The following is rabble’s final instalment from Gordon Laird’s new book, Power.

I venture out again into the deserted part of Uranium City. The sheer size of the decaying suburb is impressive: I estimate twelve city blocks of homes, abandoned and skeletal. Some still show signs of the former tenants: a crucifix on a kitchen wall, a crayon drawing on peeling wallpaper, lawn chairs scattered across a front yard. There’s even a tricycle buried under the snow of a ditch. Overall, the effect is unsettling — plastic vapour barrier and aluminum siding hang from ripped-out walls and rattle in the wind; a suburban cul-de-sac is ringed by five identical bungalows, all maimed in different ways — missing walls, blown-out doors, sagging roofs.

I pass by a decayed condo development, built shortly before the closing. Modern cedar units that no one ever lived in stand in rows, with garage doors that have fallen from their hinges and bathroom tiles and kitchen counters that remain mysteriously spotless.

Just up the road is the Candu High School, a two-storey facility built only four years before Eldorado’s demise. I’d already driven by it several times before I pulled into the driveway. Marilee Shott was there for the last day of Candu. “It’s a little hard going by there,” she says. “There’s only ten or so of us left in town.” She remembers when the decision to close Eldorado was made public. “They came into the gym when they announced it. Kids scattered, lots of hugging and crying.” She seldom goes back, even though it’s just down the road.

Dean Claussen was in the last graduating class of Candu. He’s the only one left around here. We’re sitting in his house, surrounded by his three kids. He runs the same fuel business his dad founded and does decommissioning work for Eldorado on the side. He says there’re a few hot spots at Eldorado, but he’s tested his home for radon and feels his kids are safe. Back in the late 1970s there was a radon gas scare in town: builders had used waste rock in housing materials and foundations, so many homes and buildings – including parts of Candu High School — had to either be retrofitted with vents or partially rebuilt.

“Remediation is for those who still own property and have the money to do it. With the smaller ones, the only one was Lorado, where the owners made a deal to clear out the mill — but the rest was a disaster. Highly acidic rock that leaches. It’s okay as long as you don’t disturb it. You see high levels of radon and acid during high water levels — mixes up in the creek beds.”

The decommissioning business is expensive: one recent project for the Eldorado mine cost $100,000 to cap a mine shaft with cement. Dean shows me a videotape of the Lorado site in the summertime. Lorado’s tailings pile is vivid reddish-orange, while over at the other end of Nero Lake, tailings and sand are seeping into Beaverlodge Lake. “Nothing is in Nero. It’s dead,” he says. “Though they say fishing is still good in Beaverlodge.”

Dean shows me another video clip, this one an archival collection of CBC reports from the 1950s. It’s a document of unbridled optimism. “In an uninhabited wilderness, useless for farming, citizens are staking their claim on their growing town and surrounding mining properties,” intones the narrator. Onscreen, cheerful workers drill core samples and test rocks with handheld Geiger counters. Back then, hot spots were what they were looking for.

I ask about the radon. Dean says it’s no secret among town alumni. “All the old miners died from lack of ventilation — they died a little bit earlier, mainly from lung cancer, the usual thing.” Today’s uranium mines employ complicated systems to minimize radon exposure after high mortality rates were linked to poor air supplies underground. “You keep contact with people — one friend, his dad died of lung cancer a couple of years ago.”

He’s not sure about incidental radon exposure around town. Concentrations can range widely from house to house, area to area. The clouds of radon that fly off Lorado, for example, could dissipate before reaching the town. Or not — it’s impossible to know for sure. “We had a guy from AECL and he said there’s radon everywhere.”

An EPA risk assessment for an individual living next to some of the inactive tailings piles showed a lifetime lung-cancer risk of 40 chances in 1,000 — an elevated hazard, to be sure, though not an epidemic. Radon gas from American tailings is expected to cause anywhere from 170 to 500 additional lung-cancer deaths per century, all within the immediate vicinity of the site.

In one of the buildings along the main street, in an old pinball arcade, one of two local stores operates, signless and with metal grilles over the windows. The woman inside runs the same grocery store that her mom did. She doesn’t really want to talk, though. And I don’t ask her about the cancer in her family, something Bill Holland told me about, because I didn’t travel all this way to run an ad hoc medical investigation. But it wouldn’t be the last mention of sickness; though he says it has nothing to do with the waste, Bill’s dad has been fighting Crohn’s disease down south.

In the absence of information, there’s politics. Back in 1981, Greenpeace came to town, just before the Eldorado closure announcement, to champion its anti-nukes campaign. It was part fact-finding mission, part media stunt. Predictably, most locals were not amused. “You are not welcome in our community for the fact that this is what we are all about — uranium mining,” Mayor Rose Waslenka told activist Patrick Moore when he came calling. The mayor (who moved away from this area years ago) said at the time, “We’re working for the betterment of the people of Canada and the world.” Moore and several other Greenpeacers walked around town and the tailings sites with a gamma Geiger counter and, reported the Northland News, “they were alarmed by their findings which they said indicated people here were exposed to between three and five times more radiation than the average Canadian population.” John Rogers, Eldorado’s manager, questioned Greenpeace’s “covert and unorthodox methods,” plus the possibility that they didn’t know how to read a Geiger counter properly.

“A lot of those anti-nuclear protesters don’t know a damn thing,” says James Auger, a Métis whose family originally came from Camsell Portage, about thirty kilometres west on Lake Athabasca. He worked at Gunnar mine for six years and now lives semi-retired in Uranium City, still venturing north into the barrens of Nunavut to hunt caribou. Like other trappers and hunters across the North, he takes a pretty dim view of southern environmentalists, largely because the anti-fur lobby helped push the trapping business into oblivion. But he admits the radioactive waste at Gunnar and Lorado bothers him.

“There’s a place for Greenpeacers. The thing is, the uranium industry employs a lot of people. Our kids work there. We’ve been around it all of our lives and we haven’t seen it hurt people that bad. Back in the 1950s, nobody protected the environment. If this had all happened in the 1990s, a lot of that stuff at Gunnar wouldn’t be laying around right now.

“Back in my childhood days, there was no industry, so people had to live off the land,” he says. “And it was a damn good living — one didn’t have more than the others and when a moose was killed, everybody got some.”

When he moved to Uranium City after Gunnar closed, the town was booming. With twenty-nine mines working right next door, twenty thousand people flooded the town. “You could throw a rock around at all the mines half-mile around town.” Northerners could pick up a steady job, just as traditional professions like trapping were falling off.

“Trappin’ is a dying thing,” he says. “Who’s going to go out and do all that work for nothing? It’s the young people in the mines — good company benefits, RSP plan, all that kind of stuff.” Eldorado pitched in for good facilities, discounted flights down south and a host of other incentives.

“It was still a hell of a community. That’s why we couldn’t leave,” he says. “A lot of people who left here died unhappy, not satisfied.”

He’s right. It is truly beautiful up here — a primeval landscape that, among other things, fed uranium to U.S. and British weapons programs until 1966 and 1972, respectively. The postwar military application of Canadian ore was decried by many, but it’s simply a fact of the market: there’s no guarantee where radionuclides will end up once we pull them out of the ground.

Part One:Uranium City
Part Two:A Crisis of Accountability
Part Three: “Twilight on Fission Avenue”

Tomorrow: “Tilting at Windmills”