The result of testing conducted on a small group of residents of Port Hope has found contamination by uranium of military or industrial origin.

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

November 13, 2007 at 4:52 AM EST

The result of testing conducted on a small group of residents of Port Hope has found contamination by uranium of military or industrial origin.

Four of nine people tested had unusual types of uranium in their bodies, including one who carried measurable quantities of depleted uranium, which is used to make armour-piercing weapons, and another who had uranium at levels about three times higher than average concentrations of the element.

Port Hope, a community of 16,000 located about 100 kilometres east of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario, is the site of the world's oldest uranium-processing facility, which produced uranium used in the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear bombs. It is also the scene of one of the largest radioactive soil cleanups in Canada, with an estimated 3.5 million cubic metres of contaminated dirt buried around the town from dumping between the 1930s and 1950s.

The testing was done by a local group, the Port Hope Community Health Concerns Committee, which plans to formally announce the findings today.

The analysis for uranium was done on urine samples at a leading radioisotope laboratory in Germany.

The discovery of unusual levels of radioactive compounds in people is likely to increase the unease among some residents about the large nuclear facilities located in their community.

Cameco Corp., the world's largest uranium producer, operates a processing plant in Port Hope that makes fuel for nuclear power reactors.

Earlier this year, the company abruptly shut its uranium hexafluoride processing facility after discovering uranium and related chemicals in the soil underneath the plant.

Although the results of the human testing have not been published in a scientific journal, a study based on them has been peer-reviewed and was presented at a scientific symposium last month in Europe.

"Our results suggest long-term contamination and possible adverse effects on the body burden of the current population of Port Hope," according to the abstract of the study presented at the conference by the European Association for Nuclear Medicine. The abstract referred to the results as "preliminary" and recommended that additional research on uranium exposures be conducted.

Of those tested, three had a type of uranium normally found in spent reactor fuel. Five of those tested didn't have measurable amounts of uranium from military or industrial sources.

"The study calls into question the federal guidelines and standards used by Natural Resources Canada, Health Canada, the [Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission] and Cameco to monitor radiation exposure and protect workers and the community," the health concerns committee contended in a statement issued yesterday.

Uranium is a concern because radiation from it can cause cancer, and some residents have complained that there has been an elevated incidence of brain cancers, among other ailments, in the community.

But Health Canada has previously issued studies that have found cancer incidence and mortality around Port Hope to be similar to the general provincial population.

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