A New Kind of Monster by Timothy Appleby Read Free Book Online

town’s attractions. Waves lap at the golden beaches, a magnetfor family picnics, just a few minutes’ walk from the downtown. Sunrises over the river are legendary, and a short drive away is the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. Stroll around Deep River and you will be hard put to see a piece of litter. Serious crime barely exists. In 2009, the ten-officer police force recorded 199 occurrences, two-thirds involving theft or other property crime. Residential neighborhoods don’t have sidewalks, because everybody knows to drive slowly and safely.
    â€œPeople who come here for the first time call this God’s Country,” enthuses Karen Bigras, deli manager at Fleury’s Super-Valu, the anchor retail outlet in the small downtown. Bigras moved to Deep River in 1969, when she was four, a year after the Williams family arrived, and she recalls a very happy childhood. “I absolutely loved it. We didn’t have to worry about anything, we were allowed to ride our bicycles and walk on the road, we didn’t have any fears. All the kids went to playgrounds, and there was always things to do outside: camp days, arts and crafts. The word
bored
didn’t exist when we were children. I don’t know anybody who didn’t have a wonderful childhood here. A lot of the people I went to school with have moved back here to raise their children.”
    But it was not the town’s agreeable environment and lifestyle that brought the Williams family to Deep River. Rather, it was Chalk River’s cutting-edge lab facilities, whose jobs lured scientists from around the world, principally from Britain. The Chalk River Laboratories were the sole raison d’être for Deep River, as they are today. Chalk River remains the source of more than one-third of the world’s—and almost all of North America’s—supply of medical diagnostic isotopes, a safe radioactive material used chiefly to diagnose illness.
    The atomic theme is ubiquitous in the town. Numerous schools and streets are named after pioneers of Canada’s nucleardevelopment, a stylized atom logo adorns city stationery, and A-power has long had a place within the local culture. A 1950s rock band called themselves Phil Rowe and the Atomic Five, and there was a men’s basketball team named the Neutrons.
    This was the milieu to which the Williams family transplanted themselves, six years after Canada’s first nuclear power plant, the CANDU prototype, went online near the Chalk River Labs. And for a four-year-old boy uprooted from the English Midlands, moving there must have been a grand adventure.
    Williams was born on March 7, 1963, in the small town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, southwest of Birmingham, where both his parents attended university after marrying in Wales the year before. Russell’s father, Cedric David Williams—Dave was the forename he used all his life—had emerged from his studies as a skilled metallurgist. In an era when most Britons could readily immigrate to Canada if they chose, opportunity beckoned in the shape of a job offer from AECL. So, in early 1968, the Williams family—Dave, Christine, Russell and Harvey—packed their bags and launched their rather strange new life.
    Constructed amid great secrecy and built in part by German prisoners of war, the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories were created in 1944 by the federal government as part of the nuclear Manhattan Project, which created the A-bomb. The basic idea, enthusiastically promoted by Winston Churchill, was that U.S. and British know-how would fuse with Canadian uranium, all in a suitably isolated location. Deep River was the company town built to house the scientists and their families who poured in.
    To this day the myth persists that Chalk River was the source of the plutonium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In fact, the war had ended by the timethe first Chalk River nuclear