globeandmail.com: Town’s residents test positive for uranium contamination

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.