“The Montreal Laboratory had two goals: build reactors to supply electricity and produce plutonium to eventually make a bomb,” says Gilles Sabourin, author of Montreal and the Bomb, published in English in 2021. Several hundred researchers and technicians conducted nuclear research there. During the Second World War, the university housed a secret laboratory set up through an alliance between Canada, Britain, and the United States. T his story begins at the Université de Montréal. “I hope we live long enough to get the reward,” says Kiely, who is eighty-nine. I am as puzzled as he is.Īfter a long pause, he mentions his friend and former coworker Al Donohue, who is ninety-two. Before my call, he hadn’t heard that their efforts had paid off. He and other retired employees of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a Crown corporation, had fought for thirteen years for some form of recognition for the risks they faced during the accidents. One measure had caught my eye: $22.3 million set aside for several hundred workers who cleaned up Chalk River Laboratories after two nuclear accidents in the 1950s. On a July morning in 2021, I phone to get his reaction to the federal budget tabled three months earlier. A look back at these events now that the federal government is compensating workers who took part in cleanup efforts. The world’s first serious nuclear accident occurred in Ontario in 1952, followed by a second incident there in 1958. It has been reprinted here with permission. This story was originally published as “Les accidents nucléaires oubliés de Chalk River” by our friends at Québec Science on October 7, 2021.
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