Nuclear history in Canada has been thrown out and sold at garage sales. Retired scientists in Deep River are trying to save what’s left — before those who lived it are gone.
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A presidential award for lifetime achievement in nuclear science hangs inside a former daycare in Deep River, Ont. Metres away is a rosary from the household of a chemist who trained under Marie Curie.
These are prized artifacts among the approximately seven hundred saved by scientists and engineers at the Canadian Nuclear Heritage Museum that make up a comprehensive collection of the country’s atomic golden age.
But of all the items they’ve painstakingly gathered, a Wikipedia page has been harder to come by.
The Evening Citizen
Three times a volunteer has tried to get the museum a dedicated entry on the free online encyclopedia, and each time the draft has been rejected under the site’s strict notability standards. Not even a national education award from the Canadian Nuclear Society could clear the bar.
“There are links to everyone,” said Morgan Brown, the museum’s president. “But there’s no link to us, because our page doesn’t exist.”
Whatever is missing by Wikipedia’s standards, the history the museum is trying to preserve is becoming harder to recover.
Volunteers have been recording interviews on camera with the people who can explain the objects. Three men filmed in a single week, all in their mid-nineties, have since died.
The institutional memory rests largely with Brown and Jim Ungrin, 84, a retired nuclear physicist who helped establish the museum.
Brown calls Ungrin “mister 50 per cent of the museum.” Ungrin organizes the collection and gives tours of the equipment, in some cases acquired from the homes of former colleagues and neighbours.
During a walk-through, Ungrin stands in the main gallery beside a disk drive the size of a coffee table. The input desk from the laboratory’s first digital computer weathered decades in the shed of a local man who made a habit of stashing decommissioned laboratory gear.
“He was not a hoarder; he was a collector,” said Ungrin.
Nearly everything in the collection has survived because somebody in the Ottawa Valley couldn’t bear to throw it out.
One family delivered 35 bankers boxes from the estate of an uncle who worked as a theoretical physicist. In one stack of pages, a calculation is abandoned on page nine after the physicist caught an error and started over again. To the untrained eye, the sheets are filled with impenetrable math.
“You really need to know what some of that is,” said Ungrin.
His expertise can also be summoned by telephone. A woman in nearby Eganville, Ont. called the museum about an object in her garage once belonging to the Nuclear Power Demonstration, or NPD, Canada’s first nuclear power plant. Ungrin drove over to investigate and collected a radiation monitor, which had ceased service decades earlier. How the equipment ended up in her garage is a mystery.
An injector Ungrin had worked on for years fed protons into a particle accelerator at Chalk River. Dismantled in 1987, the apparatus was sent to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Almost forty years later, the machinery remained in pieces. A curator was preparing to bring files about the components to Deep River for help identifying the parts.
“I’m the last person alive who knows what the hell that was,” he said.
Down the road at Chalk River Laboratories, that kind of knowledge used to have a permanent home. An information centre once welcomed thousands of visitors curious about the place where Canada had split the atom.
But after Sept. 11, 2001, the centre shut down for security. The exhibits were cleared. Many of the polished displays and carefully constructed record of a world-class program, according to Brown, were thrown out.
The museum had yet to exist, and in the intervening years the generation of scientists behind Canada’s nuclear program started to pass away. Their adult children came home from Toronto or Ottawa, sorting a lifetime into boxes and setting a good deal of it at the curb.
By the time Brown and a handful of others began collecting what they could in 2015, some of it was already gone.
The museum incorporated federally in 2017 as the Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage (SPCNH), or “spinach” as members jokingly call it.
“We wanted something catchier,” said Brown. “But put ‘Canada’ in there and the government worries you’re trying to fool people.”
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) lends the building to the museum, maintained by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories for $1 per year — a fee that has, by all accounts, gone uncollected.
Clear plastic boxes from Ferrero Rocher chocolates make fine display cases for the smaller artifacts. Inside one, visitors will find a rosary from the household of Marcel Pochon. The French-born radium chemist studied under Marie Curie before emigrating to Canada to extract radium from uranium ore at Port Hope.
It’s a single degree of separation from the woman who pioneered the science of radioactivity.
Brown picks up a glass container, a vial of heavy paraffin made with deuterium from a Norwegian plant that was, at the time, the world’s only source of heavy water. This was a highly guarded ingredient critical to early atomic bomb research.
How did it end up here? In 1940, just ahead of the German invasion of Norway, a physicist working in France helped secure the supply and move it out. It went to France, then to England as France fell, then across the Atlantic to Montreal, and finally to the Ottawa Valley, where it helped set the direction of Canadian science for the next eighty years.
“It has such a story connected to it,” Brown says. “It’s totally nerdy. I know.”
The museum is located a few kilometres from Canada’s first nuclear power reactor, which shut down in 1987. The fuel has been removed, leaving irradiated materials behind. The plan is to extract what can be safely taken out, fill the below-grade structure with grout, collapse the remaining buildings, cover it with an impermeable layer and release most of the land, likely to Algonquin communities under the land agreement. Chimney swifts, a protected bird species nesting in the smokestack, have complicated the timeline.
“They can’t touch it,” said Brown.
And then there are the inevitable questions about radiation involving a proposed permanent disposal site in nearby Chalk River, Ont. The Near Surface Disposal Facility would receive waste classified as low-level. Algonquin communities have opposed the project and challenged how their rights were addressed. Following a Federal Court decision, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is renewing consultation with Kebaowek First Nation.
Brown’s support for nuclear power leaves room for empathy toward people challenging the industry.
“They’ve been shut out for so long,” said Brown. “And Aboriginal peoples are finally being listened to, which they should. They’re exercising their voice because they can. And really, do I blame them? No, not really. Even though from a scientific perspective, it’s sort of like, ‘Oh, rats.’”
The museum’s unofficial mandate, as Ungrin sees it, is to replace fear with respect. A sign in the museum’s bathroom makes the point more bluntly: you are yourself a radioactive emitter, so if your goal is zero radiation, “you’ve got problems.”
“It bugs me when people pooh-pooh wind and solar,” said Brown, who said he got into the nuclear field because he was concerned about the planet.
“All systems have limitations. We’ve got to get away from burning fossil fuels as much as we can.
“But particularly in February, when the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining because it’s cloudy, I still love turning up my temperature so I can survive.”
Deep River, less than 200-km northwest of Ottawa, was established in 1944 as a bedroom community for Chalk River Laboratories and grew with the research reactors. A mid-century flyer described it as “one of the most carefully planned communities in Canada,” complete with bowling alley, boat launch and weekly paper, designed by McGill architects and managed as a company town.
The hospital had the highest birth rate per capita in the country. Residents liked to say their town also had the highest concentration of PhDs in the country.
The Upper Ottawa Valley was not a wealthy part of the province when the community of high salaries and PhDs got, in Ungrin’s words, “plunked in.” A long-running distinction developed between “townies,” the lab families in Deep River, and “bushies,” the people who had been there first. A sign at the edge of town originally read “Welcome to the Good Life.” A scientist, inevitably, amended it to “Welcome to the Half Life.”
It did not go over well in the valley. “These snotty guys up in Deep River putting this silly sign up,” as Ungrin recalled the reaction.
Federal infrastructure, over the next eighty years, calcified into local identity. The old staff hotels, where some five hundred marriages reportedly originated among young, single scientists, have become office space. The corridor of land between town and plant, nearly sold off in the mid-nineties when AECL was told to divest of unneeded land, was rescued by community donation and holds an extensive network of groomed cross-country ski trails.
These days, Deep River skews older than the national average. It is a tight-knit community where a retired engineer can write a musical about nuclear history and fill a four-hundred-seat auditorium.
The Deep River Players staged The Sound of Neutrons at the Mackenzie Community School in 2025. Phyllis Heeney, one of the first women engineers in operations at Chalk River, wrote and directed it, modelling the show loosely on The Sound of Music, swapping the Austrian Alps for the Laurentian Hills and a singing governess for a fictional physicist inspired by Maria Sagat, a real theoretical physicist from Czechoslovakia who could find work in Deep River in the 1960s only with great difficulty, on account of her gender.
“Let’s make like an atom and split,” deadpanned one character. “Let’s make like a neutron and get the flux out of here,” retorted another, to knowing laughter from an audience that included former Chalk River staff and their families.
The museum had a display in the lobby. “There’s a lot of insider jokes you need to know about,” said Brown during intermission.
Back at the local museum, there are fewer items to collect nowadays. Ungrin catalogued 286 new items in 2018, scribbling notes as donations came through the door. “I was in a panic because I couldn’t remember who gave me what,” said Ungrin.
In 2025, he catalogued eight.
And so the volunteers have been asking people to tell their stories on camera, preserving the knowledge behind the objects they’ve collected. About twenty video interviews record personal accounts of Canada’s nuclear history.
“The biggest thing that’s been lost,” said Ungrin, “is the fact that there were no interviews done on record, on video, with a lot of the early people.”
While an entry on Wikipedia has eluded the volunteers, the museum’s website has become a source for researchers. A scholar from Brazil came to study why Canada developed such an extensive nuclear program while his own country took a different course.
“It gives a bit of a high when you actually find someone who wants to use us for research purposes,” said Brown.
The volunteers have prepared the catalogue for the possibility the museum could close. They considered the system used by Ingenium, the national organization responsible for the Canada Science and Technology Museum, but it was outside their price range. The software cost $3,500 a year; the Canadian Nuclear Heritage Museum’s annual budget at the time was $100. Ungrin instead adapted the cataloguing format into Microsoft Word documents another institution could inherit.
The museum could use “professional help,” said Brown. “In any way you want to take that.”
Over the summer, a couple of local students took over greeting visitors and leading tours five days a week, along with the children’s programming.
They made an old canvas suitcase into a costume trunk filled with oversized white protective suits. One of the students, a high schooler, helped visiting school groups dress up in clothing nuclear scientists had worn to work.
By the end of August, the students returned to class and the original museum caretakers were back on duty.
“We’re trying to get it to the younger generation,” said Ungrin.
A successor has yet to take over his responsibilities. So when a visitor finds the museum door locked, Ungrin gets the phone call.
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” he tells them.
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