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Reviewed by:
  • Deep Waters: The Ottawa River and Canada’s Nuclear Adventure
  • Darrin Durant (bio)
Deep Waters: The Ottawa River and Canada’s Nuclear Adventure. By Kim Krenz. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+168. $44.95.

Deep Waters is Kim Krenz's history of Canada's nuclear development, a reflection on his active involvement in the industry from 1945 to 1980. It is not Krenz's purpose to retell stories about political, economic, or technical developments. Rather, he takes the reader on a personal journey through the early life of the Chalk River Laboratories, and on through the work of Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL). This is a story told in "human terms," dealing with psychological aspects and with the goal of facilitating understanding (p. 12). Deep Waters covers a significant era, in which a few labs clustered on the shore of the Ottawa River expanded to become a national and global nuclear industry. Krenz's book provides historians with a window onto how industry insiders lived and breathed this expansion.

Krenz begins his tale with recollections of his 1945 work at the Montreal Laboratory, followed by a move to the Chalk River Laboratories near Deep River that same year. These had been built from scratch. Despite the success of work on several reactors, with ZEEP (September 1945) and NRX (July 1947) becoming operational, life at Deep River was hard. Heating was troublesome during the Canadian winter, supply trucks plunged through ice to the bottom of the river, and workers endured "convivial" bus or truck trips to the labs. Unlike the Manhattan Project, social networks were looser and more varied at Deep River. Stuck in the Canadian wilderness were a group of highly educated and skilled scientists, engineers, and managers. The average age was thirty-five. Added to this mix were workers with construction and mechanical skills, some of whom became equipment operators at the labs. Skiing, sailing, and drama clubs were formed. Secrecy was impossible, with intimate details leaking out, possibly even state secrets. Deep River's population would grow from one hundred in 1945 to four thousand in 1956 and almost six thousand in 1966.

Filled with anecdotes (from deer hunts to drinking sessions with Russian scientists) and descriptions of the Ottawa River, this informal story brings to life what Krenz calls a "vibrant community" (p. 134). We learn of W. B. Lewis's anger and embarrassment when Admiral Hyman Rickover, visiting Chalk River Laboratories to thank AECL for its work on the fuel for the Nautilus submarine, referred publicly to Canada's reactor as a "reactor of a thousand leaks" (p. 100). Friendly contact in Deep River's clubs is said to have carried over into working lives. An interdisciplinary approach to problem solving and a "unifying effect" are related to friendship networks and ultimately the success of Deep River. Here is both the strength and the weakness of the insider perspective. Once inside, we see some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the insider world, only to simultaneously confront the outsider's limited and particular understanding of them. [End Page 673]

Deep River is a small town, filled with nuclear workers and their families; it is the insiders' inside. When the basement of the NRX reactor was waist-deep in coolant water after an accident in 1952, the president of AECL was in Ottawa, devoid of information, yet publicly announcing that the incident was just a "pinhole leak." Krenz finds an amusing silver lining; it was now known that NRX could be run at higher power. He writes that the decision to develop nuclear power was "logical" and "purely economic." The step from one reactor type (NRU) to another (NPD) was "inexorable." Despite this inexorability, the late decision to alter NPD from vertical to horizontal fueling, though costing millions, was "done for excellent reasons" (p. 118). Though furious at the "duplicity" of India in using Canadian-supplied technology to build and test a bomb in 1974, Krenz can nevertheless argue that "there is justification in that every step" of AECL work led to the efficient CANDU reactor (p. 125). Indeed, he says that the advantages of the Chalk River methods "appear...

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