Blake Fitzpatrick and Robert Del Tredici, “Port Hope: Canada’s Picturesque Atomic Town ...”

“Port Hope: Canada’s Picturesque Atomic Town with its 125,000 Truckloads of Radioactive Waste” Blake Fitzpatrick (Ryerson University) and Robert Del Tredici (independent) Presented at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes symposium, Toronto, 23-25 October 2015. www.postatomiceyes.net Port Hope, Ontario, is Canada’s premier uranium town – and the nation’s conduit to the nuclear world. Its nuclear-age roots predate the first atomic weapons when in 1932 a radium refinery was built on the edge of Lake Ontario a stone’s throw from Main Street. In the 1940s, the radium refinery shifted production to uranium refining. The company Eldorado Nuclear Ltd. was turned into a crown corporation with orders to supply uranium oxide to the United States Government for top-secret nuclear research being carried out under the Manhattan Project. Port Hope continued to supply refined uranium to the American bomb program for the next twenty years. Port Hope is thus an integral part of the development of the atomic bomb, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the production of atomic weapons during the Cold War. Today the plant supplies uranium hexafluoride for commercial nuclear reactors worldwide. In 1975 the town was stunned to learn that the gym and parking lot at St. Mary’s School contained radioactive levels of radon gas in excess of uranium mining exposure standards. The refinery had donated sandy uranium wastes to the school to use as fill and had dumped more wastes into ravines and in the town harbor. Intensively documented since the late 1970s the location and composition of these once invisible wastes have been made visible through a slew of government hearings, reports and citizen consultations. Forty years on, those wastes are still in place, but with a difference: the town has received $1.2 billion in funds for the largest environmental cleanup in Canadian history – a cleanup that will transport approximately 125,000 truck loads of the refinery’s older “historic” wastes into an engineered facility designed to last 500 years. Uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. The Port Hope story is a long-lived saga unfolding in extreme slow motion. The town has lived through approximately 75 years of continuous exposure to radioactivity and is now grappling with the nation’s costliest cleanup. Blake Fitzpatrick has photographed the town and documented its earliest links to nuclear pioneers Pierre Curie and Marcel Pochon; Robert Del Tredici has photographed the Port Hope facility, the Port Radium mine, and the Blind River Uranium Refinery, as well as Port Hope’s uranium workers and citizens. Fitzpatrick and Del Tredici’s joint presentation will shed light on one of the most oblique, lowest profile big stories of the nuclear age in Canada. Videography by Renée Lear, http://reneelear.com