Port Hope Uranium Plant Contamination Circumstances Contain Similarities to Huntington's Buried Uranium Plant

Dr. Dale Dewar, Executive Director (Canada), Physicians for Global Survival , has written about this  Ontario town on the shores of Lake Ontario.

In the Common Dreams.org article she reported “hundreds of thousands of tons of waste containing many radioactive carcinogenic elements --- uranium, radium, radon and polonium --- accrued at the site and “were randomly dispensed throughout the town in ravines and playing fields and used as landfill and building materials in foundations for schools and public buildings.”

Port Hope closed a “highly polluted” St. Mary’s School in 1975. It was polluted with radon gas. After the closure , she reported that 200,000 tons of “severely contaminated soil” was “excavated” from 400 properties and “exported” into the Chalk River.

“Contrary to statements provided by federal government agencies, no level of radiation is safe and it is cumulative -- each dose adds to the risk of cancer. Children are 10 to 20 times more radiosensitive than adults, and fetuses are extremely sensitive,” the doctor wrote. “Uranium waste is radioactive for billions of years, decaying sequentially to radioactive elements ( "daughters"), all of which can induce cancer or genetic diseases when entering the human body as hot spots or "internal emitters."

She revealed that “relevant research” has not been done to date on the relationship between radiation and genes, which was “little understood” at the beginning of the Cold War when atomic and nuclear facilities were first in operation. Still, Dr. Dewar stated that “a number of partial studies” have suggested increased cancer incidence such as brain cancers in women and children, lung cancer in women, arterio-vascular disease in women, and non-Hodgkins lymphoma , nasopharyngeal cancer.

Although she speaks of Port Hope, the plant uses appear similar to those of the Huntington Pilot Plant and the Reduction Pilot Plant. These locations processed nickel carbonyl onto uranium materials for use in the gaseous diffusion plants. In addition, the plants performed recycling of certain contaminated materials from nuclear plants removing expensive elements for re-use, a process which Physicians for Global Survival termed “pollution by dilution.”

Finally, although the Huntington Pilot Plant was disassembled and buried at Piketon, Ohio, in 1978-1979, HNN has obtained one or more documents that state that workers had access to the plant after its cold shut down in the early 1960s.