Port Hope is sitting on a carcinogenic time bomb that residents can only escape by moving out of town, a renowned doctor and anti-nuclear activist warns.

Historic low-level radioactive waste buried in parks, ravines, streets, industrial sites, the harbour and hundreds of backyards poses a “life or death” threat and can’t be safely remediated, according to Dr. Helen Caldicott.

“It’s a disaster. You can’t clean it up. Transferring it just exposes more people to radioactive material,” Caldicott said Tuesday from Seattle. On a visit to Port Hope next week, she plans to tell the community an hour east of Toronto that the only safe solution is to relocate the entire town of 16,000.

Caldicott’s warning comes in contrast to assurances by Canada’s nuclear safety commission that cancer rates in Port Hope, which has been living with low-level radioactive contamination for decades, are comparable to other communities — and that the cleanup now underway doesn’t pose a health risk.

That operation — the largest radioactive waste cleanup in Canadian history — is off to a slow and cautious start with the trial excavation of a private backyard. Removal of contaminated soil from numerous sites around town will begin in earnest next fall. The waste will be trucked to an enclosed storage mound just south of Highway 401, where it will be sealed up for centuries.

Digging out more than 1.2 million cubic metres of soil, enough to fill 500 Olympic-size pools, will take a decade and cost at least $260 million. The final scope and price tag are unknown.

The cleanup by Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. marks a major milestone in a decades-long fight to eradicate a dark stain on the town.

The low-level radioactive waste was the result of 50 years of radium and uranium refining at the waterfront Cameco refinery, the former Crown corporation Eldorado Nuclear Ltd., between the 1930s and 1980s.

Contaminated soil used as fill was identified as a health hazard in the late ’70s, but it took decades to find a long-term solution.

Glenn Case, manager of project engineering for the Port Hope Area Initiative, a division of AECL, isn’t worried about health risks.

“I’m 100 per cent confident we can do it protecting the environment, workers and the public,” he said.

But two skeptical residents’ groups who met with Caldicott during a visit to Ontario last year invited her to speak at a public meeting next Tuesday evening. Her appearance is being paid for by Families Against Radiation Exposure (FARE).

The Australian-born physician has spent almost 40 years educating people around the world about the medical hazards of the nuclear age. She was nominated for a Nobel Prize and was the subject of the 1982 documentary, If You Love This Planet.

Calling Port Hope a “tragedy,” Caldicott says people should never be exposed to radioactive material. Even so-called low-level radiation causes high-level doses when it gets inside the body and turns cells cancerous in a “silent process” that takes five to 60 years, she says.

Drinking water that’s taken from Lake Ontario is also at risk, adds Caldicott. She agrees with residents who have long complained about the lack of a real health study in the area.

“There hasn’t been a decent epidemiological study,” Caldicott says. “The whole thing is medically corrupt from beginning to end.”

Her diagnosis next week will probably be met with “shock, anger and disbelief,” she predicts, urging residents to educate themselves then demand to be moved and get the government to pay for it.

But Carene Smith, whose home near the lake is the project’s guinea pig, has nothing but praise for the “wonderful federal government’s” handling of the problem.

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While the metre-deep pit that used to be her backyard yielded worse contamination than expected, she’s not concerned about health risks.

“I refuse to be alarmist about it,” says Smith, a lawyer who doesn’t spend much time at home.

Tuesday’s meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Parish Hall, 51 King St. in Port Hope.