Comment: No to any form of Uranium mining, milling, processing, not needed, not wanted!
Raveena Aulakh, Toronto Star, Staff reporter,
June 10, 2011
Christine Ball's plans to sell her house at Harcourt St. in Port Hope were thwarted by the discovery it contains low-level radioactive waste. Even if it sells after being cleaned up, she's been told she's ineligible to receive property value compensation under a federal plan.
PORT HOPE—Buying or selling a house is stressful during the best of times, in the best of places.
Christine Ball knew that.
What she didn’t know was that there was low-level radioactive waste all over her house, which would thwart its sale. She also didn’t know that a federal program to compensate homeowners suffering the stigma of being part of the biggest radioactive waste cleanup in Canadian history would deem her ineligible.
“It’s been a nightmare,” says Ball, sitting on the couch in her three-bedroom Harcourt St. home, a 10-minute walk from the town’s charming downtown, with her beagle mix Lucy perched next to her.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she asks, with a wan smile. “I can’t sell my house and the government says I can’t even apply for the property value protection program.”
The unique program, known as PVP, was introduced in 2001, when Ottawa decided to clean up the town. Homeowners who sell for considerably less than the appraised value can get the difference from the government.
At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen.
But some residents, victims of the town’s peculiar atomic history, say they’re not being given access because they don’t fit the highly specific criteria.
The Port Hope Area Initiative (PHAI), the federal agency in charge of the big cleanup, says the rules were decided a decade ago in a signed agreement between the federal government and the municipality of Port Hope. Politicians, including Mayor Linda Thompson, are toeing the line, saying the process is still unfolding.
The result, on the eve of the cleanup, has been a year’s worth of angry emails and acrimonious meetings between homeowners and PHAI, on top of the rancour that has enveloped the town over differing views on the contamination and its solution.
Port Hope is riddled with low-level radioactive waste, the result of 50 years of radium and uranium refining at the Cameco refinery, formerly the Crown corporation Eldorado Nuclear Ltd., from the 1930s to the 1980s. It’s strewn all over town — around homes, in parks, office buildings, even under the asphalt.
Read more:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1006749--tough-sell
