from U.S. and Canadian
archives and survivors of the era tell a different story.
Unlike
Ottawa, the U.S. recently declassified 250,000 documents on its atomic weapons
and energy program, which reveal that government officials and scientists in
both countries actively discussed uranium’s hazards in secret. Yet publicly
they remained mute. The perils were well documented. As early as 1932, Canada’s
Department of Mines published studies on Port Radium that repeatedly warned
about radon’s poisonous effects on the lungs and “dangers from inhalation of
radioactive dust.” The department’s own blood studies on Port Radium miners
lead it to conclude “that a hazard may exist in the breathing of air containing
even small amounts of radon.”
Wilhelm
C. Hueper also knew this. In 1942 the founding director of the environmental
cancer section of the U.S. National Cancer Institute reviewed 300 years of
radon data on European miners. His conclusion: radon gas in cobalt mines
routinely produced lung cancers that systematically killed more than half of
all miners 10 to 20 years after their employment.
Hueper
predicted a similar tragedy for radium miners in Great Bear Lake and the
Belgium Congo. Warned the scientist: “In case the Belgian and Canadian
operations should be conducted without the essential and comprehensive
protective measures for the workers, the prospects for an epidemic-like
appearance of lung carcinomas among their employees can be anticipated in the
not too distant future.” Forty years later, two Canadian mortality studies
confirmed Hueper’s foresight.
When
Hueper began to issue similar warnings to U.S. uranium miners on the Colorado
Plateau in the early 1950s, “the mine operators and politicians got all
excited,” says Victor E. Archer, an epidemiologist who started the first cancer
studies on U.S. miners in 1954 and is now a professor of occupational medicine
in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah. Declassified U.S. documents also
show that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission told Hueper, a world expert on lung
cancers, that references to occupational cancers among uranium miners were “not
in the public interest” and “represented mere conjecture.”
Notes
Archer: “The Canadians knew about the same things that the U.S. did and in
general tagged along with the Atomic Energy Commission.” In fact Eldorado
management and the Canadian government regularly received updates on radon and
lung cancer studies on American uranium miners throughout the 1950s. But
neither government nor mine owners wanted to scare miners away or implement
better health safeguards that would force uranium prices up, says Archer.
“We
always suspected that the Americans had more information about the hazards but
we could never get the damn stuff,” recalls Hank Bloy, a retired engineer for
Eldorado’s Port Radium and Beaverlodge mines in the late 1950s. “The Americans
were buying our uranium and wanted it badly and didn’t cooperate too much on
the health standards.”
In
1945, a federal research team from Montreal sent to monitor radon in the mine
found conditions at Port Radium appalling. They reported that “the radon
content seems to be so high as to be definitely dangerous to the health of
those working in the mines.” Despite the installation of some fans in 1946,
concerns about protection for miners at Great Bear Lake even became the subject
of several 1949 memos at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which at that time
bought all the mine’s ore. This information was so confidential that one memo
said: “It should not be quoted in any published report.”
The
next reference to ongoing radiation hazards at the mine surfaced at a secret
1953 meeting at Chalk River, Ont. When Canadian officials expressed concerns
about high radon concentration in uranium mines, their American counterparts
replied that “our problem is different because we have no concentration of
uranium of any magnitude.” This was a lie: By 1953, the U.S. Public Health
Services had established that American miners on the Colorado Plateau were
being exposed to the same radiation doses as Hueper’s European miners.
Dr.
André Cipriani, a Canadian biologist keenly concerned about health safety in
the whole uranium industry, then reported “that there had been three or four
cases of cancers in employees” at Port Radium. When the Canadian government
finally sent two physicists to the area in the mid-1950s to check on radon
levels at Port Radium’s sister mine on Lake Athabasca -- a mine with much lower
grade ore -- they found lots of radon. But according to one retired senior
civil servant, that report, like Hueper’s concerns, never saw the light of day.
“We printed it in green covers, which means declassified, and sent a copy up to
Chalk River. And the next thing I knew we got orders from the assistant deputy
minister to collect every copy and get them back to the department because not
one was to go out. That report was squashed. “I know that Eldorado was
extremely cautious and didn’t want anything coming out and I guess they said, ‘For
God’s sake, stop this!’ and it never came out,” says the pensioned official,
who is still bound to silence by the Official Secrets Act.
Because
this health information was withheld, Canada’s energy minister, Gordon
Churchill, was able to declare in 1959 “that there are no special hazards
attached to the mining of uranium that differ from other mining activities.” Notes
Robert Bothwell, a University of Toronto historian and author of Eldorado, a
lengthy history of the Crown company: “The profound and deliberate
falsification of nuclear hazards began at the top.”
The
Port Radium record was eventually repeated at uranium mines across Canada. When
the Ontario government appointed James Ham to study mine safety at Elliot Lake,
another Eldorado uranium property, in 1974, he concluded that “neither the
workers nor their representatives were advised about the emerging status of the
problem of lung cancer.” Although Elliot Lake has now been closed for nearly 10
years, former miners with lung cancer and other radiation related ailments make
an average of one compensation claim a week in Ontario.
The
Atomic Energy Commission still has not adopted the latest radiation exposure
guidelines issued by the International Commission of Radiation Protection. The
ICRP, based in Sweden, issued the recommended levels in 1991.
Later
Canadian studies found just what scientists early on had predicted would be
found. One pilot study on Port Radium found 10 cases of lung cancer among 76
men who had worked more than five years at the mine. They died between 1953 and
1975. Ontario and Newfoundland studies found miners exposed to radon had three
to five times the average lung cancer rate. And on it went.
Watching
a uranium miner die of a radioactive damaged lung is a job only for the brave.
Al King, an 82-year-old retired member of the Steelworkers union in Vancouver,
has held the hands of the dying. He recalls one retired Port Radium miner whose
chest lesions were so bad that they had spread to his femur and exploded it. “They
couldn’t pump enough morphine into him to keep him from screaming before he
died.”
“The
ethical issues raised by this case are profound,” says Andy Orkin, a well-known
Ontario lawyer who advises the community and also represents the Cree of
northern Quebec. “We did it to them. Somebody knew the stuff was dangerous.
Even by standards of the day, they had a right to know.”
Before
the mine, the Dene, a nomadic people, hunted and fished along the rocky shores
of Great Bear, the world’s fourth-largest and least-studied inland lake. But
the stability of that caribou life changed when the Dene unwittingly met the
atom in 1930. That’s the year Gilbert and Charlie LaBine started to mine a rich
load of pitchblende or radium just an eight-hour boat ride north of Deline
(then Fort Franklin). According to the elders, a Dene hunter traded a sample of
the black lustrous mineral to a Kentucky-born fur trapper, who then alerted the
LaBines, failed gold-seekers. In exchange for the right to mine an ore then
worth more than $70,000 a gram on world markets, the Dene received a few sacks
of flour, lard and baking powder. “On that day, the babies of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were doomed to death by the time they would become 15 years of age,”
noted a 1945 Herald article on the historic mine.
Radium,
which consists largely of uranium oxides, was then used for watch dials,
medical X-rays and cancer treatments. It is just one of the radioactive
byproducts of uranium, a constantly decaying metal that releases a wide
spectrum of deadly energy particles, much like shrapnel from a grenade. Port
Radium contained so much of its namesake that in 1932 the Herald hailed the
find as a “treasure house” and “Great Bear’s rich citadel.” As a consequence,
the mine immediately broke the world monopoly on radium held by a Belgium firm
in the Congo.
Rather
than ship tonnes of chemicals to Great Bear to refine the radium, Eldorado
established a refinery in Port Hope, Ontario. It sold uranium as a waste
product for $1.35 a pound or scattered radioactive tailings around the city -- a
source of later scandals. Before the mine temporarily closed in 1940 due to the
war and declining radium demand, the Dene supplied caribou meat for the miners
and then worked as loggers, stevedores or radium coolies.
In
1942, the U.S. Manhattan Project -- the secret effort to turn split atoms into
explosive bombs -- quickly revived the mine’s fortunes. Having no uranium
sources of its own, the American government rapidly bought Port Radium
stockpiles at the Port Hope Refinery and placed an order for 60 tonnes of
uranium oxide. To advance the war effort, Ottawa secretly purchased the mine.
Alberta’s wide-open spaces were even offered as possible test sites for the
bomb.
It’s
unknown how many tonnes of Port Radium ore fuelled the first test bomb, called “Trinity,”
or even the war-stoppers -- “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” A shipload of Congo ore
sitting in New York harbor eventually made up the bulk of the supplies because
Eldorado had trouble filling both American and British orders for the war
effort. But the Manhattan Project mixed ores from Great Bear and Africa and all
the uranium was refined at Port Hope.
“Nobody
knew what was going on,” recalls Isadore Yukon, who hauled ores for three
summers in a row during the 1940s. “Keeping the mine going full blast was the
important thing.” To that end, the mine employed 250 white miners who battled
frigid waters, poor ventilation (the mine counted on natural drafts to
circulate air) and Port Radium’s remoteness. Miner turnover was high. While the
whites mined the ore and sewed crushed ores into sacks, the Dene carried and
piloted what they called the “money rock” out of Great Bear to Fort McMurray.
“When
I was young,” recalled 66-year-old Alfred Taniton, who worked on the
ore-ferrying boats for five years, “I saw some of the workers hauling ores. The
whites would have showers but us native people didn’t. I guess they really
wanted to destroy us... That’s why they never told us these things.”
His
wife Jane, now 59, lived two years at the mine and ate herring from the dredging
pond. Two years ago she had a cancerous kidney removed. “If they had told us
the truth the people wouldn’t have worked for them,” adds Alfred.
In
1994, an advisory committee to President Bill Clinton published a study on “human
radiation experiments” in the United States. It looked at the treatment of
miners, many of whom were Navajos. Based on declassified documents, it
concluded that “an insufficient effort was made by the federal government to
mitigate the hazard to uranium miners through early ventilation of the mines
and that as a result miners died… Because the federal government did not take
the necessary action, the product it purchased was at the price of hundreds of
deaths.” That summary should bring no comfort to Deline’s widows, nor to the
widows of hundreds of uranium miners across Canada. But it explains a legacy of
deception.
“Of
all the world’s nuclear powers, Canada is the last hold-out on talking about
its nuclear legacy and how so many things went terribly wrong,” says Gordon
Edwards, a Montreal mathematician and president of the Canadian Coalition for
Nuclear Responsibility. “I could never understand why authorities were so
resistant,” reflects Archer, whose epidemiology studies on American miners
finally broke the official silence in 1961. “As I got older I saw the same
thing with cigarette smoking and asbestos. I now believe that it’s a cultural
thing. People are reluctant to change their minds and accept new ideas.”
“The
first time I heard about this bomb was from an army veteran in the 1950s,” says
Deline elder Paul Baton. “The soldier said he’d had respiratory problems,
probably due to the war. He told us about the bomb and the aftermath and what
it was made from. “He explained how they dropped the bomb and its effect on the
Japanese. He said later, down the years, it will affect my land and my life… “We
had no idea. We are a strong people. We stand by our words. The elders are
worried about the water, the air and the land. We must keep it clean because
other animals use the land… I have never talked about this before but now I am
talking.”
In
Deline, the elders -- the ones that survived their introduction to the nuclear
age -- now go to the restored house of the prophet, the Grandfather, to speak
to the dead. There are not many other grandfathers left.
Port
Radium (Eldorado) Timeline
1932: Port Radium
begins production. Mines Canada issues health warnings on radon gas and
radioactive dust.
1939: Canadian ore
used in first atomic chain reaction experiment.
1940: Port Radium
closes.
1941: Port Radium
reopens for war effort, as world’s first uranium mine.
1942: United States
government orders 60 tonnes of uranium. Canadian government secretly begins to
buy out mine. Dene work as coolies.
1945: Bombs dropped
on Japan.
1949: U.S. officials
raise health concerns about Port Radium miners.
1953: First Port
Radium miner dies of cancer. United States government secretly begins health
studies on U.S. miners.
1956: Value of
uranium production hits $1 billion in Canada.
1957: Elliot Lake
mine opens.
1960: Port Radium
mine closes. No uranium left. First Dene dies of cancer.
1967: First radon
standards set.
1974: First uranium
miners with lung cancer compensated by Ontario.
1976: Ham Royal
Commission slams government for hiding health information from miners. First
Ontario studies published.
1979: First cancer
death study on Port Radium miners.
1988: Canadian
government merges Eldorado with the Sasktachewan Mining Development Corporation
to form Cameco.
