Great Bear Lake, NWT, Canada Port Radium (sometimes called "Fort Radium"), established in 1933 and abandoned in the 1960s , on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, was the site of the Eldorado Uranium mine.
Location
Port Radium was situated at 66° 5' northern latitude and at 118° 2' western longitude on the shores of Great Bear Lake, the largest freshwater lake within the boundaries of Canada. In its boom time the community had a population of about 800 inhabitants, most of them working in the Eldorado mine and many of them young men of the Dene group living in the Deline-area on the western shores of Great Bear Lake.
Climate The place at Cameron Bay (now renamed "Echo Bay") off McTavish Arm is located near the Arctic Circle, which means that in December the sun does almost not rise and in June it doesn’t set for 24 hours. The average temperature is –7.1°C, the prevailing wind direction is southeast.
Discovery During a field trip, Charles Camsell of the Geological Survey of Canada noted "evidences of iron, copper, uranium and cobalt” in Echo Bay on 24 August 1900. 30 years later, on 16 May 1930, Gilbert LaBine discovered high-grade pitchblende and silver at the site of the later Port Radium. On July 28, 1931, the first cargo of eight tons of radium-bearing ore was loaded onto a small craft at the so-called LaBine Point.
Mining The Eldorado mine located at Port Radium was the world's first uranium mine. It started off as a radium mine in 1932, extracting radium from pitchblende. Radium was then used for the medical treatment of cancer and sold for $10,000 a gram.
About 7,000 short tons (6,400 tonnes) of radioactive material were shipped from the Port Radium mine for refinement, via Deline at the head of the Great Bear River. Another 1.7 million tons (1,500,000 tonnes) of uranium waste which was only a reduntant byproduct of the extraction process were discarded into the waters of Great Bear Lake, or they were left exposed at the mine site, according to government documents uncovered by members of the Dene band.
In 1940 the mine production of radium was halted, but reopened in 1941 for war efforts. In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, ore from Port Radium had been used in first chain reaction experiments, and as soon as the scientists had found out that these ores contained a rich store of uranium oxide and were useful as a source of nuclear energy, the Port Radium mine was secretly expropriated and transferred to the Canadian government. The discarded uranium was even scooped from the bay, pulverized and shipped south.
In 1960 the mines were exhausted and closed. In 1988, the Canadian Government sold the Eldorado mine to Cameco Mines Ltd. In 1999 the Federal government signed a commitment with the Deline Dene Band to have the estimated 1.7 million tonnes of radioactive mine tailings in Port Radium cleaned up.
Photos
External links |
Feeds |
Contact