Atomic Reaction: New Doc Explores Canada’s Role in The Manhattan Project
By Liz Braun
Rating: A
Atomic Reaction is a quietly gripping documentary from director Michèle Hozer about Canada’s role in the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. This is a strange and sorry chapter in our history.
As the film makes clear, ongoing radioactive contamination from radium and uranium mining/refining makes it an unfinished chapter — nothing about this story can be safely relegated to the past.
Atomic Reaction begins with a late-19th century Dene prophecy about white men taking a dangerous rock out of the ground and the destruction that would follow. The prophecy was realized as Canada entered the nuclear age, a story told initially through the success of one man, Gilbert LaBine.
Producer Bernie Finkelstein (left), director Michèle Hozer, and producer David Hatch in Port Hope.
LaBine — known as the father of the Canadian uranium industry — saw something in the ground in his travels near Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. What he discovered was silver and pitchblende, the latter containing radium and uranium, and eventually he struck a claim.
The town that grew up around his mining enterprise was known as Port Radium. The Indigenous community that was already established nearby drew closer to the mine for work opportunities and moved their hunting and fishing accordingly.
The Dene people were hired to carry bags of raw uranium to the boats that carried the ore south for processing in Port Hope, Ontario. The dangers of small particle ingestion and radon gas were already well known by the 1930s.
By 1942, Canada had entered a secret project with England and the United States in a race to be first to have the atomic bomb. Atomic Reaction connects the dots between Canada and Los Alamos, New Mexico in the eventual destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and between Labine, Nobel Prize winner — and McGill professor of physics — Ernest Rutherford, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and Robert Oppenheimer et al.
From the mass destruction in Japan, the film moves to Port Hope, that picturesque spot where all the uranium used for the first atom bombs was processed. An hour from Toronto, it’s a town where the locals continue to be affected by the nuclear waste found all over their properties — the legacy of the refinery LaBine established decades before.
Waste removal of radium and arsenic is an ongoing project. Meanwhile, Port Hope residents suffer from various cancers as do the Indigenous residents of Deline (Fort Franklin) in the Northwest Territories.
There were no cancers among the people of Deline until the mine opened in Port Radium. So many of the men who carried uranium ore and worked on the shipping boats died later of cancer that their town was renamed Village of Widows.
Atomic Reaction makes good use of archival footage and interviews with a variety of scientists, authors, witnesses and experts, including Brian Bromley, great-grandson of Gilbert LaBine, and photographer Robert Del Tredici, founder of the Atomic Photographer’s Guild.
Del Tredici guides the viewer through a few segments of the film via his travels to pertinent affected sites and his photographs of same.
Certain interviews and first-person accounts allow the documentary to present a monumental story on a human scale, keeping Atomic Reaction emotionally as well as intellectually engaging. The film is an educational, albeit disturbing, watch, but knowledge is power. One hopes.
Atomic Reaction. Directed by Michèle Hozer, produced by Bernie Finkelstein and David Hatch. With Robert Del Tredici, Brian Bromley, Faye More, Molly Mulloy, Cindy Kenny-Gilday, and Lawrence Nayally. Available now on the CBC Documentary Channel and on CBC Gem. Click here to view the trailer.