A cluster of homes in Elliot Lake sits atop a deadly secret.
Radioactive tailings from long-closed mines in northern Ontario –– which produced uranium for atomic bombs –– were allegedly used as infill when the subdivision was established decades ago, emitting gamma rays and poisonous gasses into and around people’s homes.
The dangers have long since been forgotten and the mine has been shut down.
Recent testing at four houses in the area, however, reveals there are still elevated levels of gamma radiation and concentrations of radon gas far exceeding safety guidelines, according to thousands of documents shared exclusively with the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) and the Toronto Star.
An expert who reviewed multiple tests collected at the properties between 2016 and 2022 estimates residents are receiving annual doses of radiation between eight and 32 times greater than the maximum prescribed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
There could be up to 60 homes in the community currently on top of mine waste, the documents allege.
“The bottom line is that these radiation doses, both the alpha radiation from radon and the gamma radiation emanations from the source material, are above background and in the range where they certainly could have an impact on health over the long term,” said Aaron Goodarzi, an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and the Canada Research Chair for Radiation Exposure Disease, after reviewing the test results for the IJB and Star.
Federal agencies tasked with overseeing radioactive materials want nothing to do with the cleanup. In a recent response to the Canadian Environmental Law Association and Blaise Law, National Resources Canada (NRCan) said the problem “is the responsibility of the homeowners.”
A group of four women are now fighting to fix what they say is a historic environmental injustice before more unsuspecting owners purchase homes and find themselves living above radioactive tailings and waste.
“My husband had bought the house just a couple of years before we met … At no time was he aware that mine waste had been used on the property,” said Jennifer Carling, a 74-year-old retiree who’s among the group of women who belatedly discovered their homes have dangerous levels of radiation. “It’s a moral imperative that this needs to be corrected.”
After being rebuffed by NRCan, the federal department that regulates and oversees radioactive waste in Canada, the group and their legal representatives have taken their concerns to the media.
“They’re actually hoping that we will all just die off and the problem will go away,” Carling said. “If there are no complainants, there’s no problem. I certainly feel as if it’s being ignored.”
The four women are calling on the government to accept responsibility for all the mining waste in Elliot Lake, conduct a study to determine the full extent of contamination and to foot the bill for the removal of any radioactive materials.
Carol Hughes, the NDP MP for the area around Elliot Lake, will be raising the issue in the House of Commons this week, according to a copy of her planned remarks obtained by the Star and IJB.
“Without knowing, these families have been exposed to radiation above allowable limits, caused by mine wastes buried in their yards and driveways,” the statement reads. “We must permanently fix this decades-long issue. It is never a family’s responsibility to deal with radioactive waste, nor bear the burden of the health risks caused by the uranium mining industry.”
Houses built on radioactive tailings
Elliot Lake’s history has ridden the booms and busts of the mining industry. More than a dozen uranium mines opened in the area in the 1950s amid the race to build atomic bombs. As author Catharine Dixon notes in her book “The Power and the Promise,” housing was built haphazardly for employees.
As workers poured into the area, the companies worked with the province to establish Elliot Lake as a proper town. Rio Algom purchased lots and started moving some of its houses into parts of the city, according to an expert report shared with the IJB and the Star. Radioactive waste from the nearby Milliken Mine was used to level the ground for homes and driveways, the report alleges.
After elevated radiation levels were discovered in the houses in the 1970s, the province and the federal government worked together to establish a safe level of radiation exposure and ensure locals were not exposed to levels exceeding it. Fans and venting were installed in dozens of homes to funnel radon gas outside and at least one driveway was dug up to remove contaminated rock underneath.
But once this initial mitigation work was completed by the early 1980s, the government walked away, leaving ongoing testing and any further safety work up to homeowners.
As the mines closed during the 1990s and early aughts, the city’s economy collapsed. Many miners moved away, leaving thousands of houses empty. To attract new residents, Elliot Lake began marketing itself as an ideal place to retire, touting its inexpensive houses and proximity to nature.
“Not only does Elliot Lake Retirement Living offer the most attractive rents in the province, it also has the most diverse cross section of housing and apartment properties to choose from. Imagine having all of the advantages of (the) city without the big city problems,” reads a 2004 ad in the Toronto Star.
A 2022 promotional video on YouTube boasts Elliot Lake as a “clean, safe” community.
Neither mention the radiation.
Homeowners test for radiation
Kathleen Panton and her late husband, James, were already retired when they moved to Elliot Lake in 1999. They took a tour aimed at showcasing the city to retirees and fell in love. The couple had never heard of radon or imagined that irradiated mining waste could be buried under their home.
“They had everything we were looking for … we like the outdoors,” Panton said. “I love it here.”
But there was a curiosity in the home that wasn’t explained, Panton said: a fan in the basement wall. Because they were never told what the fan was for, they didn’t fix it when it stopped spinning several years ago.
“We had no idea. They just said it was an air exchange –– that’s all they said,” she said.
It took more than 20 years to learn the truth: the fan had been installed by the home’s original owners, Rio Algom, after testing in the 1970s showed elevated levels of radon. The mining company also found elevated levels of gamma radiation on the property in the mid-’80s.
But Panton said she was never told about this radioactivity in the house she purchased.
Years later in 2021, after her daughter tested her own home for radon, Panton had tests performed, which showed average radon levels of 724 becquerels per cubic metre (Bq/m³) –– nearly four times Health Canada’s safety guideline of 200 Bq/m³.
Shortly after receiving the results, Panton paid about $2,400 to install a system that vents the radon gas out of her home. Further testing outside her home revealed levels of gamma radiation reaching six times background levels and nearly twice as high as federal guidelines above some areas around her property.
“I did the best I could. We had everything done to get rid of it … We’ve gone through this and people (are) moving here and not knowing and they’re going to be stuck with the bill the same as I was,” Panton said.
Those levels of gamma radiation outside “indicate the presence of radioactive waste rock at the property,” according to an expert report shared with the IJB and the Star. “Due to the proximity of the waste rock to the home, as the waste rock undergoes decay, it is contributing to indoor radon level.”
Panton’s husband James died in 2016 at 84 years old. He suffered from an aggressive form of septic arthritis –– a bone condition that ultimately required a marrow transplant. While there is no evidence that the radiation on their property caused any of her husband’s health issues, she said she wonders if he would still be alive today if they had been told about the potential radiation sooner.
“We don’t know if my husband would still be here,” she said. “What has it done to our health?”
She’s not taking any risks with her great-grandchildren. She said after learning that there could be radioactive waste on her property she no longer lets them play with the dirt in the yard.
The report also raises concerns about Panton’s vegetable garden –– where she’s grown things like tomatoes, carrots and onions for years –– because the “vegetables may be taking up radiation or heavy metals from the soil and waste rock.”
Panton said someone should have told her there could be radiation throughout her home and property.
“I was never told. I grew my vegetables on this land,” she said. “I would just like to see it cleaned up. Somebody has to be responsible for it.”
Who’s responsible?
There are multiple layers of oversight for radioactive waste and nuclear safety in Canada, which have evolved as the understanding of the risks to public health has grown.
Before 1976, the operation of uranium mines in Ontario was regulated solely by the provincial government. Then a Federal-Provincial Task Force on Radioactivity was set up, which later handed responsibility for public safety to Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd (AECL), a crown corporation that reports to the Minister of Natural Resources. AECL’s subsidiary, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, runs the Historic Waste Program Management Office, which was established in 1982 “to carry out the federal government’s responsibilities to manage low-level radioactive waste,” according to its website.
“The office is committed to protecting public health and the environment, and performs its duties in a timely and cost-effective manner,” it states.
But because the initial remediation in the 1970s was carried out by the Federal-Provincial Task Force “at no cost to the homeowner,” the long-term radiation emanating from the mine tailings is no longer the responsibility of the government, according to a letter from NRCan to the lawyers representing the Elliot Lake homeowners.
“There is no permanent solution for these properties other than maintaining radon abatement systems. The long-term maintenance of these systems is the responsibility of the homeowners,” states the letter, sent in March in response to more than 3,000 pages of documents and expert reports compiled by the lawyers.
That’s not what the Historic Waste Program Management Office (then known as the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Office) said in a letter to the previous owner of Lisa Speck’s house in 1998.
“The crawl space beneath the home has been backfilled with waste rock from the former Spanish American uranium mine site and significant levels of radon … have been measured in this area of the home,” it read. “The preferred remedial option is the complete removal of the source material from the crawl space area.”
After paying to install a fan and venting system, the AECL followed up in 2000 with a letter stating: “(Testing) results indicate that radon gas concentrations continue to be low following the interim remedial work.”
“As of this point in time, we have no further update as to the timing of the planned remedial work to remove the mine waste rock from your property, but we will keep you informed.”
With those letters in hand, Speck said she was confident that the government would pay to excavate the radioactive materials from beneath her house to resolve the problem permanently.
“I had a commitment from the government in writing,” she said. “I guess I had faith that they’d follow through.”
But shortly after purchasing the house in 2019, she discovered that testing carried out two years prior showed the fans were no longer doing their job and radon concentrations had jumped to twice the guideline set by Health Canada.
An expert report commissioned by CELA found that residents of the house were receiving an annual dose of radiation eight times higher than the recommended maximum for members of the public.
“I don’t understand why this isn’t an emergency issue,” said Speck. “If this was found anywhere else besides my house, they’d be dealing with it immediately.”
Kerrie Blaise, one of the lawyers representing the homeowners, said the contaminated houses in Elliot Lake exist in a legal limbo because the waste was deposited there before current policies and regulations were in place.
“A basic principle of nuclear regulation is that waste must be isolated from the public in perpetuity,” Blaise said. “It’s never been contemplated by policy and law that radioactive waste ever becomes a homeowner’s responsibility.”
Federal Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson declined an interview request. Instead, his spokesperson, Keean Nembhard, sent a statement reading: “Most of the homes in Elliot Lake and other uranium mining areas in Canada that required radon abatement did not have mine wastes on the property; the radon source was natural.”
“It appears that the homeowners have not properly maintained these radon mitigation systems, resulting in radon levels exceeding Health Canada’s guideline.”
The minister referred the homeowners to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s recommendations that they get a radon test and fix or replace their radon mitigation systems.
Port Hope cleanup
Six hundred kilometres south of Elliot Lake, the government has taken a different approach to historical radioactive waste in people’s homes.
In 2001, the federal government signed a deal with Port Hope and Clarington to collect, transport and permanently store approximately 2 million cubic metres of low-level radioactive waste produced by radium and uranium refining by Eldorado Nuclear between the 1930s and the 1980s.
Over the years, contaminated soil from the crown corporation-owned refinery was offered to the public free of charge, and it ended up in parks, ravines and residential properties as backfill, according to the Port Hope Area Initiative website.
The $2.6 billion remediation project, which involves digging up and removing soil around affected houses, the construction of permanent storage facilities and monitoring of radiation levels, is slated to be completed by the end of next year.
Despite the clear parallels, NRCan said it is not responsible for the clean up in Elliot Lake, because the radioactive contamination came from a private company, not a crown corporation.
The mining companies that operated in Elliot Lake “still exist and are responsible for their radioactive wastes,” reads a March 2023 letter sent to CELA.
BHP, a multinational mining company based in Australia, purchased Rio Algom in 2000.
In a statement, the company said it’s conducting a “detailed review,” after receiving the dossier of evidence compiled by CELA.
“We are committed to understanding the history of these properties, what has happened and remediate, as appropriate.”
Unlicensed nuclear waste
The Nuclear Safety and Control Act states that a licence must be obtained to store radioactive waste –– defined as any material containing a “radioactive nuclear substance for which no further use is foreseen.”
None of the homeowners in Elliot Lake have any such licence.
“If you had a licence, then you have the safety protocols, you have the health monitoring, you have environmental monitoring,” said Blaise.
In fact, decommissioned mines containing tailings only a few kilometres away from the affected homes are licenced and actively monitored.
But people like Jennifer Carling, Kathleen Panton and Lisa Speck have been left to deal with industrial radioactive legacy on their own.
“They’re not qualified to be a nuclear facility,” said Blaise. “The joke of it all is their homes have become de facto waste facilities.”
With files from Masih Khalatbari
This article was also published in the Toronto Star.
