Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario H.A. Bruce with Marcel Pochon (right) at a meeting in Port Hope (1936) to celebrate the production of the first ounce of radium. Other notables at the meeting included General A. McNaughton, President of NRC, and Sir Frederick Banting.
Most people associate the phrase “Canadian nuclear industry” with CANDU-generated electricity and the production and use of isotopes such as Co-60 and Mo-99 from AECL’s research reactors at Chalk River or Ontario Hydro’s power reactors. Three other items – radium, Port Hope and Marcel Pochon – are strongly associated with an earlier nuclear era in Canada which predated nuclear reactors.
The first two items, radium and Port Hope, will be quite familiar to most readers while the third, Marcel Pochon, is likely unfamiliar. Over the last year Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has donated several artifacts to the Society that were collected in Port Hope by the Historic Waste Program Management Office (HWP MO, formerly known as the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office – LLRWMO). These items have helped the Society to compile a more complete record of this early period of Canadian nuclear activities.
Radium, an element generated in the natural decay of uranium, was first investigated in Paris, France during the 1890s by the Curies – Marie and her husband Pierre. The penetrating power of radium emissions allowed internal images of opaque items to be observed, a huge discovery. Over the next 30 years uses of radium were developed for treating cancer, for diagnostic imaging, and for producing instrument and watch dials which could be read in the dark. World demand for radium was much higher than production, which was mostly centered in Czechoslovakia, could supply. Prices of up to $100,000 US per gram for radium salts were quoted in 1915.
Canada’s entry into the lucrative radium market received a huge boost with the discovery of a high-grade source of pitchblende, a radium-bearing ore, on the remote shores of Great Bear Lake in 1932 by Gilbert Labine of Westmeath, Ontario. A mine was quickly developed and the ore was shipped, mostly by air, from Port Radium, as the mine became known, to the radium refinery of Eldorado Gold Mining in Port Hope, Ontario. At Port Hope the radium was extracted and the waste material, which still contained a substantial amount of uranium, was used as fill in various locations in the surrounding countryside. This stockpile proved to be a bonanza in 1940 when sustained fission was achieved and the value of uranium ore was realized.
Now let us turn to Marcel Pochon. He was born in Versailles, France, in 1889. During his stay at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris (1906-1907) he worked with Marie Curie. He then used his chemistry expertise at a mine in Cornwall, UK before moving to Port Hope in 1932 where he led the operations at the Eldorado refinery.
In the early days of nuclear science and technology, radiation measurements were crude and the effects of exposure were poorly understood. Radium, which was used to treat cancer, inadvertently was also the cause of numerous cancers developed by workers in the industry. In 1946 Pochon, who had worked with radium for most of his professional life, volunteered for a series of experiments on his body. These included having several of his bones scraped in an attempt to remove radium deposits that had accumulated. Pochon retired from Eldorado in 1945 when the company became a crown corporation. He maintained a small private research lab until his death in 1958.
During the recent HWP MO cleanup of radioactive contamination at Port Hope, many locations and buildings were decontaminated and demolished. Among the materials saved were three large photo albums retrieved from the Pochon home. These contain many photographs of the Pochon family going back to 1913 and a large collection of clippings from newspapers and letters dealing with both science/business matters and celebrations honouring Marcel Pochon’s many achievements and personal matters such the achievements and marriages of the Pochon children. These albums promise to be an excellent source of information for future researchers. Also included in the donation was a rosary that belonged to an unnamed member of the Pochon family.
