# Nuclear Avenue: \"Cyclonic Development\", Abandonment, and Relations in Uranium City, Canada
## 3 Uranium City's Abandonment and Residual Maintenance
The people who directed Eldorado had recently purchased a new Boeing 737 airliner, built new housing and other facilities, and improved the mine, spending over $100 million CAD in the year before the closure announcement (ibid., p. 315). Given such expenditures as well as the Crown Corporation's other indicators that business would continue into the future, the community of approximately 4000 then living in Uranium City could not have seen what was coming. Eldorado's commitment to infrastructure in the form of such substantial capital outlays belied its own announcement and was therefore met with disbelief. The then brand new Candu High School itself was a testament to the announcement's incredibility. Yet the 1982-83 academic year would be the last for this state-of-the-art education facility. Candu High School, named after Canada's unique heavy-water nuclear reactor sold to countries such as India ([PERSON], 2016, p. 28; Candu Owners Group, Inc., 2016), would soon serve as one of the central figures in Uranium City's subsequent history (Figure 7).  
Abandonment is relational. As a term with Old French etymologies in legal, moral, religious, and mercantile contexts, abandonment in its historic forms and usages, refers to the constraints, bonds, and boundaries of relationships (_OED_). In medieval Anglo-Norman, it is related to renunciation and therefore the acknowledged trust within and by a community that some individuals may choose to forego what others agree not to forego, e.g., commonly enjoyed pleasures, possessions, inhibitions, and/or relations, and implies freedom and agency, all of which contradicts the cyclonic development metaphor. Abandonment is the negative of _bandonment_ or _boundonment_, a state of being bound or in  
Figure 8: [PERSON] (Photo [PERSON]).  
Figure 9: Drone Still of Two Homes, Uranium City (Photo [PERSON]).  
a bond or set of bonds to humans and nonhumans. Its origins in the Old French _bandon_ also point to its public meaning communicated through \"proclamation, ban, jurisdiction, authority, disposal, discretion, license\", terms that, like abandonment, are ultimately derived from Latin (_OED_). abandonment can be active or passive: one can abandon or one can be abandoned. Abandonment, specifically in environmental terms, is agentic and, as such, reaches into everyday decisions regarding relationship. It happens across scales of space and time, from the individual act of discarding a plastic bag to a community's decision to allow methane to leak from its landfill and a corporation's refusal to account for its carbon emissions.  
Abandonment is temporal--acknowledged or not, it assumes a position relative to history and memory that things, places, and people can be left behind. Sometimes abandonment is quite necessary. However, it must be acknowledged that abandonment is primarily a dereliction of relationship. In Uranium City, then, individuals such as [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] are contracted to attend to what has been left behind, recognizing that decisions rendered by others many years ago still impact the water, soil, air, and life forms in this space. In their commitment to a place, and acting on behalf of organizations such as SRC, they see Uranium City as having not been abandoned, although there is so much (perhaps at times too much) work to do.  
Abandonment also entails going outside decision-making limits determined by consensus in a community or group and may constitute a breach of trust, one which can occur at any point in the conventional Western linear narrative ([PERSON], 2009, pp. 1-3). As we continue to interview people with ties to Uranium City, we often witness grief. Some of our contacts were born on Hospital Hill during the 1950s and 1960s because their parents had moved to Uranium City from places as far away as Ireland and Germany in order to work ([PERSON], 2017; [PERSON] and [PERSON], 2017), only to be forced to leave the place where they had grown up when others decided that mining was no longer viable. First Nations persons, such as [PERSON], have a different story of loss. [PERSON] ran free in the woods as a very young Dene child before his family--in place on this land since time immemorial--was forcibly relocated and he was made to attend a residential school ([PERSON], 2017, Personal Communication). Abandonment, in the case of [PERSON], occurred during the \"boom\" phase of Uranium City's development. Although [PERSON] has not been back to Uranium City in over fifty years, his connection to this place is powerful. He asked us, before our departure, to locate the house in the forest where he had lived with his family. Prior to his family being relocated to this site, his grandparents had lived on the town site itself well before Uranium City was conceived, planned, and established just after World War Two ([PERSON], 2017). They occupied the land where  
Figure 10: Datsun Truck (Photo [PERSON]).  
the Uranium City Hotel would later be built (Figure 11) and were subsequently forced onto a nearby hillside along with other First Nations before being relocated again to Fort Chipewyan on the Alberta side of Lake Athabasca, where they found themselves living in a tent on the beach. As [PERSON] testifies, they became refugees, displaced from their own traditional home: \"The Mikisew Cree saw us and took pity on us and brought us into their community\". To help us find his familial home, [PERSON] drew us a map, which turned out to be very precise as we foraged through mixed forest and rock. We photographed the site, left tobacco following First Nations protocols, and retrieved a piece of white birch bark, a pink rock, and a doorknob lying in the mossed-over remains of the door to the [PERSON] home to give to [PERSON] on our return.  
[PERSON]'s story regarding the dislocations and betrayals he and his family experienced arising from the establishment of Uranium City in the early 1950s points to the reality of abandonment in its own temporal frames. There is not a single abandonment but many abandonments that occur when economy and cultures, each comprised of human agents, interact. Non-Indigenous peoples, often in family units, came from around the world to work in Uranium City ([PERSON] 1993, pp. 58-64, 65; [PERSON] 2016, pp. 51-76). Eldorado Corporation, on behalf of the Government of Canada, moved families from Ireland and Germany, especially during the initial years of the Beaverlodge operation ([PERSON] 2017; [PERSON] and [PERSON] 2017). The children of these and other immigrants grew up in Uranium City; their parents bought homes and took out mortgages, built cottages, and grew to love and become immersed in the region's unique landscape (Figure 12), with its red and pink rock dominating the hills of the northern shore of Lake Athabasca. From the air, one can see extensive deserts of white sand along the southern shore, where ancient Indigenous hunting implements have been discovered ([PERSON] 2017, Personal Communication). According to [PERSON], \"More than fifty companies were reported to be working in the Beaverlodge area in 1954, and Uranium City was the hub\" (ibid., p. 28). Nearly thirty years later, when Eldorado, the largest and most powerful company, decided to call it quits, thousands of people were forced to leave despite desperate efforts by community leaders to create new plans for Uranium City's economic survival ([PERSON] 1993, pp. 314-23). Many walked away from properties they owned and cherished and on which they held mortgages ([PERSON] 2017). \"People were really hurt, especially homeowners\" ([PERSON] 2017). No compensation was offered ([PERSON] 2017; [PERSON] 2017; [PERSON] and [PERSON] 2017). A large condominium and apartment block complex was completed in the early 1980s and never occupied, standing to this day as a testament to the complexities of abandonment that cyclonic development as a metaphor cannot adequately represent  
Figure 11: [PERSON] Family Traditional Land (Photo [PERSON]).  
(Figure 13). The construction company contracted to this project fulfilled its obligations in order to be paid, knowing, along with everyone else, that it would never be lived in ([PERSON], 2017). Today former and current residents of Uranium City still feel misled by the infrastructure and investment that preceded and even extended beyond the closure announcement by Eldorado Mines on 3 December 1981 ([PERSON], 2017).  
Although the region around Uranium City constitutes an area of acute environmental concern and is undergoing expensive and necessary remediation that involves government, corporate, and community actors, Uranium City itself receives no cleanup funding ([PERSON], 2017). The Beaveridge mill and mine sites established and operated by Eldorado for thirty years were bulldozed and buried in the years immediately following the closure that became effective as of June 1982 ([PERSON], 2016, p. 217). The mine shafts, supposedly a mile deep, were sealed during this process (Figure 14). The Lorado mill and mine sites, on the other side of Uranium City,  
Figure 12: Uranium City Landscape at Dawn (Photo [PERSON]).  
Figure 13: Townhouse/Apartment Complex (Photo [PERSON]).  
were only recently remediated by the Saskatchewan Research Council on behalf of the Government of Saskatchewan ([PERSON], 2016, p. 217). Farther away, Gunnar Mine and Mill, the older open pit mine and mill, is beginning its cleanup, with an estimated cost of more than $100,000,000 CAD to be borne by the governments of Saskatchewan and Canada ([PERSON], 2017; [PERSON], 2016, p. 219).