2
Chalk River NRU Crisis
2009 Edition
Part 1

  A Nuke ... of the North
A Canadian tale from the Arctic Circle.


A story for 1950s children from ...


Don't look at the flash!
a 1947 elementary school reader

Treasure at Great Bear Lake

One short autumn day in 1929 an aeroplane winged its way above the Arctic prairie near Great Bear Lake. On board was an Ontario prospector, Gilbert LaBine, looking for new lands to prospect. What he saw below was a scrambled mass of rock, overturned and twisted when the earth's crust was cooling, long ages ago. To almost anyone else it would have seemed a wasteland. Yet if was exactly the kind of country LaBine was looking for. In just such places are valuable ores usually found.

Gilbert LaBine had looked for gold and silver ever since, as a boy, he had left his home in Westmeath, Ontario. He had searched the rocks at Cobalt for silver. He had been at Porcupine and Kirkland Lake when their famous mines were staked. But he had never made a strike that was rich. His latest find had been what looked like a promising gold mine in central Manitoba. He had formed a company called Eldorado Gold Mines, Limited. The mine had turned out to be no Eldorado. Now here he was on the rim of the Arctic, looking for another mine.


Uranium territory - northwest Canada.
Northwestern Canada in the late 1950s.
Fort McMurray, Alberta is at the lower right corner.
The Mackenzie River ends in the Beaufort Sea at the top left corner.

Yellow arrow: Port Radium on Great Bear Lake.
Purple arrow: Where the Great Bear River meets the Mackenzie River.
Red arrow: The railhead at Waterways.
Route: Yellow to purple to red ... about 1500 miles via water and land.
(The blue bars represent 1950s air services)

Story continues ...

To get to Great Bear Lake, Gilbert LaBine had to fly from Edmonton - more than a thousand miles. In those days the Mackenzie Valley had no airports. There were no weather-reporting stations to warn airmen of coming storms. But Edmonton had airmen experienced in flying over the great new northland. It was one of these who flew Gilbert LaBine to Great Bear Lake.

It was too late in the season for LaBine to get more than a bird's eye view of the country. He decided to return the following spring. He did return, taking with him another prospector, Charles St. Paul. When they reached Great Bear Lake in May, snow still lay on the ground. St. Paul was not careful about wearing his snow glasses, and became snowblind. He had to stay in his tent till his eyes got better.

This is how it was that Gilbert LaBine prospected alone on May sixteenth, the day he made his great discovery. He had gone to Great Bear Lake to find gold, but what he found was pitchblende. Many prospectors would not have recognized it, but LaBine knew his rocks. He knew that the black, shiny ore contained uranium and radium. He knew that, while pitchblende occurs in a great many places, at only two other spots in the world is it both rich and plentiful.

When the earth's crust was forming, millions of years ago, many cracks occurred. Later on, molten substances from far beneath welled up into these cracks and hardened there. Sometimes these molten substances contained gold or other metals. More often they contained nothing of value. The veins that Gilbert LaBine found on the shore of Great Bear Lake contained silver as well a pitchblende. The veins were very narrow and went almost straight down. Narrow veins make it necessary for the minters to take out large quantities of rock with the pitchblende. Would these narrow veins be rich enough to pay the high costs of mining?

Before LaBine could know the answer to this question, he would have to send a sample to Ottawa for testing. But before a large enough sample could be secured, camp buildings would have to be erected. Tools, equipment, and supplies would have to be brought down the long water route from the end of steel. All this would take time.

It took two years of work and a great deal of money to secure enough pitchblende ore for shipment. There were twenty tons of it, packed in bags. The bags were loaded on flat boats and taken across Great Bear Lake and down Great Bear River to the Mackenzie. There they were loaded on steamers of the Hudson's Bay Company for the long journey up river. From Waterways, Alberta, the ore went by rail to Ottawa. Fortunately, the tests applied proved that the vein was rich.


Mackenzie Valley near Norman Wells.
The Mackenzie Valley near Norman Wells.


Northern Alberta Railway line near Waterways.
"Mixed train descending hill between Lynton and Waterways. Photo: Courtesy of R.D.C. Comrie"
from 'Ribbons of Steel - The Story of the Northern Alberta Railways' by Ena Schneider.

As you can see this is a rough Canadian wilderness railway with a steam locomotive for power.
Down the track is the railhead at Waterways six miles from Fort McMurray.
Story continues ...

A less determined person than LaBine might easily have been dismayed by the task ahead of him. But difficulty only spurred him on. Before the task was done, he built a modern town and mining plant on the edge of the Arctic, at Port Radium. His company - still known as Eldorado - operated its own fleet of boats on the Mackenzie network of rivers and lakes. It had its own aeroplane service. It had a refining plant 4000 miles away at Port Hope, Ontario.

The first ore was hand-picked, but that process could not be followed after large-scale mining was undertaken. It was necessary to erect a plant that would grind the ore, removing everything that was not pitchblende. Fortunately, fuel for power was near at hand. Some years before, a large oil company had drilled oil wells a short distance below the mouth of Great Bear River. This oil now made it possible for Eldorado to operate its plant with diesel engines. The mill ground the ore to a fine black powder. The greatest part of this black powder was uranium and radium. Yet a long and difficult process was still needed before radium was freed. It took five hundred tons of ore to provide ten tons of the black powder. From six to thirteen tons of the powder were required to provide a single gram of radium.

To get the radium from the powder took about thirty days. From the ten tons of black powder, only a pinch of white powder, known as uranium salts, was secured. The radium salts were placed in a  glass tube about the size of a match. This must be kept in a heavy lead container because radium rays are deadly if not covered by thick layers of lead.

It took the company four years to produce its first full ounce of radium salts. An ounce contains 32 grams, and the price for each gram was about $50,000 before Eldorado began producing. Producers in Europe, who got their radium from Central Africa, started a price war and the price of radium dropped to 25,000 and even lower.

Radium has many uses in industry. It is used to make luminous faces for watches and clocks. It is used to make luminous street and house signs. Its rays will pierce metals, and it is often used to find faults in steel or iron castings. But its most valuable use is for the cure of cancer. Many lives are saved each year through the early treatment of the disease. For cancer of the lip, eyelid, and other parts of the body where radium can be applied directly, the average of cures is high. Radium is of use too, in the treatment of more deep-seated cancers, but cure is not so often possible.

Unfortunately, radium kills as well as cures. Madame Curie, who first discovered it in 1898, died as a result of radium burns. But it is uranium, which comes from the same pitchblende, that has the greater power of destruction. This was proved during World War II, when the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. These bombs were made from uranium which had been mined by the Eldorado Company at Great Bear Lake. Most people hope that is may never again be used for such a purpose.

Scientists all over the world are now working to harness this power for the purposes of peace. If they succeed, they may bring about a new day in industry. Many scientists are confident that this can be done, but it may take many years.

When that time comes, Canada should be one of the most favoured countries in the world. Our uranium deposits are the largest to be found anywhere. So important has this matter become that the Canadian Government, in 1944, took over the ownership of Eldorado Mining and Refining, Limited. It now belongs to the people of Canada.

The things men do often have results which they little suspect in advance. No stranger example of this can be fond than in the story of Gilbert LaBine. He set off to find a gold mine;  instead he fond pitchblende, the products of which have helped so much to save human life through the healing power of radium. But, in providing material for the atomic bomb, he also helped toward the wholesale destruction of human life. Yet, before the story is done, his discovery may possibly be the means of saving human labour and of help in ways that cannot now be foreseen to make life happier for all people.


More detail on the story ...
Martin Heinrich Klaproth, a German scientist, had discovered uranium in pitchblende in 1789. An American naturalist, noted some on the shore of Lake Superior, north of Sault Ste Marie in 1847. Around 1900 pitchblende was being mined in Czechoslovakia for its radium content as the Curies investigated its medical uses. About a ton of uranium was left as useless waste from the 160 tons of pitchblende processed to produce a single ounce of radium. An ounce of radium was worth about $5 million at that point.

LaBine had grown up in northern Ontario mining towns. He spotted the pitchblende from the air in 1929 only because of a 1913 lecture he chanced to attend ... given by a professor who had been central to the establishment of Cobalt, Ontario. Few other prospectors had this knowledge at the time.
Can you spot the pitchblende?
Spotting uranium ore from a distance.
Uranium ore (dark area) mining in northern Saskatchewan.
Above, the red line is a typical overburden of sandstone (i.e. sedimentary rock).

from 'Canada Rocks - The Geologic Journey'
by Nick Eyles and Andrew Miall


LaBine's Eldorado mine at Port Radium began producing concentrates in 1933. The concentrate was transported in sacks for 1500 miles by barge with several portages to the railhead at Waterways. After that, it was another 3000 miles by rail to reach the 'radium production plant'.

The concentrate refinery at Port Hope, Ontario required seven tons of chemicals to process each ton of radium ore and this accounts for the location of the plant beside two railway lines and water transportation on Lake Ontario. It still exists today.

Ironically, the economic stresses of World War 2 caused the Port Radium mine to shut down. Unexpectedly, in 1941, the British bought 2 tons of uranium oxide (waste) from the Port Hope plant. A few months later, the US government bought 60 tons of uranium oxide.

C.D. Howe, Minister of Munitions and Supply, got LaBine to reopen the mine. To support the Canadian, American, and British teams working with uranium, the concentrate was now FLOWN south by air.

The only other plant in the world which could produce uranium oxide was in Belgium under new German administration ... so the Port Hope operation became critical for the crude refining of uranium for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District ... The Manhattan Project.

In January 1944, C.D. Howe expropriated the shares of the Eldorado operation (mine and refinery) for $5 million as 'a necessary means for the effective prosecution of the war' ... and people were cautioned not to ask questions about it.

The newly nationalized Eldorado - with LaBine in charge of prospecting - was soon combing the Great Bear Lake region and northern Saskatchewan with Geiger counters ... and finding more uranium.


Contrary to the children's reader story above ...
most of the uranium ore
for the Alamogordo 'Trinity' test ... and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs,
was mined in the Belgian Congo ... but some of the wartime uranium was Canadian.


The frantic demands of the Cold War in the 1950s ensured that a significant amount of Canadian uranium
'made the big time' in the nuclear warheads of other countries.

Well ... mainly the U.S.A.


So don't be sad.


* * *


Atomic sized shockwave from airburst.
from 'The Effects of Atomic Weapons' 1950

Force waves reflect and come together with a 'regular' airburst explosion.

However, unlike simple high explosive shock waves ...
there are multiple types ...
of destructive waves of energy ...
from a nuclear blast.




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