On April 2, 2011, the Toronto Star ran a lengthy feature about the history of low-level radioactive waste pollution in Port Hope, Ontario. This is one of the most extensive features ever published in the mainstream media, and we encourage you to read it in full. Here’s an excerpt quoting Waterkeeper Mark Mattson:
Port Hope has an uncanny way of bursting into the spotlight every few years. Before Caldicott, it was a urine test that brought the town to its knees.
In 2007, desperate for more information, the Port Hope Community Health Concerns Committee raised $11,000 — just enough to test four former workers at the Eldorado plant, five local residents and, for comparison, two “control” people from outside town.
They sent the urine samples to J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, for analysis.
The results astounded them.
The samples from four subjects, all of them local residents, showed the presence of non-natural uranium. Cameco refines natural uranium. What had been found was “dirty” uranium that had passed through a nuclear reactor: in all but one subject, enriched uranium 234. In one sample, it was depleted uranium, the kind that can be used in nuclear weapons. It’s not known where any of it came from.
The testing involved an admittedly small sample. It was all the group could afford.
Faye More, who leads the committee, politely declined to be interviewed by the Star. Mark Mattson, president of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, an organization whose mandate is to protect the lake, hosted the press conference in Toronto in 2007. He said the aim was to check if some residents tested positive for radionucleides, thus demonstrating the need for further study.
“These people were chosen because they had unexplained illnesses or believed they had been exposed to radiation,” says Mattson, who has been working with the citizens’ groups in Port Hope for more than two decades.
One was Andy Johncox, who worked as a researcher at Eldorado from 1968 to 1982. A soft-spoken man with a slight stoop, he is in remission from prostate cancer and suffers severe joint pains, neurological disorders and crippling fatigue. Doctors have found no connection between his illnesses and radiation.
But the results of the study shook him to the core.
“I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach,” he says.
Non-natural uranium had been found in small levels in his urine almost 25 years after he left Eldorado.
“We call it spent nuclear fuel,” says Johncox. “No one knows how it got into our systems. It’s a mystery, and no one ever investigated.”
A bigger shock came a few days later, when Health Canada told the municipality there were no health concerns about the uranium levels identified in the study.
“There is low-level radioactive waste everywhere in town … the study showed there’s something amiss but the government has continuously refused to do an extensive health study,” says Johncox.
“I don’t understand why the government won’t do anything,” he says, shaking his head slowly.
