Port Radium is a mining area on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake

Great Bear Lake

Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely within Canada , the third or fourth largest in North America, and the seventh or eighth largest in the world...

, Northwest Territories

Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories is a federal territory of Canada.Located in northern Canada, the territory borders Canada's two other territories, Yukon to the west and Nunavut to the east, and three provinces: British Columbia to the southwest, and Alberta and Saskatchewan to the south...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. It included the settlement of Cameron Bay and the Eldorado Mine

Eldorado Mine

Eldorado Mine is located at Port Radium, Northwest Territories, Canada.It is also known as Port Radium, a name adopted for use at this specific site after 1942...

 and Echo Bay Mine

Echo Bay Mines Limited

The Echo Bay Mines Limited company was organized in 1964 to develop a silver deposit at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, which became known as the Echo Bay Mine. The company leased the old Port Radium settlement from Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited and used the old camp and mill to...

. The name Port Radium did not come into use until 1936 and at the time it was in reference to the region as a whole. The Eldorado mine site at LaBine Point adopted the name for its settlement in the 1940s and it has generally stuck. The official name of the settlement itself, however, was Echo Bay, but the community no longer exists.

Location

Port Radium is situated at 66°5′N 118°2′W on the shores of Great Bear Lake, the largest freshwater lake within the boundaries of Canada.

Climate

Port Radium is located near the Arctic Circle

Arctic Circle

The Arctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. For Epoch 2011, it is the parallel of latitude that runs north of the Equator....

, which means that in December the sun almost does not rise and in June it does not set for 24 hours. The average temperature is –7.1°C, the prevailing wind direction is southeast.

Between 1950 and 1974, this climatic data was collected at Port Radium:

Month	Temperature (°C Celsius Celsius is a scale and unit of measurement for temperature. It is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius , who developed a similar temperature scale two years before his death... )	Precipitation (mm)	Bright sunshine (hours)
Jan	–27.0	11	0.19
Feb	–27.0	8	1.82
Mar	–19.1	14	7.57
Apr	–10.7	6	16.03
May	+1.2	14	21.76
Jun	+9.0	14	23.16
Jul	+12.0	35	18.54
Aug	+10.6	43	11.97
Sep	+5.3	25	6.20
Oct	–3.2	27	2.85
Nov	–14.8	25	0.39
Dec	–23.0	14	0.00
Average	–7.2		10
Total		236

History

During a field trip along the east arm of Great Bear Lake in August 1900, James McIntosh Bell of the Geological Survey of Canada noted evidences of iron

Iron

Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...

, copper

Copper

Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...

, uranium

Uranium

Uranium is a silvery-white metallic chemical element in the actinide series of the periodic table, with atomic number 92. It is assigned the chemical symbol U. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons...

 and cobalt

Cobalt

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. It is found naturally only in chemically combined form. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal....

 in the vicinity of Echo Bay. Thirty years later, a prospector Gilbert LaBine

Gilbert LaBine

Gilbert LaBine, OC was a Canadian prospector who in 1930 discovered radium and uranium deposits at Port Radium, Northwest Territories. He has become known as the father of Canada's uranium industry. LaBine was president of Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited from its start in the late 1920s to 1947...

 discovered high-grade pitchblende

Uraninite

Uraninite is a radioactive, uranium-rich mineral and ore with a chemical composition that is largely UO2, but also contains UO3 and oxides of lead, thorium, and rare earth elements...

 and silver

Silver

Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...

. His company was Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited

Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited

The Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited company was originally organized in 1927 as Eldorado Gold Mines Limited to develop a gold mine in Manitoba. Its president Gilbert LaBine later found radioactive deposits at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories in 1930, which led to the development of the...

, then known as Eldorado Gold Mines Limited. Radium

Radium

Radium is a chemical element with atomic number 88, represented by the symbol Ra. Radium is an almost pure-white alkaline earth metal, but it readily oxidizes on exposure to air, becoming black in color. All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive, with the most stable isotope being radium-226,...

 ores

Orés

Orés is a municipality in the Cinco Villas, in the province of Zaragoza, in the autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. It belongs to the comarca of Cinco Villas. It is placed 104 km to the northwest of the provincial capital city, Zaragoza. Its coordinates are: 42° 17' N, 1° 00' W, and is...

 were highly valued at the time because the price of radium salts, used in cancer treatment and then monopolized by Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

, was US$70,000 per gram.

Several settlements popped up in the 1930s in this area. Eldorado Mine became the first producing venture and it had its own private camp for its employees. There were also operations at the Elbonanza silver property, at White Eagle on the Camsell River, and at Contact Lake. In 1932 prospectors and businesses settled down in a protective cove off Echo Bay, known as Cameron Bay. By 1933 the Canadian Government had surveyed a townsite. At its peak the Cameron Bay settlement had 100 permanent residents, and the Port Radium area as a whole probably boasted 200+ residents. But by 1934 all the important deposits had been staked and activity died down. The Eldorado Mine at LaBine Point entered production in 1933 and the Contact Lake silver mine followed in 1936. At Cameron Bay, the government established a post office, a government office, and a wireless radio station. There was also a Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...

 post and a Hudson's Bay Company

Hudson's Bay Company

The Hudson's Bay Company , abbreviated HBC, or "The Bay" is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and one of the oldest in the world. A fur trading business for much of its existence, today Hudson's Bay Company owns and operates retail stores throughout Canada...

 post. In 1936, the government facilities were re-christened Port Radium to glorify the nature of the nearby mining operations.

With the closure of the Eldorado Mine in June 1940 and the general lack of activity, the government closed up the offices at Cameron Bay and except for a few native families which now occupied the abandoned buildings, Port Radium was empty. When the Eldorado Mine reopened in 1942 to supply uranium ores for the war effort, the mine settlement adopted the name of 'Port Radium'. Cameron Bay remained abandoned, but later in the 1960s Branson's Lodge would build a fishing lodge on the site.

Therefore, Port Radium, a name brought to use in 1936 to apply basically to the entire region, was now being used to name the Eldorado Mine site, which was the only operation in the area after 1942. Port Radium, as it is now called, was occupied from 1942-1960 when the Eldorado Mine was a uranium producer, then again between 1964 and 1982 when Echo Bay Mines Limited produced silver from the so-named Echo Bay Mine, and the Eldorado Mine. When the mine finally closed in 1982, Echo Bay burned down the remaining buildings with few exceptions. In 2007, the Federal government completed the remediation at Port Radium by removing all remaining infrastructure.

A cairn and plaque at Labine Point are the only onsite remains of Port Radium. The old 1936 RCMP log cabin post was dismantled log by log in 2007 and rebuilt in Norman Wells by Rick Muyres.

An early case in the Aboriginal rights movement involved the Eldorado Mine's alleged discrimination against First Nations

First Nations

First Nations is a term that collectively refers to various Aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis. There are currently over 630 recognised First Nations governments or bands spread across Canada, roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The...

 and Inuit

Inuit

The Inuit are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada , Denmark , Russia and the United States . Inuit means “the people” in the Inuktitut language...

 workers, such as giving them the last priority when establishing safety services. The Native Sisterhood made it a national political issue in Canada, and sparked the more famous native-rights activism in Alaska during the 1940s. The case faded in Port Radium itself after the closing of the Eldorado Mine, however, and did not return to the forefront until the 1980s, when some former mine workers developed health problems that were said to have been due to radium toxicity

Radiation poisoning

Acute radiation syndrome also known as radiation poisoning, radiation sickness or radiation toxicity, is a constellation of health effects which occur within several months of exposure to high amounts of ionizing radiation...

, a result of their failure to receive radioactivity protection coats containing lead. The government finally settled the case by providing treatment for the patients, and working with mine policy to ensure that similar injustices were not happening at the present and would not be allowed to happen in the future.

External links

• 1930 Eldorado Mine NWT Historical Timeline, Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre