John Curran
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 27, 2007
PORT RADIUM - Roughly 265 km east of Deline, amid towering cliffs, rocky islands and the almost turquoise waters of Great Bear Lake, sits Port Radium: birthplace of Canada's uranium industry.
Relics of Port Radium's past - which included supplying the uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War - still dot the landscape halfway through the cleanup. - John Curran/NNSL photos
Port Radium by the numbers...
Here's a condensed look at some of the numbers related to Port Radium's past and the current remediation effort:
3: The number of mines operating at Port Radium.
910,000 tonnes: The amount of uranium produced over the years.
200,000: The estimated number of Japanese killed or injured by the atomic bombs containing uranium from the site.
1.7 million tonnes: The amount of tailings generated by the three mines in total.
800,000 tonnes: The amount of tailings estimated to have spilled into Great Bear Lake.
50,000 tonnes: The amount of fill and concrete Aboriginal Engineering crews will move in remediating the site.
18: The total number of mine openings at Port Radium.
$20-$25: The average Deline residents have been paid per hour this summer at Port Radium.
525: Deline's population.
49: The number of Deline residents employed on the project this summer.
1996: When Deline began raising health concerns related to Port Radium.
120 days: The expected time required to remediate Port Radium.
28: The number of contaminated sites in the Deline district.
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By the end of next month, remediation will be done and Port Radium will be placed on Ottawa's long-term monitoring list.
It's been a long road getting to this point today.
The economic potential of the site was first recognized in May 1930, when Gilbert LaBine discovered pitchblende - the ore that yields radium and uranium, which at the time was useless.
"There were three mines operated at the Port Radium site over the years," said Carole Mills, NWT program manager of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada's Contaminants and Remediation Directorate.
LaBine's firm, the Eldorado Gold Mining Company, first operated a radium and silver mine. After the radium market crashed due to over-supply, the mine closed in 1939.
It was reopened again by Eldorado in 1942, this time supplying the uranium for the Manhattan Project, which eventually developed the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.
The Government of Canada expropriated the mine in January 1944 and operated it as Eldorado Mining and Refining, producing uranium until 1960.
Echo Bay Mines arrived in 1964 and opened a silver operation which was finally decommissioned in 1982.
"Dene people moved to the area and worked cutting wood and harvesting meat for the mines," said Mills, adding woodcutters were paid $3 to $5 for each cord they supplied.
One of the people who moved there was Deline elder Bernadette Yukon. Then a 10-year-old girl, she spent almost two years around Port Radium with her grandparents.
"We lived around the corner in Cameron Bay," she recalls. "The miners didn't want the aboriginal people living with them."
She remembers two or three hundred people living in the area, which was a self-contained community.
"At the time, the only hospital in the area was here," she said.
Initially Dene ore haulers were also employed, carrying rock as it was barged out via the Bear and Mackenzie rivers for processing in Port Hope, Ont.
Later in the 1950s, a mill was built on the site and yellowcake - processed uranium - was produced at Port Radium and flown south in sealed containers.
While modern mines are quite safe, the operating procedures of the past were much different.
"Some of the stuff they used to do here, boy! They'd throw you in jail if you did the same things now," said Bob Johnson, vice-president and project manager in charge of engineering, design and construction with Aboriginal Engineering.
"They would dump used oil in the water to keep ice from forming around their boats, for example."
Between 1930 and 1982, the three mines together produced about 910,000 tonnes of uranium and 800,000 tonnes of silver.
Along the way they also generated roughly 1.7 million tonnes of contaminated tailings.
Residents in Deline, which has a population of about 525, began complaining about high cancer rates, birth defects and other abnormalities in the mid-1990s.
After roughly a decade of lobbying and scientific study the federal government awarded a $6.8-million contract to Aboriginal Engineering to cleanup the site on Dec. 20, 2006.
"Deline has a lot of widows," said Leroy Andre, president of the Deline Land Corp.
"We're still not 100 per cent satisfied with things ... but we have to move forward."
