Old A-bomb plant may be torn down

TRAIL, B.C. — A long-abandoned plant where heavy water was made for the first A-bombs to be tested during World War II could be demolished within a year, officials say.

Teck Cominco plans to spend $1.8 million to demolish the 60-year-old Project 9 tower as part of a program to remove obsolete structures at the company’s lead and zinc smelter complex in this southern British Columbia interior town.

The dark gray 14-story building on a hill above the smelter about 135 miles north of Spokane has been little more than an overgrown birdhouse for half a century.

Town Council member Gordon DeRosa says the building should be saved as a historic site, the source of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for the first atomic bombs to be tested during World War II.

Mark Edwards, Teck Cominco’s local manager of environment, health and safety, is concerned about how safe and useful it is.

“The top floors are literally filled with several feet of pigeon droppings.”

Moreover, the structure is in the middle of a fertilizer plant with ammonia stored nearby and is “not something we want anyone near,” he said.

Asserting that there has been no groundswell of support for preserving the building, Edwards said the company has talked with local museum officials about recording its history.

Despite deterioration, Teck Cominco officials say the building remains solid, with thick concrete walls that won’t be easy to take down.

The project to produce heavy water came with a price tag of about $20 million Canadian more than half a century ago.

Heavy water from the plant was used in A-bombs that were detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first on July 16, 1945, but not in the ones that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

Before the United States had even entered the war, the refinery complex was identified by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development as a likely heavy water production site.

The only other site capable of producing deuterium at the time was in Vemork, Norway, which fell to Hitler’s forces in 1940.

In February 1941, A heavy water proposal landed on the desk of Selwyn Blaylock, president of Consolidated Mining & Smelting, a Canadian Pacific subsidiary which operated the smelter at the time.