He was a Georgia peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote and expand human rights.
Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday afternoon (Dec. 29) at age 100, also resonated with Canadians for his efforts to avert a nuclear catastrophe in a small Ontario town northwest of Ottawa.
Arthur Milnes, known as Kingston’s storyteller-in-chief, wrote a book called “98 Reasons to Thank Jimmy Carter” for Carter’s 98th birthday.
In a 2022 presentation to the Historical Society of Ottawa, Milnes noted that while Carter didn’t single-handedly save the Ottawa Valley and Canada’s capital from nuclear annihilation, he played a key role in Canada’s nuclear history and helped make Canada a world leader in nuclear safety.
As a 28-year-old U.S. navy lieutenant, Carter led a team of workers tasked with making repairs to the Chalk River reactor, which had experienced a partial meltdown.
Following multiple explosions, the reactor was flooded with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. Workers called in to the repair the reactor would be exposed to radiation levels up to 1,000 times the level considered safe by today’s standards.
As the Historical Society of Ottawa explained in a Facebook post, when the Canadian government turned to U.S. nuclear experts for help, Lieutenant Carter was among the relatively few in the world at that time with any training in this new technology.
The reactor had to be shut down, disassembled and replaced. Remediation work extended into 1953.
An exact replica of the reactor was built on a nearby tennis court. Every pipe, bolt and nut was rebuilt exactly to replicate the damaged reactor.
Carter divided himself and his men into teams of three. Each team worked 90-second shifts, rushing in and cleaning and repairing the reactor, precisely as they had practised on the tennis court.
The 90-second interval was deemed the longest the human body could handle the amount of radiation that remained in the area, even with protective gear.
Carter and his team still absorbed a year’s worth of radiation in each of those 90-second shifts.
The Historical Society of Ottawa added Carter’s first-hand exposure to the Chalk River disaster gave him a profound respect for the destructive power of nuclear energy and influenced his decisions decades later, including cancelling the U.S. military’s development of a neutron bomb.
Of the more than 1,000 Canadians and Americans involved in the cleanup and repair effort, only one would end up in the White House.