Home Sweet Radioactive Home? Uranium and Retirement at Elliot Lake, Ontario

http://www.elliotlake.com/retire/

Centre for Excellence in Retirement Living

Up until the late '80's, Elliot Lake was known as the "Uranium MiningCapital of the World". As the mining era drew to a close, the City of Elliot Lake recognized the need for revitalization.

All the circumstances presented a unique opportunity for Elliot Lake to remake itself as a retirement haven.

Created in 1987, Elliot Lake Retirement Living began attracting its first retirees to this picturesque community nestled in the beauty of Northern Ontario.

Since then, Elliot Lake Retirement Living has been successful in its goals and has become known as the Most Affordable Retirement Program in the country and Elliot Lake, as a centre of excellence
for retirement living.

This site consists mostly of pictures of some of the retirement
buildings and opportunities in Elliot Lake, now the "Jewel in the
Wilderness".

Sure sounds lovely, huh? Explore this "Jewel" even further ...the link is right under the picture above...and there are lots of gorgeous pictures of this wonderful retirement community! Then read the rest of the story:

LET'S LOOK AT THE REST OF THE PIECES:

http://www.earthwins.com/ewd/ewd031698a.html

--At Elliot Lake, Ontario where Rio Algom operated sulfide uranium mines from the early '60s, "...the lakes and rivers of the Serpent River watershed were being polluted by chemicals and radium 226."


--"Other waters contaminated by the run-off from other tailing sites, added their burden of acids, sulfates, nitrates and radiation, so that waters eventually emptied into Lake Huron, 30 miles downstream were tainted."


--When the mines abruptly closed during the 1980s and '90s, thousands of unemployed miners had to walk away from their homes, leaving the banks holding worthless mortgages as there was no one who wanted to buy.


--After a large inventory of abandoned homes grew, a mining company vice-president came up with the idea of a "Retirement Living Program."


--As another mining company vice president observed, "Senior Citizens have faced numerous hardships during their lifetimes, wars, depression, inflation. So what's a little low-level radioactive waste?"


Source: The Power & The Promise: The Elliot Lake Story
by Catharine Dixon, Gilldix Publishing, Inc. Elliot Lake, Ontario 1996

AND:

http://www.ccnr.org/uranium_deadliest.html#daughters

In testimony to the Elliot Lake Environmental Assessment Board in 1978, mortality figures published by the Ontario government were used to show that even the "acceptable" levels of radon contamination in homes would result in an extra 17 lung cancer deaths per thousand people chronically exposed to such levels. In other words, instead of 54 lung cancers per thousand, one would expect 71, a 31 per cent increase. In light of this evidence, the Board recommended that the radon standard for homes be reassessed. But no such reassessment has taken place.

Since 1980 the B.C. Medical Association has published a slightly higher risk estimate and has condemned the radon standard for homes "as tantamount to allowing an industrially induced epidemic of cancer." A 1982 report published by the Atomic Energy Control Board concurs, estimating a 40 percent increase in lung cancer among those living in homes contaminated to the "acceptable" radon level.