A previous Nuclear Heritage article discussed Marcel Pochon, the Canadian radium industry in the early part of the twentieth century, and the eventual need for a cleanup of the radioactive tailings from the Eldorado uranium ore refinery at Port Hope. It would appear that the tailings were not the sole radiological problem at that facility. Les Cook, the Director of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division of CRNL from 1945 to 1956 related the following anecdote in his unpublished book, “Birthpangs of CANDU”:
“It was years before serious efforts were made to correct the (Port Hope) situation. Evidence of this turned up some years later when a “visitor” from Port Hope arrived in the chemistry lab at Chalk River: he was an NRC employee who had been sent to Port Hope to try to do something to improve the procedure for safely filling small tubes with radium (for medical purposes).
The first signal that anything was amiss was a loud ringing of buzzers at the building entrance such as we had never heard before. Within seconds a small platoon of health radiation staff and chemists, including the visitor, had gathered to see what was wrong. After some minutes, more instruments were brought, and someone had the brilliant idea that the visitor might be the cause of the alarms. He was marched out of the door to the road. All buzzing stopped. Only then did they ask where he was from, and the mental bells began to jangle.
In a bemused fashion, he began to fill his pipe. Bang! His tobacco pouch was walking with radium.
He was straightway taken to the medical building and thoroughly tested all over. His suit was removed; it too was full of radium dust. He was given a set of standard white working ducks and sent on his way. His “visit” to Chalk River to see what he could learn that would be helpful had ended more vigorously than he could ever had anticipated.
The story has a sequel. Who would recompensate him for his suit? A year later I received an anguished letter from him. Could I help? His employer, NRC in Ottawa – specifically Dr. Boyle, head of physics, refused to recompensate him because, he claimed, the suit had clearly been damaged at Port Hope. Eldorado should pay. Eldorado stated flatly that the health precautions were adequate and strict. The visitor had been sent by NRC at NRC’s request, not Eldorado’s. Eldorado had no control over him or what he did, hence no responsibility for his suit. Naturally, Chalk River had no responsibility; they had merely found the contamination and were seeking to protect him. They couldn’t be expected to pay for his suit.
In fact, there was no mechanism by which the Federal government could pay damages for the suit except by a special resolution of the Federal cabinet itself. And clearly no one in the bureaucracy, at Eldorado, NRC or Chalk River, wanted to expose this can of worms at that level. Beyond complaining vigorously, and uselessly, there was nothing I could do. He was never paid.
A dozen year later, having long forgotten his name, I was telling the story to a colleague, a fellow ex-Canadian and a senior scientist manager at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady. Suddenly, he said quietly, ‘I know. He was my brother. He died of cancer a few years later. We never had any reason to suppose it was related.’”
The Society is always interested in hearing more stories of people’s experiences in Canada’s nuclear history. If you have a story to tell, send it to info@nuclearheritage.com.
