Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

Part Two

Having come finally to my subject, Sellafield, I am forced to confront the epic scale of my narrative. My inability to invoke a suitable muse is really my only deficiency in treating this great subject. To the objection that I know very little about plutonium, I can reply that I know better than to pour it into the environment. On these grounds alone I can hope the British nuclear establishment will learn something from my work, so that I may repay them for the insights they have given me into the nature and prospects of humankind.

To the objection that I work largely from newspaper articles, I can reply that by the same means we learn most of what we take to be true; for example, that Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister of Great Britain, and that her status has been arrived at by orderly means and carries with it significant prerogatives. It may well be that the moon landings were filmed in Arizona, and that the world’s affairs are presided over by Freemasons, who stage elections and inaugurations only to mislead the rest of us. For all we really know, there is peace in Afghanistan and plenty in Ethiopia, and the Irish Sea and the North Sea are of a most Edenlike purity.

Yet, granting the problems of knowledge, which are imposing, it is not generally considered prudent to discount entirely the information one finds in the press. Antinomians will wade into the sea I describe and delight as the warm ooze rises between their toes, and report that they have never been so refreshed. And any neoplasm that may afterward obtrude will be laid to a chemical additive in cereal packaging, or to the aftereffects of Chernobyl, with perfect plausibility, though the only acquaintance most of us have with either of these phenomena is through articles in the newspapers. People believe selectively, and they are outraged selectively, so that any little area of informed or moral thinking tends to become a dot in a grand mosaic of pernicious nonsense.

It will become very clear that I do not invest great faith in any of my sources, no more in specialist publications than in those produced by self-styled champions of this unthinkably savaged planet. I have not written a “history” of Sellafield, because I doubt that it really has one, except insofar as a shopkeeper’s ledger is a history. The supposed events that surround it seem purely epiphenomenal. To maunder on about leaks and fires is a bad joke in light of the fact that reactor cores are broken down and poured into the environment routinely and continuously. Such pother normalizes Sellafield, so that grave men can compare its “safety record” with those of other plants and industries.

Sellafield simply grows. Inquiries in 1976 and 1984, which enthralled the British press with calculations of peril and tales of malfeasance, coincided with two great expansions of the plant. I have read that in 1964 Sellafield was directed from defense toward commercial development by government policy. Commercial uses for radioactive materials are older than defense uses, however, and the British government are simply the last people in the world to arrive late at any chance to make money. So I am not sure that the plant has ever undergone any change at all, except in size. Its new facilities are being constructed at great expense (to the Germans and Japanese), to make it capable of extracting uranium and plutonium from new kinds of nuclear wastes.

The one thing always to be borne in mind is that, on the coast of Britain, wastes from a plutonium factory are poured into the environment every day. This is easily demonstrated from a little document, prepared by the British government Central Office of Information, printed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, titled Nuclear Energy in Britain. I will quote first from the version published in 1976.

It comes as a disappointment to discover in such documents an important degree of impressionism in technical-sounding terms like “low-level” waste or “low-activity” waste. “Low-level” seems to mean no more than that the contaminant is intermixed with something else — it is on tissues, gloves, or overalls, or as the British use the term, it is in water, or in air. “Low-activity” wastes are relatively stable and persistent materials, like plutonium. So the effluents from Sellafield, insofar as plutonium is concerned, are low-level and low-activity; that is, widely distributed and with us forever. The pamphlet tells us, “Low-activity liquid wastes are normally discharged into public sewers, rivers, or coastal waters.” It tells us, too, that “volatile fission products krypton, xenon and iodine,” high-activity wastes, are in “effluent streams” and are also “discharged, after treatment where required, to the atmosphere at heights necessary to secure adequate atmospheric dilution,” though in future they may have to be stored “until their radioactivity has decayed.” High-activity gases are vented from smokestacks into that rainy climate in the full flower of their brief lives, routinely, so that they in effect combine the worst characteristics of volatility and persistence. The pamphlet informs us that “the major source of radioactive waste is the chemical reprocessing of irradiated fuel elements,” and looking to the future, or perhaps merely speculating, it remarks that along with other modifications “it should also be possible to remove toxic elements such as plutonium from waste streams.”

This amounts to a fairly straightforward description of the routine release of toxic and radioactive materials. A revised version of the same publication, printed in 1981, says, “Low-level gaseous and liquid waste can be dispersed directly to the environment where the dilution of the waste is sufficient to avoid any significant risk to the population.” Notice what latitude the word “significant” allows to the expression of cultural values. Further, “two main sources of low activity liquid effluent arise at Windscale [that is, Sellafield]: water discharged from the fuel storage ponds and waste streams arising in the chemical plant. These are discharged into the Irish Sea through a twin pipeline which extends 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) offshore.” An insight into the meaning of “low-level” is provided later in the same paragraph: “Low-level radioactive waste is also disposed of in concrete-lined steel containers at sea, in the deep North Atlantic Ocean, some hundreds of miles from land.” This is done in accordance with the provisions of two agreements with truly wonderful names, the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972) and the Multilateral Consultation and Surveillance Mechanism for the Sea Dumping of Radioactive Waste. According to the report, international inspectors come along to watch the barrels go over the side. In any case, low-level waste is the kind of thing one encloses in concrete and drops into the remote depths of the Atlantic, when one is not dispersing it directly into the environment.

These publications of Her Majesty’s government document the essential fact, which is never disputed, that Sellafield pours plutonium and other radioactive substances into the sea and air. A booklet published in 1981 for the Commission of the European Communities, edited by J. R. Grover of the nuclear research center at Harwell, U.K., titled Management of Plutonium Contaminated Waste, makes a series of startling assertions about plutonium oxide which are apparently meant to justify the practice: that “its density is nearly that of lead which reduces strongly the possibility of it blowing over long distances”; that “it cannot be assimilated by plants or transmitted via biological routes”; that “in water its solubility is virtually zero. Therefore it cannot be transported by water.”

In the first place, plutonium oxide forms extremely fine particles that become suspended in air, as the pamphlet itself acknowledges when it says of plutonium that “in a dusty form it is pyrophoric”—capable of igniting spontaneously in air. That this risk is compared to the danger of explosions in “other dusty operations” in industry merely restates the fact that plutonium oxide tends to become highly particulate. The pamphlet also describes dispersion of plutonium-contaminated gases through smokestacks, a practice which surely assumes that plutonium can be carried by the wind, since wide dispersion is supposed to render it harmless. The booklet actually defines gaseous plutonium-contaminated waste as “just the effluent air from plutonium process areas,” an apparent acknowledgment that plutonium oxide is readily airborne.

As to the transmission of plutonium “via biological routes,” plutonium concentrates in the liver, kidneys, and bone marrow, according to other authorities. This is to say that it passes into the food chain — into black pudding and kidney pie, for example.

The suggestion that plutonium cannot be transported by water because it does not dissolve in water suggests to me that the writer is not highly observant. Anyone who has hosed down a sidewalk is in a position to enlighten him.

The pamphlet goes on to say: “(a) There is no known chemical toxicity of plutonium, (b) The genetic effects of plutonium are negligible, (c) The carcinogenicity of plutonium is relatively inactive through all the routes of absorption except by inhalation because of the poor excretion of plutonium in that situation.”

According to the International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology (1986) “Plutonium is chemically active and toxic.” According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Physics (1962), whose contributors are overwhelmingly British academic and government scientists, including J. E. Gore, who contributed the article I quote, research into the physical properties of plutonium has been complicated by “difficulties in handling the metal, such as its high toxicity.” So far as I can discover, no description of plutonium as other than chemically and radiologically toxic and as carcinogenic is reflected in reference literature.

The waste-disposal booklet says, “There is no proven instance of a human being suffering from plutonium intake.” This is a favorite quibble. Leukemia, multiple myeloma, and lung cancer, though they are all associated with plutonium, cannot in any single case be proved to have been caused by it, supposedly, though they occur in high numbers in a plutonium-contaminated environment. Since each may have another etiology, so might all of them. Therefore, high cancer and leukemia rates cannot be said to be caused by exposure to plutonium, the causal link is not proven, and plutonium is exonerated. All this deserves its own chapter in any history of modern thought, simply because its consequences are epochal.

The booklet describes a regime of fastidious caution governing the operation of a “reference” plant, something between an actual, a hypothetical, and a projected system for fabricating nuclear fuel. “Windscale” is mentioned twice, never with reference to its accidents. In the midst of murky descriptions of contamination swabbed up with cotton and of the polishing of windows, under the heading “Special Problems,” we are given a description of plutonium which concludes that there are no special problems. And yet the booklet describes how plutonium 241 will continuously decay into americium 241, with the release of beta and gamma radiation, so that “the specific external risk for plutonium operators is steadily increasing with time.” The section concludes, “This may become especially embarrassing during waste handling operations.” So even in claiming a good character for plutonium it puts aside the matter of its virulent decay product, for the management of which no guidance is offered, unless to be braced for embarrassment.

Why this little document should have been produced I have no idea, or how it could be read by anyone even moderately conversant with these issues and not inspire amazement and alarm. I think the official imprimatur may have dazzled skeptics. In any case, the radiological assumptions that governed British treatment of plutonium at the start of this decade are stated very openly and authoritatively here.

On the basis of the practices and assumptions described in these publications of Her Majesty’s government, and taking into account the age and size of the plant, reckon what impact Sellafield is liable to have had. Add reports of radiation-associated illness, stern government inquiries with their implied disavowal of responsibility, and international protests, which in 1986 resulted in a vote in the European Parliament to close the plant down. The general purport of journalistic accounts, always to be considered suspect in their particulars, is confirmed.

If there is anything to the theory that a lump of plutonium the size of a grapefruit is toxic enough to destroy life on earth (I encountered this theory on the front page of The (London) Observer, in a chatty little story which included the information that the British government had poured that quarter ton of plutonium into the waters off the British coast) then the jig is up. I see no point in rushing to this somber conclusion, though it is very difficult to find any authority that will give plutonium a significantly better character.

West German animal tests are said to have demonstrated that a thousandth of a gram of plutonium killed dogs and rats in a matter of days. I have grown cynical enough to judge a piece of information by its effect, whatever its source. When a scientist declares that a speck of plutonium will kill a rat in a period of days, he is saying a spill of plutonium would create an unconcealable disaster. Then that part of a quarter ton which, over years, must have entered the environment and the food chain should have felled Britain by this time. The belief that overwhelming catastrophe would be the consequence of plutonium contamination implies anything less spectacular is proof that plutonium contamination has not occurred.

The official secrecy of Britain reflects the assumption that information damaging to the government should be contained where possible. Employees of the National Health Service must sign the Official Secrets Act, a fact which in this context sheds new light on the economic value of both the Act and the Health Service. There are no grounds for crediting public health data generated under such conditions, especially where it might inhibit a policy so enthusiastically pursued as Sellafield has been. Still, effects of radiation must have been limited enough, by the standards of the exposed population, to seem tolerable. Since Britain’s industrial history has made occupational illness and injury commonplace, passivity relative to such problems is a settled feature of life. Effects will be more conspicuous over time, reflecting the cumulative and incremental enhancement of exposure which will come with further releases of wastes, and the decay of plutonium into americium, a more intensely radioactive element, and the continuing action of surf and tide in bringing the wastes ashore. Perhaps the limits of physical endurance will be reached before the limits of docility. That is usual in such cases.

To put the matter briefly, I am writing about the radioactive contamination of a populous landscape — wastes from the plant can be measured on every coast of Britain — without special confidence in any description of plutonium, and without more than anecdotal evidence of the consequences of radiation exposure for public health. Grossly elevated rates of childhood leukemia and lymphoid malignancies in the area are conceded, though their significance is thought to be uncertain. In the Ravenglass Estuary near the plant, concentrations of plutonium are 27,000 times “background” levels, established by residues left from atomic testing which officials claim are high enough to create problematic contamination in the area, and which therefore must provide such calculations with a hefty multiplicand. Recently, officials have claimed to have no figures on levels of background radiation in Britain. Such discrepancies are commonplace. The Ravenglass Estuary near Sellafield once had a nesting population of 24,000 gulls and five other varieties of seabird. It is now virtually extinct. Eggs from the diminishing flock are radioactive, but no conclusion can be drawn from this fact.

As it happens, on the east coast of Ireland there have been numerous cases of Down’s Syndrome and leukemia, and in England in the area of Sellafield, as fate would have it, houses have been found to be contaminated with plutonium. In response to the charges that the plutonium factory is to blame, both these phenomena were laid, by British officials, to the detritus of atmospheric testing, brought down by rain. Jonathan Schell, in The Fate of the Earth, remarks that there are such “hot spots,” though he does not name any of them. Given the importance of British experts in the councils of the world nuclear enterprise, I wonder if their thinking is reflected in this hypothesis. I wonder if other “hot spots” are coincidentally centered around other nuclear facilities.

It is surely odd that ascribing health problems to the bomb tests would seem to anyone to exculpate Sellafield. If plutonium that falls from the clouds is harmful, then plutonium that comes in on the wind and the tide is no doubt harmful as well. After all, a woman in Cumbria who found that her house was contaminated when she sent her vacuum cleaner bag to the United States to be analyzed was obliged by law to sell the house at a very low price because it had a defect — the contamination. Apparently no law requires that the defect be corrected. One must conclude, however, that the British feel plutonium in one’s house is something to be avoided or, failing that, regretted. Radiation is found in particularly high concentrations, one thousand times background levels, in household dust in the area, subsequent inquiry has shown.

I have suggested elsewhere that logic is not a ruling passion among the British. My problem in writing this apocalyptic tale in a style suited to the importance of its subject is in fact that there is a particular, somber, officious foolishness about it all, and a forthright miserliness which it was, until lately, my error to consider beneath the dignity of governments.

We are all accustomed to horror stories about nuclear plants. There are so many tales of near-catastrophe that they are almost soothing. Any dire information elicits a “Did you hear the one about—?” response, as if no story could be quite the worst, as if one’s being impressed by any particular set of revelations is naive, or a perverse sort of optimism, since it seems to assume that things work reasonably well anywhere.

British stories are of another order, however, because for them safety as we understand it was never a primary objective. An anecdote is related from time to time about how Clement Atlee, Prime Minister at the end of the Second World War, ordered that Sellafield (then Windscale) should have absolute priority in obtaining building materials. But the instruction was marked “Top Secret,” so no one was allowed to read it, and therefore the builders had to compete for materials without any preference shown to them. For the British, the idea that government conduct is based on fluke is exculpatory. The government has no positive obligation to see that a policy is carried out competently or humanely, or to correct its past failures. It strains belief that a country which had just come through a war, and which had lived since 1911 with the Official Secrets Act, under which the whole of “public” business has the status of military secret (the better to confound the Hun), could not handle a straightforward matter of military procurement. Since Windscale/Sellafield was a munitions manufacturing site before it became a plutonium factory, mere inertia should certainly have assured it some preferential treatment. The anecdote does at least acknowledge that the plant was and is shoddily built, and a great deal of evidence is available to prove that this is indeed the case.

The report of a recent inquiry into cancer deaths near the plant remarks gently, “While there is ample evidence of a real and sophisticated concern with the safe operation of the plant, it has to be said that some of the plant was installed many years ago.”¹⁵ James Wilkinson, science correspondent for BBC-TV, finds French waste disposal methods “tidy,” while British arrangements are astonishingly “tatty.”¹⁶

Oddness and awkwardness surround every transaction that involves information in Britain, whether the taking of it in or the giving of it out, as the Atlee anecdote suggests. There is clearly a deep cultural ambivalence about information. It is a power vested in the innermost counsels of the state. And then the state can claim to have failed to generate it, as in the matter of health data and radiation levels, or it can reject information it finds not to its liking, as in the matter of recent reports of structural flaws at these old nuclear sites. The plants were designed to operate for twenty years. In 1976, when the first were due to close, the Labour government in the person of its telegenic Minister of Environment, the awfully ferocious radical and pretty persistent gadfly of entrenched interests, Anthony Wedgwood “Red Tony” Benn, after a lot of study, decided to keep the plants running. This is perhaps an instance of Benn’s ability to set his populist enthusiasms to one side.

Despite the implications of design limits and the building of these postwar plants out of materials about which no one seems prepared to say anything kind, except that they were inexpensive, official statements of the risks these plants pose boggle the mind by invoking the far reaches of the infinitesimal.

“Odds” always imply, amazingly, that there is some sort of safe landing on the other side — a plant might start up, waltz through its productive life, skirting every danger, and then be done and gone. The time that has passed from the fall of Troy to the present day will not bring humankind halfway to the end of the problems any one of these plants creates in the course of quiet, impeccable functioning. Consider for example that calculations of the warming of the earth and the rising of the sea have Sellafield and a great many other sites under water in the next century. Reactors are called “breeders” and nuclear materials are described as “fertile,” and in fact the functioning of a reactor even in the best circumstances is the gestation of ferocious elements this suave little planet was never meant to contain. Tapping electricity from such a phenomenon is like setting the house on fire to toast marshmallows.

Since Calder Hall has been singled out for faulty design, there is special cause for worry. This old reactor, opened by the Queen in 1956 at Windscale and said by the British to have been the first reactor in the world to generate electricity on a commercial scale, does, after all, share a site with the largest repository of nuclear waste in the world, and nuclear wastes differ from egg shells and potato peelings in that in storage they must be constantly and solicitously tended. They are simply reactor cores that have become too fissile, too radioactive, to be used to generate electricity. To describe them as “spent” is entirely misleading. Like reactor cores they generate enormous amounts of heat and require continuous cooling. This failing, they burn voraciously, through concrete. The Russians were able to cover over their damaged core and to contain the release of radiation by burying the reactor in lead and boron, for the time being at least, or so we are told. But the effort required was gigantic. The problems involved in keeping radioactive wastes safely stored are about the same as in keeping a reactor stable. So a major accident in a waste storage site, where tons of reprocessed plutonium are stored also, would set in train a series of consequences that could put all previous misfortune very far in the shade. As the Russian events made clear, a nuclear accident is difficult to contain because it creates circumstances in which it is hard to keep other reactors at the same site under control. At Sellafield, the problem would be many times compounded by the nature of the establishment.

In 1958 the Russians had an explosion in a nuclear waste dump at Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains, a not especially famous disaster that took towns from the map, depopulated hundreds of square miles of countryside, possibly killing hundreds of people, according to the Russian physicist Zhores Medvedev, and filled Russian scientific journals with distinguished contributions to research into the impact of cesium 137 and strontium 90 on biological systems. Russia is very large, and has growing reason to be glad for all that space. Britain cannot sidestep the full consequences of its errors, nor can Europe pull back its skirts from the mess that will be made if any such thing should happen in England.

If Americans have heard about the Sellafield nuclear waste dump and plutonium factory, they have heard the name Windscale, which appears from time to time with little or no elaboration in lists of nuclear accidents. The Windscale fire of 1957, which for our purposes is the history of the public-relations strategies surrounding the event, bears an uncanny, not to say unnerving, similarity to the recent accident in the Ukraine. Windscale was the most serious accident in a nuclear reactor before Chernobyl. It occurred in a graphite-moderated reactor with the sole function of producing plutonium for British bombs. Its causes were promptly located in “human failure” rather than in any problems with the design of the reactor, which was said before the fire to have provided the model for British power-generating reactors, and after the fire to resemble them hardly at all. An inquiry found that staff had undertaken an experiment at a time when the reactor was going through a routine maintenance procedure, just as their Russian counterparts did thirty years later. The nature of the British experiment has never been revealed because it was defense-related. On these same grounds the real composition of the radioactive fallout from the accident has only gradually begun to be acknowledged. According to new accounts, it was very much more virulent than originally claimed.

Local reports of the event described an explosion, a fire, and a massive release of radioactivity. Official reports described the core temperature rising to red heat, and a release of radioactive gases mainly trapped in filters above the pile. Subsequent revisions of the official account concede that there was indeed a fire, and a cloud of radioactivity, which contaminated England, Ireland, and Europe. No one was evacuated. A reassuring press account describes children in the nearby village of Seascale playing in the streets.

Comparison in this regard is to the advantage of the Russians, who only delayed evacuation, and who only temporized for a few days about the severity of their problem. Satellites and monitoring devices may enforce candor, at least at the discretion of the governments or firms who operate them. In 1957 an extraordinary degree of concealment was possible. One “casualty” was acknowledged, in quotation marks because he was only contaminated, and was to be seen the next day wearing rubber gloves while playing dominoes in a pub. He was said to have been among those workers who trained fire hoses directly on the burning reactor core when other attempts to cool it failed.

Men from other facilities were brought in to work in forty-minute shifts. Some were said to have collapsed, but officials denied this robustly. They declared that no one had suffered any harm. The fire in the reactor core was out of control for two days, even according to early reports. The pile had been functioning for seven years, so its inventory of radioactive materials would have been much more virulent than that in the plant at Chernobyl. There was no containment structure. Dousing such a fire with water would inevitably produce, at best, radioactive steam in enormous quantities. Water was poured into the core for twenty-four hours.

The physicist in charge of the routine maintenance operation was found to have had no manual of instructions for carrying it out. This was seen as a collective responsibility and no disciplinary action was taken. So, as at Chernobyl, an extraordinary concatenation of misjudgments produced an accident which had no implications for the nuclear industry as a whole. As at Chernobyl, amazing good fortune prevented the consequences of disaster from being as severe as might have been expected, at least according to the newspapers. Prime Minister Macmillan assured the Parliament weeks after the Windscale accident that there was no evidence of harm to any person, animal, or property. This is remarkable, considering that milk produced in a 200-square-mile area around the plant had been confiscated and poured into, of course, the sea, during those same weeks. Now the British attribute about 260 cases of thyroid cancer to the accident. Perhaps in 2017 the Russians will also revise their original estimates of the seriousness of Chernobyl.

In this early event features highly characteristic of British handling of nuclear issues are already fully apparent, not least typical being the singling out of thyroid cancer as the one result of a reactor core fire. This follows logically on the pouring out of milk as the one measure settled upon to protect the population at the time of the fire, in its turn a consequence of emphasis on the release of radioactive iodine. All sorts of things would have come from a plutonium-producing pile in which graphite and uranium burned for days, and there would have been an array of aftereffects. But thyroid cancer is said to have a high cure rate, so that only a few deaths need be attributed to the fire if this kind of cancer is treated as its only consequence. Cancer of the breast or lung, also radiation-associated, would imply many more deaths. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note here again that Britain leads the world in lung cancer deaths.

Recent concerns about the consequences of exposure to radiation focus, just as arbitrarily, on clusters of childhood leukemia, which seem, for the purposes of those who document them, to mean rates of mortality which exceed national averages by about 1,000 percent. In any but the grimmest circumstances, such excesses should be relatively rare. In fact, they have been found near many British nuclear sites. This phenomenon is usually associated, speculatively and again arbitrarily, with environmental exposure to plutonium, though there are many other radiation sources in the environment. The association of foetal X-rays with childhood leukemia demonstrated by the British physician Dr. Alice Stewart indicates that even a brief, discreet exposure to radiation is sufficient to predispose a child to this illness. Narrowing of the terms in which a problem is to be understood remains a flourishing art.

Fully present also in the Windscale affair is the tendency to treat every problem as a public-relations problem first of all. Asked in Parliament whether he would publish the government report on Windscale or support a proposal for further inquiry, Prime Minister Macmillan agreed to consider these steps, “but he was also interested in maintaining the tremendous and unique reputation of our scientists in this field throughout the world,” according to the Times report of parliamentary discussion of the accident.¹⁷

Public safety, where it is in conflict with prestige and export prospects, has no standing. This exchange was reported about three weeks after the accident, when even short-lived contaminants would still have been present in significant amounts. Yet the public was told from the first it was safe to eat local vegetables and to let cattle graze in the open air. These assurances came in the face of protests by farmers and by construction workers employed at the site.

Twenty years later, at the time of the Windscale inquiry of 1977, which yielded the decision to expand the plant’s role as waste dump and plutonium factory, half the mortality data on workers was found to be missing from the files.¹⁸ Those that existed were thought sufficient to provide an estimate of the plant’s safety. There is no reason to doubt that the prestige of British nuclear development did indeed emerge unscathed from the events at Windscale, and every reason to look for its influence in other quarters, especially on our own industry, which has served as a catch basin for the brain drain.

The American trade publication Nuclear News reports respectfully on the affairs of the British industry, alluding to radioactive discharges and emissions with a serenity I can only find alarming, since its readership is usually represented as earnestly concerned with preventing measurable “radiation doses” to the public from nuclear sites. British assurances of the harmlessness of such exposure are reported at length, without any hint of skepticism, and without any of the detail or specificity a lay person might hope the specialist community would demand.

After Chernobyl, a British report, highly critical of the Russians, was described in an article which quoted Walter Marshall, head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, as saying no such accident as Chernobyl could occur in Britain because “the overriding importance of ensuring safety is so deeply engrained in the culture of the nuclear industry that this will not happen in the U.K.”¹⁹

There are said to have been three hundred accidents at Windscale/Sellafield since the core fire. Such figures are meaningless. Accidents are creatures of definition. An industry that ignores every standard of caution is almost proof against accident. There have been events that required buildings to be closed and abandoned, there have been fires. There was once a flood. None of these approach the normal functioning of the plant as sources of contamination. But a history of accident gives the place a kind of respectability, implying standards and scruples.

Britons figure prominently in world organizations which generate standards the British violate with a special flagrancy. How do these gentlemen resolve the contradictions of their national and international roles? John Dunster, health physicist at Sellafield in its formative stages, early defender of its plutonium dumping, has since become one of the two longest-serving members of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, which establishes exposure standards for the Western world.

Such contradictions abound. It seems there is a branch in Cumbria of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, an organization of doctors appalled by the darker potentialities of the age. They meet in premises available to them, according to an article in the New Statesman, on the condition that they say nothing against Sellafield.²⁰

An editorial in the British magazine New Scientist, accusing the American press of fueling anti-Soviet hysteria by demanding information about the accident at Chernobyl, remarked, “If the Soviet authorities want their people to die in ignorance, then it is up to them.”²¹ The issue of secrecy opens on the very largest questions of legitimacy and social order. There is a consensus in British life that keeping up appearances is a thing to be done at any cost. There can be no doubt that the appearance of reasonableness, morality, and good order is deeply important to them, of great value in its own right. Pervasive as secrecy-enforcing laws and conventions are, no one ever seems to refuse to talk about anything. Secrets are kept by saying something other than the truth. According to an article in The Guardian, a report on the Windscale fire published in 1983 by the National Radiological Protection Board described the original report by John Dunster, its head until 1987, as “spurious.”²² I am describing a very remarkable culture.

Putting aside such obvious mystifications as missing data, other issues seem to lurk behind the Windscale accident which would make its significance, great as it was, only relative. A Labour MP, asking for explicit assurances that the drinking water for the city of Manchester, which comes from lakes in Cumbria, was safe, said, “Before the accident happened some very strange things had been taking place in the Windscale area, though no public information has been given.”²³ An article in The (London) Times addressed the issue of nuclear waste disposal, which seems to have been implicated in the public mind in the events at Windscale. The article explains patiently that the two were not related, that the siting of the reprocessing plant near the reactors was merely convenient and had no bearing on events at the reactors. It was just at this time that complaints arose at the United Nations about plutonium dumping from Windscale. British scientists experimented with incinerating plutonium in Australia. I suspect that some such toying with disposal methods may have gone on before the accident, whether or not such experiments were connected with it, and that the contamination from the core fire may simply have frosted the cake.

So early on, the assumptions upon which Windscale/Sellafield would operate were already firmly established. In the article about waste disposal published after the accident at Windscale, The Times describes the division of radioactive materials into three groups: those that are sufficiently short-lived to be managed by a limited period of storage; strontium go and cesium 137, which are too long-lived to be treated in this way and for which commercial uses should therefore be found; and a few materials “so long-lived that the amount of radiation they contribute is not significant.”²⁴ By this must be intended plutonium and uranium, both low-activity and long-lived. The article explains that “as a matter of common sense rather than science, it has been fairly generally accepted that so long as the total additional radiation is small compared with natural radiation the amount of harm done, if any, is unlikely to be detectable.” Especially if health data turn up missing.

The British approach to the disposal problem is sufficient to deal with the entire world output of waste, according to The (London) Times in 1957. Fully twenty years before the decision was made public, the commercial or scientific (or common sense) rationale for Sellafield was already fully formed. That is to say that, in twenty years, the thinking of those responsible for the operation of the plant did not develop.

In 1977 Dr. Geoffrey Schofield, chief medical officer at Sellafield, testifying for the plant’s expansion, said plutonium had become “a great bogeyman.”²⁵ It would be tempting to say that the cleverest class of the cleverest nation wagered on the innocuousness of long-lived fission products in broadcasting them over the landscape, if it were not the case that they have always permitted flagrantly damaging materials, specifically strontium 90 and cesium 137, to pour into the environment as well. Interestingly, an essay titled “The Guarantee of Safety: Protection Built In,” by the Group Medical Officer of the Atomic Energy Authority, included in the supplement published by The (London) Times a year before the accident, when Calder Hall was opened, said, “It is important to note that the British nuclear power programme has been so planned that these chemical processes [that is, reprocessing] will be carried out at one or two sites remote from the power stations; by this arrangement, the complicated problems of protection against the risks of radioactive contamination will be isolated in the chemical processing plants and will be excluded, therefore, from the nuclear power stations.”²⁶ Reprocessing at Windscale/Sellafield has never been remote or isolated. As this passage implies, it has never been designed to obviate contamination by any other means.

The issue of the super-addition of man-made to natural background radiation still arises, still in the same terms. If an increase in radiation in the environment is small as a percentage of background, no harm has been done. Now, if this were believed in good faith, surely there would be publicly available figures for background radiation to serve as a basis for measuring any increase. Such figures are said not to exist. Complicating factors are adduced; for example, that levels of natural radiation vary from place to place. But then measurement devices can be moved from place to place. Weapons testing has enhanced radiation levels in the environment. But if radiation levels were established, the impact of other sources could be measured nevertheless. If public-health decisions are made on the basis of supposed safe rates of increase of radiation exposure, it surely behooves those who make such decisions to supply themselves with a basis for their calculations. Lately the meaning of the word “background” is shifting, so that it refers simply to whatever is there, with the implication that existing levels are safe. What constitutes the area to be described as “background”? If the only significant source of radiation for a mile in every direction is the fish in my soup, what comfort can I find in the fact that, averaged out over some unspecified area, the radiation “dose” is insignificant?

These calculations are rather insanely abstract. Contrary to vivid experience, Sellafield apologists seem to imagine that the wastes put into the environment are in fact “dispersed.” So they speak often of “undetectable” harm, the kind that is owed to the plant but cannot be attributed to it. For them the word means something very like “nonexistent.” Sellafield officials are reported to have asked the area county council — in which Sellafield is well represented — for permission to raise emissions.²⁷ The new levels would produce, by the reckoning of the council’s radiation expert, one extra cancer a year. It was agreed that this undetectable death would probably occur in the population near the plant. Permission was granted. Of course that was when the death from cancer of one child in sixty in Seascale, the nearest village, was still undetected. Radiation-induced cancers among the Sellafield work force are undetected, because the plant management has never accepted that any cancer has resulted from working there, though it admits contamination is commonplace.

The use of Cumbrian lakes as reservoirs for cities sheds an interesting light on the practice of expressing cancer rates as multiples of regional or national rates. The runoff from the mountains would surely concentrate contaminants in the drinking water of large populations. The nearness of Sellafield to Manchester and Liverpool is seldom alluded to, but there are hundreds of thousands of people living within the range of its effects. So far as I can discover, illness in such populations only serves to make health anomalies nearer the plant appear less exceptional, harder to “detect.”

Information, for want of a better word, is always suspect, and it is continuously undercut. On page 1 of The (London) Times of May 21, 1985, there appeared an article titled “‘Plutonium food’ sought for children,” an article which fairly epitomizes the complexities of following this issue in the British press. It was said to be based on leaked minutes of a meeting of representatives of government agencies whose duties and expertise were relevant to the situation at Sellafield, including the Department of Health and Social Services. The stolen minutes were supplied to a parliamentary committee by Greenpeace. At this meeting it was allegedly proposed that “volunteer” children should be given plutonium-laced food to see how it affected their bodies. The proposal was roundly denounced by the committee. One of those present is reported to have said, “‘How many parents would volunteer their children? Are we living in the real world?’”

The DHSS should have whatever data there might be about the human impact of radioactive contamination in Britain. While one is struck by the low level of moral refinement that would be reflected in the notion of feeding a toxin to children to observe whether and how they are poisoned, stranger by far is the apparently profound naivete reflected in such a suggestion. To act as though no information on the subject exists, and that the way to develop information would be to perform an experiment on human children, is truly remarkable, though this latter may reflect a sensitivity to the views of animal-rights groups, which are mighty in Britain. The Enclyclopaedia Britannica has a thing or two to say about the toxicity of plutonium, and there is a scientific literature of some quality and interest which should be known, or at least known to exist, by individuals who have made plutonium their stock-in-trade.

In this case it was subsequently reported in The Observer that Greenpeace had been “condemned by the House of Commons Environment Committee for falsely alleging that it had been suggested that Cumbrian children be given food contaminated by radioactivity.”²⁸ In the same article, for good measure, it was also reported that a former Greenpeace spokesman had signed on as advisor to a new scheme for depositing wastes in the sea floor. In light of the peculiarities of British press and secrecy laws, I think it is always reasonable to wonder about such things as “leaked minutes,” because it seems extremely likely that any leaked information is actually planted. For why should the publication of such information not bring down penalties, when, under the same government, the offices of the BBC and the New Statesman have been raided and searched by the police, The Observer has been forbidden to allude to information contained in certain of its own articles (having to do with a book by a former MI₅ agent), and so on? The authenticity of the reported suggestion is said in the Times article to have been confirmed by the managers of Sellafield, British Nuclear Fuels, who explained that”the idea of feeding children contaminated food was not a serious suggestion; it was a throw-away remark.” The chairman of the committee and a Conservative MP are both named in the article as harshly critical in their reaction. It was the chairman who put the question about living in the real world. Perhaps the government wished to distance itself from BNF, in preparation for new management and implied reform. It may be that this select committee wanted to get its ignorance on record — where ignorance is exculpatory ’tis folly to be wise. The subsequent renunciation of the minutes does no more than to cast doubt on their authenticity, nuancing the effect, so that the question of competence can remain unresolved.

But the oddest thing of all is that, as the Times article implicitly acknowledges, the feeding of plutonium to children living in the area of Sellafield is entirely redundant. The children there have already been fed plutonium. Another suggestion reportedly offered at the meeting was that “placentas and still-born children should be analysed for concentrations of radioactivity.” Reports in other sources indicate that this is in fact being done. Another article in The Times reports confirmation by officials that aborted and stillborn babies, afterbirths, and children who die in accidents are tested for plutonium concentrations.²⁹ Children have been experimented upon ab ovo and, together with shellfish-eating fishermen who have been used for “monitoring,” they constitute two ends of a continuum whose intervening stages might be inferred. And of course there are the children dead of leukemia, whose peers and siblings surely bear watching, and all the presumptive plutonium eaters of Cornwall and northern Wales and northern and western Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It surely would be strange to respond to having fed plutonium to children with the suggestion, even as a “throw-away remark,” that plutonium should be fed to children. To propose that the thing should be done is to deny that it has been done already. To renounce the report that such a proposal was ever made intensifies this denial. Then all the outrage directed against what is as if merely suggested or alleged puts those who act out disapproval in a proper moral position. The parliamentary committee meeting is like a ritual in which reality is magically altered, evil is resisted, and sanity affirmed, an effect reiterated in the subsequent, quite plausible denial that this remarkable proposal was ever made. But as I write and as you read, plutonium is flowing into the human environment, courtesy of this same government.

Perhaps I should use my own reaction to interpret this artifact, this putative stolen glimpse into epochal deliberations, reported in a reputable newspaper favorably disposed to government and industry. At first I thought, These people are very foolish, very ignorant, and, I imagined, dabblers, sheltered incompetents. I forgot that, when the huge state and private companies which have marketed nuclear construction and equipment, as well as radioactive materials, and have undertaken the transporting of wastes — and the supply of expertise — are taken into account, the British nuclear industry is old, vast, highly elaborated, and profoundly influential. And I forgot that these people have pulled off the public-relations coup of all time, inverting every rule, pouring out “routinely” all the toxins we are always assured no foreseeable accident could release from any reactor, doing so without qualm or hesitation, without any loss of face or of moral confidence. Only think how many people outside Britain have known this for decades and never said a word.

To compete with great success in a sophisticated industry requires and implies sophistication. This success is based not on technical competence so much as on an amazing gift for concealing the obvious. And the trick is working even now. Why should the food given hypothetical “volunteer” children be laced with plutonium? Why should the autopsy tissue of actual children, who were in no sense volunteers, be tested for plutonium? Why not radioactive iodine, which is vented from the plant’s stacks? Why not cesium 137, which flows into the sea, contaminating meat and milk and fish? Better still, why not all three, with a lashing of chemical solvents that break down reactor cores and a soupçon of the uranium dumped daily by the chemical plant up the coast? Plutonium is only an aspect of the problem, and not the most acute by any means. If the emphasis on it is intentional, it is shrewd, because it tends to simplify and therefore minimize the problem.

Bother about the stolen minutes makes the alleged suggestion sound more untoward than it really is, measured against other reported policies. An article published in The Guardian titled “Radiation tests ordered on Sellafield food” describes a plan by the government “to take samples of food to test whether it has been contaminated” by a recent series of leaks from the plant.³⁰ The tests were to be coordinated by the National Radiological Protection Board, the incredibly feckless agency responsible for monitoring public exposure to radiation. The point of the study will be “to try to establish how much radioactive waste has entered the food chain” (italics mine). The design of the study is very interesting. “A sample of the local population will be asked to buy twice as much of the food they normally purchase over a seven-day period.” One half of the food “will then be analysed in government laboratories.” Clearly the object is to establish levels of intake. Otherwise food would simply be tested at random. In other words, the thing to be established is how much “radioactive waste” is eaten by individuals — what tastes or habits or budgetary considerations might result in high levels of ingestion. Ethically, this is more than a little similar to the disclaimed suggestion that, in The Observer’s words, “Cumbrian children be given food contaminated by radioactivity.” While children are neither explicitly included in the later study, nor excluded from it, they are among the population whose food is presumed to be contaminated. And since they are not prevented from eating it, or provided other food, whether their exposure is noted by scientists or not is a question of very little interest.

And still there is the matter of singling out food as the “pathway” of radiation exposure. The spills into the sea and air could impinge in all sorts of ways. More to the point, as usual they are treated as novel and alarming, though the whole landscape has been exposed to accumulative contamination for decades.

The 1976 Nuclear Energy in Britain, the British government publication mentioned earlier, describes as follows the work of the Biology Department of the National Radiological Protection Board: “In order to derive appropriate standards for air concentration and maximum permissible body content, the distribution, retention and excretion characteristics of these materials [plutonium, americium, and curium] following their intake by experimental animals is studied.” Also studied are “the mechanisms of production of chromosome aberrations by ionising radiations.” Interestingly, these passages do not appear in the 1981 edition of the same pamphlet. They certainly indicate that the government has sponsored research by the NRPB of a kind to clarify the issue of the health effects of plutonium contamination. Yet the government claims to have no such information, as for example in the case of the Black Report on the leukemia deaths of Cumbrian children in 1984.

According to the 1976 edition of Nuclear Energy in Britain, “the most important route of entry of radioactive substances into the body is by inhalation and deposition in the lungs.” Yet inquiries always imply that ingesting these materials would be the most important source of exposure to them, even in an environment where household dust is radioactive. Again, focusing on one “route of entry,” like focusing on plutonium, makes the contamination seem much less complex and pervasive than it obviously is.

Reading over the news of decades, one grows accustomed to certain faces, which appear from time to time in the murky chiaroscuro of photographs like fish nosing up against the side of a tank, a little startled to be reminded again that there is a world to which they are of interest. The fine, mild face of John Dunster appears from time to time. I saw it recently on my own television screen. He and other British worthies had been enlisted to explain the nature and consequences of the events at Chernobyl to the American public. They were gravely reassuring.

The most recent news I have of John Dunster is an article from the British magazine New Scientist by Michael Kenward, describing yet again the work of the National Radiological Protection Board.³¹ The New Scientist is always of interest, being widely read in America, and being a trove of cryptogrammatic journalism. So an article on the NRPB is of interest for a number of reasons.

The NRPB, we are told, is pinched by lack of money. British journalism often adopts a cozy tone in discussing parsimony, especially where it is seen to abet incompetence in the government. A recent role filled by the NRPB, after Chernobyl, was “the matter of advising the government, few of whose ministers knew an isotope from their elbow.” This same government has been running a nuclear rag-and-bone shop for decades. Considering the very great decisions, great in terms of their consequences, that Britain has made for the whole world, in massively polluting the sea, in producing plutonium in quantity, and in treating the stuff of doom as an article of commerce, it has taken upon itself a positive obligation to be capable of even finer discriminations. The NRPB is, according to the article, a small, besieged organization, which lost fifty staff members to budget cuts between 1980 and 1982, and which still struggles with a shrinking budget. It was obliged at the time of Chernobyl to inform its government of the consequences of radioactive contamination. No one in Whitehall, no advisor for the Ministry of the Environment or the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, entities responsible for approving waste dumping and emissions — and they do approve, heartily — none of these people was competent to describe the nature of radioactive contamination.

This may seem odd, among the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, yet I am very inclined to believe it. Rather than being seen as reducing the government’s authority, ignorance actually seems to bolster it, amateurism being a term of praise among these people. There is really no reason to imagine the Minister of the Environment swotting up on the mutagenic properties of alpha-emitters when the possession of such information could only bring regret, given that the British environment is already salted with them and that the government is committed to a policy of always greater waste accumulation in that densely populated island, and that neither law nor custom demands competence from him, even of the most general kind, any more than they expose him to the painful obligation to speak the truth in these matters of pressing national and international interest.

The article has a tone of having taken a deep breath and made a fresh start, which invites readers to forget what they may have read yesterday. After all, at the time of this article, British nuclear issues had been filling the press, including the New Scientist, since the fall of 1983, about thirty-one months, and had arisen in pressing forms at intervals since the late fifties. Yet it is as if Britain were an enchanted island, its government aroused from Keatsian indolence only by an alien east wind. In fact, the government at first insisted Chernobyl had not had a significant effect on Britain. And, to clinch the argument, it did not test for contamination. Or it was testing, but a rain began to fall and the NRPB had to move its instruments indoors to keep them from getting wet — another New Scientist version of the story.³² Or it tested only in England, one cauliflower and one cabbage in the northwest, one sample of spring greens in the center, elsewhere “two of parsley, four of spinach, four of cauliflower, one of rhubarb, fourteen of cabbage, five of broccoli, four of eggs, and a single trout,”³³ like supper in a Peter Rabbit story. In an article published before the extent of contamination came to light, the New Scientist reported matter-of-factly that “people would have received, on average, 0.008 millisieverts extra in one week from radioactivity in the air … 0.002 millisieverts from drinking tap water for one week …” etc. These calculations to the third decimal place came from the Ministry of the Environment, the parsley testers, and were presented under the title “A lot of fuss about a few millisieverts.”³⁴ Information seems to have a very short half-life. For weeks the British bought and consumed highly radioactive food, specifically lamb contaminated because the pastures were hot. Then hundreds of thousands of sheep and lambs were removed from the market — temporarily, of course. Need I say, the areas along the Irish Sea and in Scotland — coincidentally, those most affected by radioactivity from Sellafield and Dounreay — proved to be especially badly contaminated?

Interpreted as it is in Kenward’s article, the delay in government response is attributable to the outré and uncongenial character of the circumstances these ministers are suddenly obliged to deal with. There is no allusion to the oddness of the fact that the government does not routinely monitor radiation levels around its two most important and controversial installations, though both have histories of accident and both have been associated with elevated cancer rates, and both have been the subject of international protests.

It will be remembered that Chernobyl came to world attention first because it set off an alarm in a nuclear plant in far-off Sweden. If radiation came down with special vengeance in the regions of these two British nuclear installations — which are represented as technical miracles except when they are being defended as old and shabby — surely their alarms should have responded at some point and the fact should have been reported to the British government, since every government in the Northern Hemisphere was watching the effects of Chernobyl in those days.

One may imagine alarms that never sound, or alarms that sound so often they are not attended to. However it may have been, Britain declared itself unaffected by the cloud from Chernobyl, during the time, perhaps, that the NRPB was describing to ministers the prevalence and health implications of the elbow. The article says that in the days after Chernobyl this “radiation watchdog” worked overtime “to supervise the monitoring of air and rain from the east.” They must have forgotten to switch something on.

The article that has set me to pondering is a comprehensive description of the work of the NRPB, which the organization itself was outlining in a “corporate plan” just at the time of Chernobyl. (I must ask my reader not to be put off by acronyms. I am persuaded, more or less, that they exist to repel inquiry, to suggest expertise, and also to suggest drab toil taken on for the rest of us by those whose blood is thin enough to make tedium congenial, and to starve out the full-blooded vice and full-blown madness that might rage among others entrusted with such great responsibilities. Such officious nonsense is a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on doors behind which things are transacted which should disturb us all.)

John Dunster himself is quoted describing the organization he directed thus: “‘The board aims to establish an overall policy in radiation protection that provides a proper standard of safety without unduly hampering the beneficial practices giving rise to exposures.’” In other words, it exists to adjust exposure standards to “‘beneficial practices.’”³⁵ The director of the NRPB, longest-serving member of its international counterpart, believes that practices giving rise to radiation exposure can still be beneficial. One craves elaboration. Yet there would be little value in it. As the article notes parenthetically, “(It isn’t the NRPB’s job to decide on the government’s policy, so, as Dunster admits, ministers are quite free to ignore the board’s advice.)” So the policy is merely “advice,” which “ministers”—who, as we have just been told, tend not to know isotopes from elbows — can ignore. This is most wonderful.

Writers on government sometimes remark that Britain has had trouble generating a concept of the state. The problem of the state of Britain is that while on the one hand nothing seems really independent or distinct from government, on the other hand, when responsibility is to be located, the government recedes like a dream and is nowhere to be found.

We have seen in Michael Kenward’s article how the curtain rose on ministers all unsuited to deal with nuclear issues at the time of Chernobyl. In 1970, we are told, the government set up the NRPB “when it realized that all of the organizations in Britain with any knowledge of radiation and its effects on people were part of the nuclear establishment and were, therefore, compromised in the eyes of the public.” This nuclear establishment was and is a creature of the state, funded, shielded, and patronized by the government, and flourishing in the balmy atmosphere of Crown Immunity, where no acts of Parliament apply, and under the protection of laws affecting national defense and commercial confidentiality as well as the Official Secrets Act, and under the supervision of ministers who have not made themselves competent in the area of their responsibility, and who are very much inclined to waive such standards as the government pretends to. If the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, which carried out the policies of the government, became discredited, why was the government itself not discredited? Why does it have no obligation to generate and enforce standards of practice for which it will answer to the public? And what is a government, in any case, that can shed a compromised institution like a dirty shirt? When the UKAEA was abandoned in favor of the NRPB, the new entity was staffed from the ranks of its predecessor, with John Dunster as its head. British Nuclear Fuels, which now operates Sellafield, was created in the same way for the same reasons. The plutonium factory itself had its name changed from Windscale to Sellafield to rid it of an evil reputation. Recently that company’s management was replaced, because the government lost confidence in it. The new management immediately retained the services of a public-relations firm. It now shares advertising space with Greenpeace.

This changing of letterheads and images neither promises nor effects any change in government policy or industry practice. “Practice” at Sellafield merges quite indistinguishably with accidents and spills and faulty record keeping, in any case. So, while there are no meaningful standards, the greater problem is the unsuitability of the facility to comply with standards should they exist. Again, this hapless plant is and always has been the exclusive property of the British government.

When Henry VI brought England to ruin in the fifteenth century, there was some debate as to whether the King was a saint or an imbecile. In either case, since he could not be expected to understand the evil that went on around him, he was not to be faulted for it. The British government is, as an idea, some such specter of irreducible innocence and sanctity, liable to being badly served in the very degree that it is innocent. This could very well be nothing more than the survival of some especially successful medieval public-relations campaign. Why old myths should be assumed to be more respectable in their origins than new ones I do not know. The point is simply that the phantom sovereign, always to be revered and never held to account, is a major part of the phenomenon of political sovereignty in modern Britain.

Yet clearly the government—“ministers,” in the terms of Michael Kenward’s New Scientist article — is always decisively involved in what happens. It reserves to itself truly extraordinary powers. For example, the NRPB corporate plan will give the government an idea of the board’s plans and activities “in words of as few syllables as possible,” that is, appropriate to the understanding of imbeciles. Yet the reason for preparing a plan the ministers might understand is to allow them to override it: “If the government wants to point its watchdog at new scents, then at least it has something to go on, some false trails to abandon.” So this “independent” watchdog agency is to allow its agenda to be set by the government, which is also the nuclear industrialist and trash collector.

The NRPB is reported to be “embarrassed” financially and hinting obliquely for a little increase in staff. This is poignant. It is always touching to see how British institutions struggle against the hard demands of government thrift. It is also an instance of the enormous power of the government to expedite its policies by omission. By failing to fund its monitoring agency at an adequate level, it is preparing a defense for itself and the agency as well, in the event that things are done now which will someday have to be disowned. The government is rendering itself less competent, preparing a more thoroughgoing deniability, perhaps to constrict the painful environmental information of recent years, scant as it has been, or perhaps in preparation for the greatly expanded plutonium extraction and waste storage and dumping that will take place at Sellafield and Dounreay in the near future.

In its straitened circumstances the NRPB has begun to accept privately contracted work, though it is said to be loath to do so because these projects take time away from basic research on the biological effects of radiation. In other words, private interests share with the government the right to set the agenda of Britain’s “radiation watchdog.”

At the same time, the NRPB maintains Britain’s place in the nuclear councils of the world, because “Britain has to live with international standards on radiation if it is to persuade the public that it is behaving responsibly.” According to the article, such standards “tend to be cooked up” by international committees. This kind of language gives a fair sense of the function and standing of such regulations. The legalism of our culture predisposes Americans to believe in their potency. But the British do not assign any significance even to standards they set for themselves, when advantage lies in ignoring them. Crown Immunity is an elegant concept and an important fact. It means that law is not considered fit to act as a restraint on government. That this notion shades off into similar protections of private economic interests is an aspect of the problem the British have always had in making distinctions between government on the one hand and economic power on the other. The extraordinary devotion of a government enterprise like British Nuclear Fuels to profit has been much encouraged by ministers of both parties. Considerations normally assumed to weigh in the thoughts of government — for example, foreign policy, an art which must pass into desuetude as trade in plutonium spreads through the world — obviously count for little over and against profit. There is absolutely nothing else to be gained. Yet profit must be overtaken fairly quickly by an array of misfortune.

This is very alarming. Members of the British Parliament are employed as paid lobbyists and are not required to declare the interests whose advantage they are paid to seek in their role as Parliamentarians. An arrangement so well suited to invite and express venality might be expected to produce it in a very pure form. Yet no mere mammonism is sufficient to account for so dismal a project as Sellafield, and what the New Scientist article refers to serenely as “the propensity with which British Nuclear Fuels polluted the Irish Sea with its radioactive discharges.”

This piece of journalistic muddle will give a fair sense of the form in which information appears in the British press. I am extremely reluctant by now to postulate guile, simply because this strange pattern is so ubiquitous.

As often, very bad news is presented obliquely, in tones that suggest a special good fortune is being described, a government full of humanity in the form of foible and limitation. The actual news content in the piece is startling. The government disavows competence in matters nuclear but will curtail and direct the work of those who are competent to advise it. The staff of this supposedly independent agency is headed by a health physicist present at the creation of the world’s dirtiest nuclear facility. Greenpeace members, described as floating offshore from Sellafield and “watching in amazement as effluent gushed out through the pipe,” go afterward to the NRPB to see if they have been irradiated by a system constructed with its director’s blessing. The board scientists have marketed their time to private companies and therefore cannot “expand their knowledge of the biological effects of radiation,” yet they are called in to advise on “the effects of the radiation that seeps out of Sellafield on people living in the area.” The board sits in on international committees to persuade its own public that “Britain” is behaving responsibly. Radon gas “pervades every home in the country.”

As if to refine upon perfection, the article concludes that Chernobyl has brought attention to the need to study the biological effects of radiation, having only two paragraphs before alluded to the radiation exposure of the population near Sellafield. Since this radiation exposure is precisely the responsibility of John Dunster, among others, it conforms entirely to my model of the workings of the British official mind that such questions should focus on an event in the Ukraine.

John Dunster also figures very prominently in Patrick J. Sloyan’s article on Sellafield in New York Newsday, May 20, 1986. It seems he has a map on his office wall where he can point to the “lake” of plutonium Sellafield has created off the British coast, an “almost 300-square-mile elliptical area at the end of the pipeline,” the residue of the more than 500,000 curies of plutonium the plant has poured into the sea. What does John Dunster say as he ponders Lake Plutonium? “‘So damn expensive, hard to believe they throw it away.’”³⁶

But this remark raises a very important question. To say that plutonium is expensive is to say it is valuable. In fact, only plutonium 239 is usable in nuclear plants or weapons. An article in New Statesman reports that there is no limit on releases of the unstable isotope plutonium 241, and that 550,000 curies of it have been released into the sea.³⁷ Are only those emissions limited or measured that represent straightforward economic loss? By “plutonium” do Dunster and others mean only plutonium 239?

John Dunster can take heart, however, if he is oppressed by the loss of plutonium. Walter Marshall, who looks in photographs like Tweedledum, but who has been made a lord for his previous accomplishments and is head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, has found plutonium in nature, surely the crown of his career. Recently he has given lectures in which he reassures the public that the small amount of plutonium released in a recent, much ballyhooed accident was only equivalent to the plutonium “naturally present in the top yard of soil over an area of just five square miles.” This perspective was admiringly reported by James Wilkinson, BBC-TV science correspondent.³⁸ A streak has been added to the tulip. It seems to be this man’s happy genius to bring perspective to nuclear issues. He is reported to have won applause at a meeting of the British Nuclear Forum by saying that the effects of radiation exposure within the Chernobyl exclusion zone would be “no worse than smoking a couple of extra cigarettes a year.”³⁹

Strange as it seems, the explosion at Chernobyl has been turned to great advantage, and with worrisome ease. That such a major event should seem to have had such limited effect is used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of all anxieties about man-made radioactivity in the environment. A recent essay in The Observer launches off with an attack on the press by a Cumbrian man named John Allan, comparing reports which described more loss of life at Chernobyl than Russian authorities subsequently confirmed, to reports about Sellafield — also, according to Mr. Allan, lies meant to sell newspapers.⁴⁰ Typically, the article compares the dangers of working in a nuclear plant to those of coal mining, and notes that closings of mines and steelworks have made the area overwhelmingly dependent on Sellafield in any case. Then it establishes that plutonium contamination incidents, called by the workers “taking a bit of ploot,” are entirely commonplace. Dr. Jack Strain, head of the medical staff at Sellafield, told a reporter that if they informed doctors whenever their patients among the work force were contaminated, “we would be writing 100 letters a day.” A man named Jim Horspool, apparently involved with Sellafield from its early days, propagates the view “that a certain amount of radiation could be beneficial.” As such people always do, he adduces the fact that we are exposed to radiation in nature. “‘Chadung,’ he cried. ‘That was a cosmic ray going straight through. Chadung. There goes another one.’” Then we are introduced to “Atomic Stan,” the worker contaminated in 1957, when he was among those who put fire hoses into the burning Windscale reactor. He describes having looked into the core itself. The son of a stonemason who died in middle age of stone dust in his lungs, Stan is now seventy-one and smoking thirty cigarettes a day. The article describes tours of the plant arranged by BNF, and an exhibition which demonstrates the radioactivity of Cornish granite and of a luminous watch face.

The gist of the article is that radiation has indeed received a bad press. Workers accept the risk with “a kind of quiet pride,” a risk that compares favorably with those of other industries, or at least bears comparison flattering to both traditional industry and the nuclear industry. The quiet pride of Sellafield workers, we are told, is like the attitude of miners toward the risks of lung disease or cave-ins. This is a disturbing evolution in industry apologetics, since it was supposedly the benevolent hope of the nuclear industrialists to relegate such suffering to the brutal past.

There are stories in the press which give insight into the obscurity surrounding the health issue, for example, one in the The (London) Times⁴¹ about a man named Harry King, who worked inside the Sellafield plant in a room with an inoperative air filter. He was found to have been exposed to an overdose of plutonium. In the course of time his teeth and hair fell out. He developed cataracts, and finally died of brain cancer. BNF paid his widow £8,000 compensation but did not accept responsibility for his death. The physician at Sellafield, Dr. Jack Strain, has said that when workers are contaminated it is explained to them that no one has ever developed side effects from working in the nuclear industry. This assurance might have required some revision after Chernobyl, though perhaps not, given its fairly spectacular imperviousness to deaths like Mr. King’s. BNF, as of February 28, 1986, the date of the Times article, had paid £246,233 in compensation to Sellafield widows. This includes an award of £120,633 in 1985 to the family of a member of management staff.⁴² The company is initiating morbidity payments to those of its workers who are in the way of succumbing — to Weltschmerz, presumably.

These attentions do not fall like the gentle rain from heaven. BNF holds hearings at which claims for compensation are accepted or denied, on what basis God knows, unless it is the poignancy of the tale. If no one dies from working in a nuclear plant, obviously no one can be more or less deserving of compensation on other than sentimental grounds. Certainly the anguish of dying from nameless causes is much intensified by developing cataracts and losing one’s teeth and hair. So there would exist a humanitarian basis for such selectivity. And BNF has made cancer its favorite charity, and is therefore no doubt particularly moved when this malady appears among its work force.

Most cases are denied hearing in the first place—94 out of 164, according to the article in The Times, which explains that BNF had set up its compensation system to avoid the expense and delay of legal procedings. This is an impressive tribute to the government’s faith in their objectivity, more striking in view of their stated lack of confidence in the plant’s management during this same period. The figures suggest settlements in sixty-eight cases averaging less than £300, or about $500. An indication of the job status of those who do most of the dying, presumably. Thrift, at least, appears to be served by the arrangement.

The importance of the assertion that no one dies from working in a nuclear plant to those responsible for the management of Sellafield would seem to militate against pure objectivity in adjudicating the grievances of those who feel a family member has in fact died from working in the nuclear industry. To admit to responsibility in any death would establish that there are conditions in which exposure to radioactive materials traumatizes the human organism fatally. The ramifications of such a concession would be very great, the uproar among widows and orphans being only a leitmotif. For it is the impeccable safety record of the industry itself as much as anything that predisposes the government to view with skepticism any suggestion that they might be creating health problems in the general public. In fact, comb the literature as I may, I find no allusion to experiments of any kind that bear out the view of the authorities about the nature of radioactivity. Rather than producing research that indicates the degree of innocuousness of radioactive materials required to justify practices at Sellafield, they defend themselves with claims that their harmfulness cannot be proven. “An observed association between two factors does not prove a causal relationship,” in the words of the Black Report on childhood leukemia near Sellafield.

There are many occasions in which it seems that the interests of industry must influence scientific research. The Black Report, granting elevated levels of both radiation and leukemia in the area of Sellafield, and observing that irradiation is the only known cause of this illness, recommended research to discover other possible causes. Subsequently the Human Leukemia Virus Centre has been founded in Glasgow to research the role of viruses in the onset of leukemia, specifically in the phenomenon of leukemia clusters.⁴³ Such excesses within geographical areas have been found near many British nuclear sites.

Since both leukemia and irradiation depress the immune system, I suppose we will all be kept busy reading about viral infections associated with cancer. It will be implied, I am sure, that observed association should be construed as causal relationship.

An article published in the New Scientist in 1986 titled “Clampdown at Sellafield” describes a bold and assertive government that has “decided to step in and curb airborne radioactive pollution from nuclear plants,” startling both BNF and environmentalists “by announcing plans to set both an overall limit and numerical limits for specified radionuclides and groups of radionuclides.”⁴⁴ Interestingly, this initiative was taken just at the same time the cloud was floating west from Chernobyl, and thus, presumably, by those very same gentlemen so unschooled in such matters as to have boggled at big words like “isotope.” This little article goes on to explain: “At present, airborne emissions are monitored — but there are no specific authorisations, as there are for liquid discharges, to control permitted levels of gases, mists or dusts containing radioactive contamination.” However, the article notes serenely, “the company is worried that it may have problems keeping to the new limits if it wants to maintain the throughput of its reprocessing activities while vital pollution control plant is out of action during maintenance.” In other words, no variety of emission is controlled at all except what comes down the pipeline, and the priority given to “throughput” is such that the plant continues to function even while “vital pollution control plant,” whatever that can amount to, is out of commission. Once again, it is surely reasonable to wonder what all the NRPB’s research was for, if these emissions have been unlimited all these years.

This is no Faustus legend. Science is not at the root of the problem, nor is an overweaning desire for knowledge, or perhaps even power. The plutonium factory at Sellafield merely thrives on the failures of science, as an undertaker thrives on the failures of medicine. Any great curiosity about the mysteries of Being would have led these gentlemen to read up on their stock-in-trade — a pardonable hubris, surely, beside the incurious good cheer with which they have scattered it over the landscape. The refuse collector in Brazil who stripped the lead shielding off the capsule of cesium 137 to sell it was engaging in a naive commerce, very modest in scale but similar in kind to the commerce centered in Sellafield. He did not know what he was doing. It is as if the refuse collectors at Sellafield do not know what they are doing, either. Cesium 137 is among the contaminants released in important quantities through their pipeline into the sea, and among those toxins most present in seafood. The terrible deaths of the people in Brazil who came in contact with this substance indicate that harm is to be feared from exposure to it. Yet not until the accident at Chernobyl, when it fell over Europe and was treated, briefly despite its persistence, as a public health problem on the Continent, was it treated as a problem in Britain, where it has accumulated in the environment for decades.

But can I suggest that men who have long mingled with the premier nuclear scientists and technicians of the world do not know what they are doing when they pour radioactive materials into the European environment? Is another conclusion possible? This is not a rhetorical question. While behavior of the kind I describe is what one fears of terrorists, and while there can only be malice at the bottom of policies so abusive that an enemy might blanch at the thought of occasioning such everlasting, indiscriminate harm, still is it to be imagined that these men have quite knowingly set out to do what they have done?

They must have known better once.

A London Times supplement devoted to Calder Hall, on the occasion of its commencing operation in October 1956, included an essay titled “How the reactors were planned,” written by B. L. Goodlet, engineer in charge of design study, which described radiation hazards as follows:

The term contamination implies loose radioactivity — dust or droplets — which may be absorbed into the body through skin abrasions or by breathing, eating or drinking. The counter-measures against contamination are complete enclosure of all processes involving radioactive materials and rigorous controls of the effluent — gaseous, liquid, and solid — from all plants using radioactive substances. ⁴⁵

The plants were not designed to meet this standard, however, and over the years theory seems to have conformed itself to practice, becoming primitive and improvised to suit the needs of the industry.

I think moral aphasia might be a useful concept. It is no doubt apparent from my long approach to Sellafield that in my view a civilization with such a pervasively violent history, in the course of which it has acquired the highest estimation of its own decency and mildness, has developed a peculiar trick of mind, not to be called a divided nature, since the conviction of particular goodness always one way or another justifies or conceals or expedites really remarkable transgression.

Any schoolchild knows better than to do what these men do, transporting toxic materials over thousands of miles of sea despite the risks of accident or seizure — do we know these things have never happened? — or bringing them across the Channel, and through London by train, and then storing them in quantity among leaking silos and earth ditches, until they can be bathed in solvents, the greater part of the uranium 235 and plutonium 239 extracted from the resulting broth, and the rest flushed into the sea. Then plutonium 239—bomb-grade, that is — is stored at Sellafield, or returned by sea or by air to whomever it was that sent it to Britain as waste, so that it can abide forever as plutonium in undisclosed quantities in unknown hands in a world not remarkable for stability or, as I have just demonstrated, good sense.

In 1976 then-vice-chairman of BNF, Julian Avery, was reported by The (London) Times to have answered concerns about the possibility of terrorist actions in a “plutonium economy” with the remark that it is not plutonium but terrorism that should be eliminated.⁴⁶ Presumably Northern Ireland demonstrates the ease with which this is to be accomplished.

Like so many of the world’s sorrows, Sellafield, then Windscale, grew directly out of World War II. The United States attempted, after the success of the Manhattan Project, to monopolize nuclear technology, excluding the British along with everyone else despite the early prominence of British physicists in atomic research and despite their contributions to the building of the bomb. Newspapers and magazines of the period make it clear that relations between Britain and America after the war were not especially cordial. A member of Congress declared himself no more pro-British than pro-Russian, in response to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered in Missouri, which raised hackles among the American public by seeming to propose an Anglo-American alliance.

The closing down of access to technology seems to have been a reflex of pure alarm by a government that had arrived rapidly, though still too late, at a sense of the perils of “proliferation.” Since the United States never had any sort of corner on the relevant science — British accounts of the evolution of nuclear physics hardly include an American name — there is little reason to doubt that the attempt to control it was futile from the beginning. Margaret Gowing, historian of the British nuclear enterprise, declares that the bomb was their invention. I would eagerly concede them that distinction.

In any case, the British received no special treatment from us in the matter of atomic weapons development. As a result, they set about developing them on their own, with no other resources than “green fields and grey matter,” in a phrase of the period, and with such urgency that the construction of the plant at Sellafield was, as I have said, supposedly compromised by materials shortages brought on by the war. Since this fact is now used to account for the plant’s spectacular history of accidents, no major reconstruction of the basic plant can have been undertaken when time and the availability of materials allowed. Whether the jerrybuilding of the site was indeed a product of haste or not, the haste is notable in itself. The possession of atomic weapons established nations as powers, and Britain, still an empire at the time, was determined to keep its place in the counsels of the mighty. The United States may have been pressured by a fear that the Germans would develop the bomb first, and Russia may have been driven by the fear of conceding such an overwhelming advantage to a possibly hostile American government, but the British seem to have understood earliest the status-conferring properties of these new weapons. Their haste had no justification in terms of any threat to their safety. It must be laid to pique, and to a desire to retain their importance in the world. They had made a fresh demonstration of the practical value of their empire in the war just concluded, summoning troops from the ends of the earth. But Britain (perhaps England would be better here) seems always to have felt so vulnerable, in the matter of its wealth and importance, that any course of action or any policy could be justified as the expedient of desperation. Though Britain enjoyed greater relative wealth and dominance for a longer period of time than any other power after Rome, its behavior has always been predicated on littleness. At the end of World War II Britain had by far the strongest economy in Europe, and banks full of savings. There was no more pressing need for cheap than for hasty nuclear development. Yet both are treated now not only as justified in themselves but as excusing their inevitable consequences. A great continuing belief in the wisdom of early weapons policy is reflected in the ability of the Labour Party to destroy any electoral advantage that seems about to accrue to it by proposing that Britain rid itself of nuclear weapons. The party seems now headed for marginalization on the unaided strength of this issue, even while its constituency has a great practical need for a functioning party — a need which, in fairness, Labour is poorly suited to fill in any case, less so since Mrs. Thatcher abolished the elected major city governments that were Labour’s power base.

Britain has never had to justify to its people the possession of nuclear weapons on any grounds other than their assuring that the country would continue to cut an impressive figure on the world stage. It has never had to excuse the slovenliness with which the great enterprise was gone about on any grounds other than Britain’s littleness and poverty. Presumably it is the country’s exceptional depth of civilization, or its gift for taking the long view, that elevates it above the level of poseur in the minds of its people. In any case, it is assumed that Britain should be a world power, that extraordinary methods are necessary to make it one, that developing nuclear weapons was an appropriate course to take in assuring Britain’s place among nations. While we and the Russians pardoned ourselves as the defenders of opposed systems which we were persuaded could bring justice and the alleviation of suffering to other societies and generations, Britain, typically, scrabbled to shore up its own interests, narrowly defined. Seldom departing in public from the values with which Americans identify themselves, except to add emphasis in one instance, urge temperance in another, and imply, through a certain fretfulness, that the whole thing would be better if it were not so crudely managed, the British nevertheless acquired nuclear weapons to establish their independence from the United States, in heat and haste that look like desperation. Denied the use of testing sites in America, they considered exploding atomic bombs in Scotland and Yorkshire, and finally arranged to use Maralinga in the Australian interior, which they left severely contaminated with plutonium, as it remains to this day, as well as islands off the Australian coast, sending one especially notorious cloud drifting across the mainland from Monte Bello. Now, of course, the British test in Nevada.

The materials for these handsome acts of national self-assertion have come from Windscale/Sellafield and from Calder Hall, the plutonium-producing, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at the same site. As a plant primarily designed for the production of plutonium, with electricity generation as an ancillary function, Calder Hall served as prototype for the first generation of nuclear reactors in Britain. There has never really been a second generation. Not only were military and civilian uses not distinct, the former took priority over the latter in determining reactor design for both uses, since the reactors are not especially efficient as producers of electricity. Dounreay, in Scotland, was launched very early, in 1959—a breeder reactor, the wave of the future, or so it was thought at the dawn of the nuclear age, and so it may prove to be, insofar as these developments have not precluded a future. Plutonium would be needed to fuel such plants when the technology was perfected. Perhaps the British decision makers hoped to be the first into the field, with a prototype for the breeder and a supply of the material to run it. Export sales have always been a consideration of the first importance in the development of nuclear power.

Britain’s history especially predisposes it to keeping a world market in view, so perhaps such an explanation would account for the otherwise strange decision to build so many plutonium-producing plants, more than have ever been required to supply the fantastic demands of nuclear weapons development in the United States, for example. British strategic nuclear weapons seem to be numbered, for the purposes of international reckoning. Since even the British Parliament has no access to defense information, and since governments can conceal nuclear capabilities as they choose, the seeming disproportion between the scale of Britain’s plutonium production and its apparently modest defense needs is not based on information of sufficient quality to merit brooding over. Understating numbers of warheads would reduce pressure on Britain to enter into arms control negotiations, while overstating them would enhance national prestige at little cost and little risk, the force being meant to trigger grander events, not to sustain an exchange on its own.

The relation between British plutonium production and weapons production is asserted as often as it is convenient to invoke security and the national interest in behalf of Sellafield, though the plant has for a long time functioned mainly as a repository for foreign waste. A Martian, watching Germany and Japan ship toxins into Britain to be poured into its environment, might wonder why so much blood and sweat should have been expended in the defense of this same island. An occupying army is after all a survivable problem, and democracy a nostalgia where a government can, in secret, put an ax to the root of the culture that supposedly sustains it.

Be that as it may, Sellafield is a significant part of British national defense, as press and government reckon these things. Sellafield may indeed epitomize the phenomenon of national defense in the nuclear age, being a vulnerability not to be dreamed of in any country less well defended, a vast bull’s-eye for enemies or terrorists or plain misfortune.

Affronted by the American attempt to keep a monopoly on nuclear technology, the British set out to build bombs. That is how they tell the story. But if the technology had been handed to them, presumably they would have used it to build bombs. Why else should their exclusion have aroused such shock and frustration? In any case, they put a complex together to produce plutonium, tested ferociously where the locals permitted, built an entire series of plutonium-producing reactors with electricity production as a secondary feature, reprocessed and stocked plutonium, and built Dounreay, which has not functioned properly since it was switched on; which has a reprocessing plant of its own, sending radioactive effluents into Scandinavia; and which nevertheless sends wastes to Sellafield to be reprocessed, by stormy sea.

The output and commerce reflected in all this are clearly of startling magnitude. What Sellafield reflects in terms of the intentions of those who set all this in motion is probably not a simple question. The more secretive and narrowly based decision making is, the more eccentric it becomes, and often things happen for reasons that are foolish or bizarre, and therefore elude all surmise. Plutonium is an extraordinary substance, both waste and commodity, costly and dangerous to keep, dangerous and profitable to sell. Where it exists in quantity, as it does in Britain because of its Magnox reactors, and more recently because its expanding of reprocessing services brings in the plutonium-rich wastes of a great part of the world, there would be considerable pressure to find ways to use or be rid of the stuff. Ninety percent of the nuclear waste that has been dumped into the sea has been put there by Britain, presumably as a function of its role as universal dustman.

I speculate that the origins of it all may lie in that first decision to produce nuclear weapons, which led to the development of a plutonium-producing reactor, which was subsequently sold abroad as a power-generating reactor. A notable feature of the British Magnox reactor is that it produces wastes which cannot be stored for long periods. Reprocessing is a solution to this problem.

National prestige as well as enormous sums of money are at stake in all nuclear transactions. When Chernobyl exploded, supplanting the fire at Windscale as the most serious nuclear plant accident in history, Britain is reported to have brought pressure to bear on Italy to prevent it from closing a Magnox reactor; that is, one of the type of Calder Hall and the other British reactors of the first generation, and similar to the one at Chernobyl.⁴⁷ (British and Soviet physicists worked together in the pioneering days, so the similarity of their industries may suggest intellectual cross-pollination.) The economic interest of Britain as an exporter of nuclear technology, and also the interest of the British government in avoiding anxiety at home about the safety of these old reactors, seems to have prevailed over Italy’s disquiet.

Italy is among the countries whose waste is reprocessed at Sellafield. A benefit of selling reactors abroad which produce unstable wastes might be that the buyer will also be obliged to pay for the disposal of spent fuel rods. The potentialities for turning a profit are considerable, given the will. The history of Sellafield certainly demonstrates the injustice of Mrs. Thatcher’s chiding her countrymen for being laggard in this regard, by the way. But then it is always the case that people find themselves deficient in the things that in fact matter most to them, or seem to them most admirable, and in which they are least liable to be remiss. The British berate themselves with excessive caution, and with being slow about putting scientific discoveries into commercial application. Any student of the history of Sellafield will surely find them innocent on both counts.

It is clear from articles in the press of the time that the first British reactors were not considered an optimum design, even by those responsible for building them. That they should be gas-cooled was a choice encouraged by thrift. Since the old plants continue to function, long after the end of their design life, their deficiencies are by no means matters of academic interest, any more than their characteristic of producing “waste” with a high plutonium content.

Building reactors whose waste could not be stored locked Britain into reprocessing continuously and on a large scale. Sellafield, which was built to make fissile materials for bombs, has assumed the civil function of waste dumping, in the course of producing the same fissile materials. It has made an officious and energetic show of managing the unmanageable. Its patrons or clients in other governments have in fact done the same thing. They have evaded the most important and costly problem created by nuclear energy by paying the British to take if off their hands, temporarily, since winds and currents assure that their problems will not remain solved for very long. In the meantime, they can appear to have mastered this most difficult technology, and they can propagate their versions of it through the world. The clientele of Sellafield is a Who’s Who of technologically advanced countries: Japan, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and Sweden. France has its own pipeline into the sea at Cap de la Hague on the English Channel.

The relation between the civil and military functions of Sellafield is never clearly defined — a fact which limits its accessibility to EEC inspection, among other advantages. One Christopher Hinton engineered the pipeline and received an honor for it from that same government which forbade him to mention it in public. This discretion is consistent with anxieties about the wisdom of dumping toxins into the sea. Yet there is no indication that concepts like cumulative impact or long-term consequences were brought to bear in making the decision, though Britain was embarking on a policy whose course would be measured in decades at the least. The silence about the pipeline must indicate lingering doubt, or the anticipation of criticism of the kind that came up at the United Nations in 1958, when John Dunster defended the dumping as an experiment. While the results of this “experiment” revealed contamination — though at levels acceptable to the government — a more characteristic defense of Sellafield asserts that plutonium, being almost as heavy as lead, will lie on the sea floor, presumably somehow inert. Water passing through lead pipes is contaminated. So it seems logical that currents and tides passing across a sea floor on which rests a pool of sludge, including plutonium ash, would also become contaminated. In neither case does weight impede the process. Here again it should be borne in mind that plutonium has never been the sole or primary radioactive material released into the environment. So its peculiarities could not in any case justify the emissions from Sellafield.

While I am no physicist, I do know that radioactivity was observed in nature in the first place because certain substances give off small amounts of heat. Plutonium, and especially americium, into which it is converted as it decays, give off heat. Modest as my experience of the natural world might be, I am bold enough to suggest that when heat-generating materials are spread across the floor of a northern sea, a new influence on the movement of water is introduced. In Britain, even at this hour, learned men are struggling to account for the ferocious toxicity of spume in this unhappy region. I believe my hypothesis might be of use. Since contaminated water would be warm, it would come to the surface. The contaminants, being warm, and continuously warming the water around them, would not sink again. At the same time, more contaminants would be added from below. So the model according to which substances which are carried into the sea in water suddenly become impervious to being dispersed by water once they are in the sea seems flawed on several grounds.

Of course I am proceeding backward from observed phenomena, such as radioactive spume, radioactive sand, and radioactive wind. But this method is certainly superior to insisting on the appropriateness of a model which runs counter to observed phenomena. An amateur’s interest in the virulence of spume might distract attention from what really is a more important question — that is, why, with plutonium and all the rest pouring into the environment daily, it should be important to determine by what process the surf has become especially hot. The source of the problem is not far to seek, and the nearest way to containing it is equally clear. While dumping continues at an accelerating rate, with no prospect except for invidious change, to trace the movement of radioactivity from the bottom of the water to the top seems a misappropriation of effort. It is of a kind with the sponsorship of cancer research by British Nuclear Fuels, in that it tends to distract attention away from a situation that is extremely straightforward, toward its intractable consequences. Research projects and furrowed brows and a fluttering of white coats, things full of reassuring implications, at the same time create an aura of mystery where all is as plain as day.

The British government has just decided to build a pressurized water reactor at Sizewell, in England, after an inquiry that seems to have satisfied notions of rigor by continuing for months and producing, literally, scores of tons of testimony, and to have satisfied definitions of civility by ending with funny-hat party. As always with such inquiries, the government set the terms of the question and appointed the inquiry chairman, who not only presided over the affair but also determined its outcome — which is not binding on the government. Every bet is covered. The issue at Sizewell was whether the plant to be built was to be an advanced gas-cooled reactor, a British design, or a Westinghouse-type pressurized water reactor (PWR). Environmentalists were allowed to testify, though what they said against nuclear power itself was necessarily extraneous, and they appeared, when the time came, funnily hatted. The famous weight — that is, heft — of the information gathered in this inquiry certainly reflects the fact that elaborate cases can be made against the construction of reactors of either kind. Yet it is cited as evidence of the great deliberation with which Britain approaches nuclear decision making.

The committee chairman, Frank Layfield, decided in favor of the PWR, a decision that confirmed the wisdom of the government, which had favored it from the first. The decision was supported with assurances that the American design would be brought up to British safety standards. This may not involve great expense. Sizewell is already the center of a leukemia “cluster.” Both Sellafield and Dounreay satisfy British safety standards. Less extraordinary plants must therefore fall within them quite effortlessly.

In 1983 it seems a spill occurred at Sellafield which caused the beaches to be closed for months. This was one of those clustered events which must make the management at Sellafield, together with the British government and any lover of mankind, say alas and alack. In my credulous days I considered this an authentic and significant event, but I have begun to realize it bears scrutiny badly. I was living in England that year, and not long before the spill was reported, as I perused The Guardian, I came upon a little article on a back page in which it was stated that experts had begun to believe that it was more harmful to ingest plutonium than had previously been thought. Of course I was startled. For just then American public opinion was turning over as if for the first time the fact that we and our great competitor were acting as impresarios for the Day of Doom. Of all the terrors we had prepared for ourselves, nothing compared with plutonium, according to the lore shared at dinner parties among the thoughtful classes. The word “plutonium” leaped at me, conditioned as I was. I began to notice mention of this substance and its ilk in the news almost daily.

One accepts the news, for some reason. A fiction writer has to braid events into a plausible sequence. But the news is simply a series of reported incidents which, one assumes, manifest varieties of accident and causation, plausible if they were known. There are no grounds for this assumption. Sometimes the news reads suspiciously like unusually clumsy fiction. In litigious America, with its habit of trials and investigations, we always attempt to establish a narrative on the order of who did what to whom and why. This approach is full of problems, the chief one being that people become loyal to one narrative or another and lose interest in objectivity, together with respect for information that fails to confirm a favored version of plot and character. I can only assume many Americans read the same articles I read. They swarm that island, to the utter weariness of the natives and one another. But England is established, in their narrative, as a mild and scrupulous old nation which, like the lion in Mark Twain’s unfallen Eden, gorges on strawberries. So they see and do not perceive, hear and do not understand, full of that awe which Toqueville, precisely wrong, said Americans were incapable of feeling.

According to our narrative, poor Europe must endure our crude embrace or fall into one more crushing. It is a funny story, really. All the troglodyte behavior for which we can never apologize abjectly enough, all the stationing of troops and sticking the world full of missiles, are the single bond that ties us to Europe, the one proof, never sufficient, of loyalty and love. We make ourselves the worthy object of our own contempt for the sake of a civilization much richer and more populous than the Soviet Union.

We cannot absorb or retain information which would establish Europe as a major and not at all a brilliant actor in contemporary history. We have sacrificed our humanity to preserve countries that connive in the production of the worst sort of explosives and toxins and their release into the environment. There is nothing pleasant in this fact. It has no place in the story. When the Russians hear all the prattle about Western values they must surely assume they permit plutonium dumping. Who can argue? It may be more than their absolutist history that prevents them from being converted by the force of Western example.

I often wonder how the Russians interpret the silences and omissions in American journalism. Every country is ridiculous in its own way. We are at our most ridiculous when we imagine our bold, hectoring press with its armor of legal protections informing us, in some meaningful sense. Any grumbling about its excesses is shamed to silence by a reminder of the great freedom the press must have in order to do its great work. It is impossible to know the extent of its misfeasance without leaving the country. When Americans speak of its failures, they usually impute them to public indifference to foreign affairs, as if fine, plump articles on these subjects withered on the shelves, as if the American consumer pinched an item about former Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme’s secretly developing nuclear weapons over an eighteen-year period, and squeezed an item about the British secret service raiding the offices of the New Statesman and the BBC, and rejected them both in favor of an update on the Betty Ford clinic. News of the affairs of the world is not readily available to Americans. I believe this may be true for Russians and Chinese. If the origins of isolation are different in the three countries, that is less important than the fact of isolation, which is equally incompatible with democracy in every case.

The American zeal for establishing a narrative context for events may falsify as much as it clarifies. But it does at least set events one beside another to see how they cohere, and it acknowledges the importance of actors, who are assumed to be responsible and accountable for what they do. British news, by comparison, is simply a series of revelations. For thirty years a pool of plutonium has been forming off the English coast. The tide is highly radioactive and will become more so. The government inspects the plant and approves the emissions from it. The government considers the plant poorly maintained and managed, and is bringing pressure to lower emissions. The government is expanding the plant and developing another one in Scotland. Foreign wastes enter the country at Dover and are transported by rail through London. Finished plutonium will be shipped from Scotland into Europe by air. Whose judgment and what reasoning lie behind these practices and arrangements? The question is never broached. Information merely accumulates, without effect. The British government, the great constant behind the notional shifts of management, the proprietor and stockholder, never loses its ability to reassure the public, assuming the lofty role of inquirer into its own doings and finding nothing seriously amiss, nothing a little finger wagging will not put right, a little expression of lack of confidence in the management. It is very much as if the object of these revelations was to let the public know what it must accept.

Certainly the most striking effect of all the revelations to this point has been to produce quiet, while the government launches into the vast program of construction that will make Britain an ever greater center of plutonium extraction and waste dumping. Some of the writers and publications from which I have taken information seem courageous. But then since none of these articles seems to have done more than to inoculate public opinion against bad news still to come, how is a foreigner to judge any writer’s intent? No hearing will convene to assess the wisdom of shipping radioactive wastes through a populous capital, or dumping them into the sea, or extracting weapons materials from them to be shipped by air into Europe, and through North America to Japan. Bad news only intensifies the prevailing resignation.

I noticed the little article about possible adverse effects of ingesting plutonium. It was feared, the article said, that children absorbed the material many times more readily than adults. Soon afterward the matter of the contamination of the beaches of Cumbria arose. First an employee of the plant, nameless and faceless as figures in this narrative very often are, stopped to tell a young family not to allow their children to play on the sand. They wrote to their Member of Parliament, who raised a question about conditions near the plant. At about this time, a Greenpeace boat went out to cap the pipeline by way of protesting the gush of radioactive materials and solvents into the weary sea.

This is a very strange little story by itself. Something over a million gallons go down that pipeline in the course of a day. Could people working under water actually hope to cap a double pipeline through which so much toxic liquid was flowing? Capping the pipeline at Sellafield, if it could be done, would seem to involve the risk of backing up this enormous outflow, flooding the beach or the interior of the plant, a dubious piece of environmentalism. Their ability to close the pipe was said to have been taken seriously by someone and foiled. The mouth had been changed so that the cap they had prepared for it would not fit, a fact that led to speculation in the press about government surveillance of Greenpeace.

As the event was reported, these Greenpeace divers first went into the sea at the mouth of the pipeline, to take silt samples. They surfaced again through a slick, and discovered, when a Geiger counter in the boat indicated radioactivity at 1,500 times “normal” levels, that they were contaminated. Thus was discovered the great slick that closed the beaches of Cumbria, that made them get up and move, like Birnam Wood. (I have never seen a photograph of this giant convoy of trucks, moving back and forth, presumably for weeks, so I cannot speculate on the methods used to avoid spreading contamination en route to the site of disposal, wherever that may have been. Plant management denied the beaches were being removed. A large decontamination effort was undertaken, however, and since flotsam and seaweed in themselves could hardly have been sufficient to sustain such an effort, I incline to believe the reports that sand itself was removed. Testimony at the trial of BNF for its management of this incident described levels of radiation at ten thousand times background. ⁴⁸While it is not possible to assign any precise meaning to such figures, they clearly indicate an extreme situation. The trucks disappear from later accounts altogether. So does the attempt to cap the pipeline.)

Some days passed between the contamination of the Greenpeace divers and the closing of the beaches, which seems to have been the time it took for BNF to acknowledge that anything unusual had occurred. It has never been clear to me whether they did not know a spill had occurred, or whether they did not consider the event unusual. In all such events, delayed response is characteristic.

If the spill was serious enough to require a significant effort of decontamination, it would certainly have been prudent as well to relocate children and pregnant women while the decontamination was proceeding. When I imagine these residues of spent fuel, oxides fine enough to be carried in solvents into the sea and then to be brought in again by the tides and winds, I can only imagine that they would be highly particulate, and that when the sand was disturbed they would be winnowed out by any movement of the air, unless the sand was wet, in which case they would seep out with the moisture. In other words, I cannot imagine how the repair of the beaches could have failed to have intensified the contamination of the area, in terms of unavoidable human contact with it.

I find the going a little hard when I try to imagine a boat full of bright young men, literate in matters nuclear, with a Geiger counter on board, on their way to take silt from the floor of this notorious sea. Why did they go on this mission? Because radioactive wastes were being disgorged into the sea, at that very site. Did they expect to be contaminated, diving down to the plutonium-spewing orifice? Clearly they did not. It was supposedly an oily slick that made them radioactive when they returned to the boat. Where would this slick have come from? That pipeline. Therefore, they no doubt dived as well as surfaced through it. So here is the problem. Why would fit young men with their lives before them, diving near the pipeline because it released radioactivity, and who had a Geiger counter along, not test the condition of the water before they entered it? Putting aside the apparent fact of one particular slick, how can it have come as a surprise to them that they were contaminated, and why should they have treated the discovery that they were as meaning something exceptional had happened? If they really thought this radioactive emission problem was only of such magnitude that one could dive into the thick of the most prolonged and intense contamination in the world and rise out of it as fresh as Wordsworth’s Proteus, then they might make more profitable use of their time selling toy seals — the kind most resistant to radiation in the environment, as these conservation-minded folk are no doubt aware.

In fairness, Greenpeace seems to have a Geiger counter problem. Here we read how they had one along in the boat. But then when Chernobyl blew, the only Geiger counter that was used to provide readings on levels of radioactivity on the west coast of Britain belonged to a high-school science class. Surely we might have expected a flood of independent information from this sun-bronzed band of nuclear foes, since they do have Geiger counters, as this story proves. Yet they seem not to use them to maximum effect, and that is a pity, all the more so because their shortcomings in this regard replicate precisely those omissions of government, industry, the regulatory agencies, and the scientific community which create the aura of mystery around Sellafield, an uncertainty a little monitoring could so quickly dispel.

But let us return to the matter of narrative. Let us suppose the facts discussed so far were to be construed for the uses of fiction, and the writer was obliged to impose on them or discover in them that order of reasonableness and plausibility which could keep the reader from flinging the book out the window. Clearly the nuclear activists could not leap into the most radioactive sea in the world at the eye of its contamination and then register amazement that their Geiger counter was agitated. They might at most sail out and sail back in again. The idea of capping a pipeline from which comes a massive flow of toxic materials clearly must be scrapped on grounds of implausibility. And the detail concerning the contamination of the divers and their boat had best be crossed out, too, since the reader would wonder about the other ships in the Irish Sea that day and the catches pulled up through the toxic film and stowed in contaminated hulls and carried away into ports and countries where the name of Sellafield is never heard — America, for example. These environmentalists would no doubt be expected to think in larger terms than merely their own persons and property. According to reported testimony at the pollution trial — the first in British nuclear history — there were people on the beaches that day and fishing boats off the coast.⁴⁹

Without offending the reader unduly, the tale could be told in this way: Greenpeace declares the coast to be contaminated, couching the information, so as to make this fact seem surprising, in terms of the pipeline anecdote. After a few days, BNF admits that there has been an accident. In the fiction, this delay would make the spill seem less alarming and egregious than it would if the management responded with any kind of haste. At last they admit that solvents were indeed accidentally flushed into the sea. The beaches are closed, hauled away, replaced, and declared safe, though strollers are advised not to pick up bits of flotsam, which are still hot. Except for the removal of the beaches, no extraordinary measures are taken to protect anyone. We know from experience with conventional oil slicks how they devastate coasts and aquatic life. This slick, we are to believe, drifts in and is blotted up and hauled away — to some corner of that vast kingdom where radioactivity can do no harm, or back to the sea, to resume life as a slick. Obviously the beach must be considered radioactive over the long term, or there would be no point in moving it. So wherever it was put, it will be radioactive, over the long term.

This makes narrative sense, if the point and object of it all is the removal of severe radioactive contamination from the area of Sellafield. It would be very easy to imagine reasons for doing this. Putting aside the matter of any particular episode of contamination, the beaches had absorbed contaminants for years. The great concentration of radioactivity in surf and in seaweed and flotsam would make this inevitable. At some point it would have to become a problem, more especially because the area is the site of an enormous construction project which will continue over years of time. (Former BNF chairman Con Allday has written that instruments for sensing radioactivity inside Sellafield are so sensitive that alarms are sometimes triggered by the materials from which the plant is built. Where the materials are local and the construction reasonably recent, this may not be proof of great sensitivity, after all.) Perhaps the residues, filtering through the sand over all those years, have begun to stratify. Plutonium 241 goes critical in very small quantities. Criticality is a vast release of energy, deadly to anyone exposed to it. Sellafield as an environment is unique in history, and I have read nothing to guide me in imagining what would happen if, fifteen feet under the sand, a few tablespoons of volatile isotope converged. It might be an incident that would spoil a picnic. I have read that at Hanford in Washington State shifting of soil was required because wastes had seeped into it and were accumulating dangerously. The analogy here seems potentially useful. According to the New Scientist, in 1986 the Central Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry of the Environment suggested that “it would be prudent to place restrictions on any development along and off the coast near Sellafield which could disturb the concentrations of radioactivity building up in mud and silts.”⁵⁰

Maybe the beaches at Sellafield had begun to glow in the dark. Islands in the Pacific that were used for atomic testing glowed for years, and contamination levels at Sellafield are like those at testing sites. That would be an excellent reason for hauling the sand away. The matter arose conveniently in the winter months, avoiding any great disruption of the tourist season, at least for American tourists.

Then, too, cancers were accumulating at a rate that would be difficult to ignore. Just at this time a report by James Cutler prepared for Yorkshire Television stimulated a government-appointed commission to look into the leukemia deaths of children in Seascale, the village nearest the plant; the inquiry was headed by Dr. Douglas Black. The Black Report was a response to anecdotal information collected by television journalists, in the event, but the kind of story liable to gain currency even when doctors are legally prohibited from giving out information that is not officially authorized, as in Britain. The physical environs of the plant would have constituted a natural history of contamination, a geological record of a sort, if models and extrapolations were made to take into account tides and seepage and the rest. We must curse the luck that has apparently caused this resource to be lost to science. This is all the more true because the Black Report made a considerable point of stressing the difficulties and uncertainties of establishing dose levels and exposures, and all the more true because a standard defense of practices at Sellafield has been that contaminants disperse in the sea or become somehow fixed to the sea floor.

If Sellafield occupied a cultural terrain where there were such things as liability and culpability, what has happened would appear very like a destruction of evidence. It seems not to have been an act of prudence as that word is normally understood, because nothing was done to decontaminate local houses and shops. I conclude this from the fact that those tested at the time of the Black Inquiry, months later, were found to be contaminated with plutonium and other substances, and this was treated as a surprise. A project was then launched to vacuum houses in the Sellafield area with specially fitted machines, and to do the same in areas well away from nuclear facilities, to determine whether there was any correlation between cancer rates and plutonium in the domestic environment. The project does not seem terribly well designed. The point is to dissociate cancer from radioactive contamination, and the scientific hoovering is to demonstrate, presumably, that there is more radioactive material in houses near nuclear plants than in those at some distance from them. I am at a loss to know what in such information could either surprise or reassure. This demonstration will be made, however, and cancer rates compared, to illustrate that cancer can flourish unabetted by a nuclear power plant. Again, while this can no doubt be proved, there is nothing here to surprise or reassure, either. It is known that near Sellafield the rate of childhood leukemia exceeds the national average by ten times. Where comparable anomalies occur seemingly without exposure to radiation implicated in the deaths of the Cumbrian children, it should be incumbent upon health authorities to look for the causes of these other anomalies. They may be the quirks of statistics, or they may be viruses, or they may be proximity to a chemical waste disposal plant, or to a hospital, since these have been found to dump radioactive iodine used for diagnostic testing into the water system, or to any of the industries that pour detritus into the air and into rivers and estuaries, or even proximity to a rail line along which wastes would pass on the way to Sellafield, or any combination of these factors. If the health consequences of Sellafield blend into larger patterns of public health in Britain, it is because the environmental practices of the nuclear industry are consistent with those of other industries in that befouled country. Finally, the Black Commission concluded that it could offer a limited assurance of the safety of the Cumbrian environment, and so the issue was more or less resolved, at least to the satisfaction of the government.

Yet sometimes the health consequences of radioactive contamination are explicitly conceded. In the recent case of the Black Report, uranium released from the plant was belatedly acknowledged to be a lethal carcinogen through the following sequence of events. Dr. Black, inquiring into the deaths from leukemia among children in the village of Seascale, concluded that emissions from the Sellafield plant could not be blamed because the number of deaths was in excess of the number he felt could be projected from the emissions that were supposed to have occurred. According to him, emissions would have had to be forty times as great to account for the actual rate of death. Now, this line of reasoning was ingenious rather than persuasive, in the view of many. The Black Report, with its measured (that is, equivocal) reassurance, seemed open to doubt.

Dr. Black, in a reply to critics, wrote: “Since the report came out, we have been notified of further cases, and indeed asked to include them. We cannot validly do this until the figures in other electoral wards have been brought up to date for comparison.”⁵¹ Since so much is made by Sellafield’s defenders of the fact that the number of child deaths — ten — is too small to be significant, though in so small a population it yields an excess rate of 1,000 percent the national average, it is strange to minimize the significance of new cases, appearing within months of the publication of Dr. Black’s report. If other electoral wards are in so unhappy a state as to cushion this rate of excess, God help them.

Dr. Black explains that a cause-and-effect relation between radiation and leukemia will be established if lower emissions, which he says are being achieved, bring lower rates of illness. In other words, future leukemia excesses will exonerate the plant, as present ones have done. This is such a pretty piece of reasoning, I will not spoil it with talk of half-lives.

But just in the nick of time a man came forward with information which saved the day. In the fifties, when the plant was still under the management of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, a release of uranium occurred which was, uncannily, forty times as great as had been shown in the records. ⁵² The man who came forward was a former employee, who had left years before, disgruntled by the fact that releases of radioactivity from the plant were higher than acknowledged. He and a colleague tested the levels of radioactivity in their homes, found them unsettlingly high, and decided to leave the area. But he surfaced to make his telling revelation about an incident in which uranium was released into the environment. The information was opportune in a number of ways. It tended to confirm the accuracy of the Black Inquiry’s projections. It associated leukemia with radioactive contamination, but it located the source of the anomaly in a single, discrete episode of contamination. Out of good nature I do not dwell on the persistence of uranium in the environment.

By implication this one episode of contamination being exactly sufficient to satisfy the Black Inquiry’s projections, there is nothing else the inquiry failed to take into account. While the plant is implicated in these deaths of children, the rest of the information it gave the inquiry about its operations was at the same time vindicated. (It is sometimes reported that the NRPB, that body whose frequent service to the public has by now made it familiar to my readers, supplied the inquiry with its figures. But if they missed this decisive infusion of uranium into the environment, they must be substantially dependent on industry figures in any case.) Thrift may well have been a factor in the design of the investigation. And in fairness, it had only recently seemed prudent to the government to decontaminate the local beaches, as I have said, and this would necessarily have reduced the value of the area around Sellafield as a source of information, though not to the point where industry estimates need have become the exclusive source.

One feels continuously a sense of lost opportunity. For example, if it seemed appropriate to these inquirers to reason from an excess of childhood leukemia, over and above what their figures led them to predict, to an exoneration of the plant as the cause of leukemia, and if the discovery of the release of uranium undercut this argument by appearing to account precisely for these deaths, could not that first happy conclusion, that the plant was not to blame, have been rescued by drawing attention to the fact that there are elevated rates of leukemia in other villages around Sellafield, and up and down the coast? If excess is exculpatory, then Sellafield is clearly as benign as a clover patch.

As it is, the question has been left in obscurity. Why should a release of uranium that occurred in the fifties have had this dreadful impact on children whose parents were children at the time? If it suggests either chromosome damage or the retention of radioactive substances in the bodies of young women which affect fetal development, then the contamination should manifest itself in other forms besides leukemia. The uranium was apparently vented into the air. Therefore lung cancer would be a likely aftereffect, and the delay in its onset comprehensible. However, only one group of leukemia deaths in one village were within the limits of the study, so other forms of impact of radioactivity were neither sought out nor taken into account where they made themselves manifest. I lay myself open to the charge of cynicism by suggesting that this particular emission was granted its special importance because it occurred under the old management, before BNF took control of the plant. The imputation of carelessness, of bad record keeping, is cast back on the UKAEA, and the present management is unsmirched.

Oddly enough, only days after Dr. Black’s results had been, in essential ways, shored up by the discovery of an emission of uranium sufficient to account, by his system of reckoning, for the leukemia deaths of the children of Seascale — a release of uranium from the plant occurred twenty-two times greater than that to which these deaths of children had been more or less attributed. How did the management respond? With public assurances — the Irish were making a fuss — that the release had been approved by the government, was wholly intentional, and presented no threat to anyone. After all, according to former BNF chairman Con Allday, uranium is the most common element in the earth’s crust.⁵³ He informed the public that the Irish Sea is full of many thousands of tons of naturally occurring uranium. Therefore, another half ton of Sellafield uranium could hardly matter. The (unnamed) chemical plant up the coast releases as much every day — a fact never taken into account in calculating radiation doses, so far as I can discover. In conclusion he laid anxiety about Sellafield to “fear born of ignorance.” He does not say whose ignorance inspires this fear.

Other aspects of the nuclear issue are as thoroughly nonsensical. It is said that refusal by the Seamen’s Union to man dump ships has ended nuclear waste disposal by Britain into the open sea in the last few years. Since international agreements to stop such dumping have been ignored routinely, there is no great reason to imagine that the action of a labor union will have had a restraining influence, especially on Mrs. Thatcher. The advantage to the government of this action is that it creates obscurity around the situation without the government’s having to disavow its policy, should it resume dumping or be found never to have stopped.

In any case, the merits and demerits of ocean dumping from ships — the kind that has supposedly been desisted from — are mulled over in the press as gravely as anyone could wish, though not altogether usefully. The complexities of underground storage are explained with reference to the fact that high-level wastes must be isolated for thousands of years. This information comes as a little shock to one aware of disposal practices at Sellafield, as do the qualms about dumping in the open sea. Jim Slater, former head of the Seamen’s Union, spoke of organizing industrial action against Sellafield, and Miss Jean Emery, a leader of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, has pointed out the absurdity of fretting over the malign consequences of ocean dumping when the quantity that has been put in the Irish Sea from Sellafield is twice as great as that dumped over the sides of ships.⁵⁴ But in general the press seems content to leave all this unreconciled. Despite the supposed halt to the practice, press reports of “stolen minutes” from a meeting of the ministry whose function is to approve dumping at sea record anxiety that the loading of an oversized container, one of special thickness, would tip off the press that plutonium was being dumped, and that this would in turn shake public confidence in ocean dumping.^† This is very odd, this glimpse of a government bundling plutonium up in an especially heavy containment and then still chary of being seen to put it in the sea at all. This same ministry has approved all the uncontained disposal that occurs from Sellafield. A cynic might wonder again if this image of a cautious and stalemated government has been planted to create characterizing detail at odds with the plain, brute persistence of actual policy.

While British scientists study the relative merits of bores in shale or granite, salt mines, vitrification, or implantation in the seabed as disposal methods suited to materials which must be isolated for periods significant even on geologic time scales, other British scientists ponder the fact that the human placenta has not proved a sufficient protection for the human fetus from plutonium ingested by the mother. Granite is inappropriate to contain plutonium because water can pass through it. The inappropriateness of the placenta for the same function apparently eludes scientific understanding. Unfortunately, while the deficiencies of granite, and doubts about other methods of long-term isolation, have delayed the development of these methods, the same prudential concern has not prevented the disposal practices which rely altogether on frail human flesh. What, after all, should be protected from a notorious mutagen if not a human fetus? This is clearly another instance where industrial practice has run ahead of scientific knowledge, if not in fact away from it. It may be germane here to point out again the great economic advantages entailed in flushing plutonium into the environment. If thrift is a factor, any other method will be hard pressed to compete, more especially now that the horse is out of the barn.

The British ponder costly strategies for disposing of nuclear waste, nuclear power being the only viable long-term energy source for a country that is closing down its coalfields and selling its oil abroad. Faint hearts are scolded for refusing to deal with this hard reality. No mention is made, of course, of the fact that Britain goes looking for trouble, first by soliciting foreign custom for their disposal industry, second by using reprocessing as a disposal method, when the solvents involved multiply the volume of toxic waste more than a hundred times, and third by failing to invest in new plants, which at one time could have set some bounds to the dreadfulness of the enterprise by limiting leaks and spills. The nuclear waste disposal industry, also known as the plutonium industry, slipstreams behind nuclear power as the price that must be paid for industrial vigor. No one seems to dwell upon the fact that the price is paid in Britain for industrial vigor in Germany and Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.

Of course they do not bear this cost alone. World commerce in toxins, like every kind of commerce, must suffer from accident and spillage. A traffic in waste destined to end up in the sea is not likely to be obsessively cautious. And then it does end up in the sea, just off the coast of Europe. While Europeans make protesting noises from time to time, their governments pay for these services. The egregiousness of Britain’s industrial offenses simply reflects the international role that has been delegated to it, that its peculiar notions of self-interest have caused it to seize upon. Meanwhile, Sweden, a Sellafield client, is constructing a state-of-the-art subsea depository that may be in fact more immune to accidents than most human contrivances. It sounds very impressive, and if it should fail, the wastes so cautiously isolated will at worst only mingle with the Swedish wastes that pass through the pipeline at Sellafield.

I do not know whether I am describing the kind of dissociated behavior that would come with genuine denial, or simply a public-relations stunt, which plays shrewdly on a sad tendency in the public to cling to any little sign of competence on the part of those entrusted with their well-being. On the face of it, all the shielding and tunneling and vitrifying are predicated upon calculations of the dangers of these substances which take them to be extraordinarily great and persistent. So the experience the Europeans have had living alongside seas contaminated with the entire range of radioactive substances produced in reactor cores has not led their specialists to take a more sanguine view of their impact on the environment. This seems to me a fact worthy of note, in light of continuous British assurances that no harm has been done.

Clearly major questions have never been resolved concerning the rights of a national government toward the people and the terrain entrusted to its care. To dispose of either, to sell the health and posterity of one, the habitability of the other, for money, is a perfection of high-handedness beside which all other examples pale. Even to the extent that the mass of people can be thought of as entering into this bargain freely and knowingly, they have sold — for employment, or for some notion of national interest — the well-being of their descendants, which was never theirs to sell, and in the short or medium term, the well-being of the descendants of every mote of life that stirs on the face of the earth. If this has happened in a society which can be called, in any degree, open, free, and democratic, then we had better look at it very seriously indeed. Our own open, free, and democratic country lives in an informational vacuum that makes us a danger to ourselves and a terror to everyone else. No one is any freer than he wishes to be. The apparatus of democracy becomes a sort of Soviet constitution in every instance where there is no will to animate it.

The British are amazingly docile. It is a trait they admire in themselves, and for which they are admired. They have been set apart, among all the developed nations, to endure the insupportable, and they have done it with the quietness and goodwill for which they are legendary. We have justified our reputation for impenetrable ignorance, meanwhile, winging in to drop a tear on the grave of Dorothy Wordsworth and snap a few photos of a gentler world. For forty years, since the end of the Second World War, people have asked how such vile things could have happened as those that deviled Europe in the thirties and forties. The answer is, because anything can happen.

American books on nuclear issues usually omit to mention Britain at all. Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth is a distinguished recent example of this tendency. This earnest call to repentance sees nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States as the one great peril to the world’s survival — implying one great solution, that we “put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.”⁵⁵ It is as if history proceeded by referendum, and a grand exertion of collective goodness would put the planet out of harm’s way. I have the greatest respect for Schell’s religious and democratic zeal, but there is a tendency among committed democrats like us to believe all significant problems must be somehow suited to our solutions, as our pious elders thought their trials were always suited to their strengths. Cleansing the world of weapons is a relatively simple problem beside cleansing the sea of tons of radioactive sludge, and cleansing the air and the earth, and discovering and limiting the varieties of harm already done. Putting wastes into the sea has been the work of a few bureaucrats. Taking them back out again will be impossible, no matter how aroused and enlightened public opinion might someday become. The problem has been and is now outside democratic political control, first of all because books about nuclear issues do not tell the public the problem exists.

It is a very comfortable thing to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made — that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century.

Mr. Schell explains that, if a nuclear weapon destroyed a nuclear power plant, the radioactive material from the core and the wastes of the plant would be much more virulent and persistent than fallout from the bomb that destroyed it. Then imagine ripe old cores broken down chemically and poured into the environment through a pipeline, or through chimneys and smokestacks. This happens routinely, along the coasts of England and Scotland, and along the coast of France.

Clearly it is not meaningful to say that any sort of permission giving on the part of the public, such as is implied in the existence of nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Schell, lies behind this waste dumping. The people exposed to it are assured that it is not especially harmful. Books and movements which define nuclear peril primarily and even exclusively in terms of nuclear weapons and superpower rivalry confirm these assurances. British people have no grounds whatever to imagine that their situation, notorious as it is, would not impinge on the awareness of a writer who had undertaken so great a subject as the fate of the earth. They must assume therefore that if their radioactive sea does not merit a mention, it cannot be so great a problem after all. I do not believe that Mr. Schell has intentionally excluded information that would complicate the grand simplicity of his thesis. I think he is among those legions who are emotionally incapable of accepting the historical importance of stupidity and furtiveness.

Mr. Schell locates our problems in national sovereignty, by which he means a sort of national self-love, so potent as to make us contemplate a defense that would destroy us. I locate them in the kind of sovereignty that has always been expressed in exploiting and disposing of the lives over which history and accident have given “governments” authority. The fact is that the world public arrives at this parlous moment with a grinding history behind it, badly educated, starved of information, full of sad old fears and desperate loyalties, injured in its self-regard, acculturated to docility and stoicism. The world’s most favored public, our own, is educated thoroughly and badly, starved of information, and flattered as to its own importance, while it is made incompetent in the use of the power it has. There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry out policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient.

If the world were as Mr. Schell represents it, a place where we make our problems and can unmake them, a place where all those warheads represent public hostility toward the Soviet Union, and a new gospel of love can therefore free us of them, the world would be very simple, simpler than any city, or family, or psyche, or dream. The hostility of Americans toward Russians is an invention of polemicists. If the Soviet Union is authoritarian, so are most countries. While atheism is espoused by its government, religion seems to flourish among its people. Western European cultures, by contrast, are atheist in fact, at street level, and that has never struck us as any abomination or unbridgeable divide. Like most things, it has never struck us at all. If Russia ceased to appear to us as a threat, we would probably simply forget it, as we do most of the world most of the time. The tendency of this country to be engrossed in itself makes it ill suited to sustaining large-scale, long-term interest of any kind in the outside world. But we are told constantly that the government of the Soviet Union has aggressive intentions, and we remember just enough modern history to know what that can mean. Presumably the Russian state of mind is some version of this, mutatis mutandis, and people may well unite to eliminate nuclear weapons, at least in the countries that acknowledge having them and, unlike Britain and France, are willing to submit to international agreements to control them.

Nuclear weapons can be produced at short notice by anyone in possession of fissionable materials, of course, but even if they are not simply replaced in secret after they are destroyed in public, fissionable materials will continue to be produced, and toxic and radioactive materials of even greater virulence than those used in bombs, through the routine functioning of nuclear power plants, so many of which were built to produce bomb-grade plutonium as well as electricity, and will continue to produce it for as long as they are used for power generation. So at best these diabolical substances will accumulate as wastes rather than as warheads, but more toxic because they will not be dissipated in the upper atmosphere but will burn or leak into the ground or simply be buried or dumped somewhere, as in fact most wastes have been for forty years. In the long term it will not matter whether national sovereignties destroy their “enemies” or merely themselves and their neighbors. The fate of the earth will be the same.

An October 1987 article in The New York Times⁵⁶ informed those of its readers capable of absorbing the information that an agreement, classified along with the analysis which supported it, had been signed by our Secretaries of State and Energy, to permit flights carrying plutonium from Britain and France to Japan to land and refuel in Anchorage. This is the kind of situation in which one regrets that there is not more attachment to “national sovereignty,” in Jonathan Schell’s sense of the phrase. The governor of Alaska has sued to have the shipments blocked, and has failed to win a restraining order. How unfortunate for him that the issue arose just when other stories of greater urgency, for example the television evangelism scandals, were filling the front pages of America’s newspapers. The governor’s suit charges that “thousands of pounds” of plutonium will pass through Anchorage, and quotes a physicist from the University of Michigan to the effect that “plutonium is one of the most, ‘if not the most,’ toxic substances known to humans. Inhaling a microscopic speck could lead to cancer.” That is, of course, the usual formula for describing the toxicity of plutonium.

I doubt that our Secretaries of State and Energy have considered and signed such an agreement casually. It is entirely possible that they signed it to prevent the refuelings from occurring in Seattle or Los Angeles, without approval, and without special security measures. After all, this commerce is being run by people who see no harm in “taking a bit of ploot.” Small amounts of plutonium would be easy to conceal, in the absence of any special precautions. A letter to the governor, Steve Cowper, signed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said that approval for these flights “will be conditioned upon a number of safety requirements such as transfer exclusively by air (to minimize time spent in international transit), use of a cask certified to withstand a crash, armed guards, redundant communications and detailed contingency plans.” If the conditions the Secretary sets out are not met, how will he know? If they are met in 10 percent of shipments, while the other 90 are stowed away in other passenger or cargo flights, will he be the wiser? Most European power plants are built on national boundaries. Therefore any accident will be half the problem of another government. Aside from its being an interesting comment on their view of the safety of their own industries and a telling comment on all the gasps of surprise, at the time of Chernobyl, that nuclear reactor accidents know no boundaries, it reveals a certain willingness to let foreigners bear the brunt of risky policies. If plutonium burned in an airliner crash, would anyone know? Would the discovery of these residues afterward be laid to a non-domestic source? I suspect the real nature of this “agreement” is simply a plea to the Europeans and Japanese to tell us what they are doing and when they are doing it. The threat to end the permission only threatens us with uncontrolled movement of plutonium through our hemisphere, no problem to the Japanese, who are accustomed to seeing their wastes dumped into European coastal waters, and no problem to the Europeans, who consider this an excellent business to be in despite self-inflicted contamination on a scale no accident could visit on us here.

A second New York Times article, published a few weeks later, described a report sent to the Congress by the Defense Department, warning that increased production and use of plutonium, and increased international shipments of radioactive materials, will increase the risks of theft, diversion, and terrorist acts.⁵⁷ The article explains quaintly, “The United States produces plutonium only at military installations for use in weapons. France and other countries, however, are exploring the feasibility of breeder reactors to produce plutonium commercially to fuel other reactors or for weapons.” In other words, commercial production of plutonium has not yet begun, or so anyone would infer who did not know better.

The article informs us that “International agreements and American law govern the security provisions enforced when plutonium is moved.” Well, this is something one would never learn from reading the British press. In nothing is a more sublime autonomy displayed than in the United Kingdom’s dealings in plutonium. The bomb plant at Sellafield was created in the first instance in defiance of American attempts to control nuclear proliferation, and nothing that has happened subsequently indicates any second thoughts. Either international standards mean nothing at all or they mean it is acceptable to ship nuclear wastes across the world to be dumped into British and European waters — which is to say, they mean nothing at all. Their single function seems to be to baffle the Yankees, and that they do very well.

It is worth noting how plutonium and radioactive materials are weapons intrinsically, as the London Times editorialist understood in 1976. We cannot close our borders against plutonium because it is plutonium, and liable to punish us brutally if we make the attempt. Our sovereignty is overridden by allies under cover of our own poor journalism. Is this the expression of the will of our people? Are they so eager to expedite this disastrous commerce that they would knowingly accept its risks? Of course not.

Except, perhaps, for that numerous new breed of moralist thrown up by this sad age, which will reprove me for criticizing Britain — unheard-of cheek. But we are talking about the world, after all, which history has placed in our most unworthy hands.

The final, visceral loyalty of American “intellectuals” to Europe is racism. The refusal to see the dimensions of phenomena like Sellafield, the refusal to call them by the hard names that fit them, is racism. If you think the Third World is hungry now, wait till the sea is dead.

Of course the United States has been smirched by history. But in the larger scheme, the United States is an invention, like Constantinople, which, if life could be imagined going on, would drift and evolve into other shapes and things in the way of species, clouds, and continents. If I could dream that the world would live so long that our books were lost and our name forgotten, I could feel we had been a good and successful civilization, after all. We give countries kinds of reality they do not have. They do not define the natures or the obligations of the human beings who live in them. Our country allows and encourages us to know nothing. But if we are ignorant, the fault is ours. Increasingly it encourages us, through its educational institutions, press, and popular culture, to consider ourselves knaves and fools. But if we act like fools, the fault is ours.

The recent decline in national self-esteem has led many Americans to invest their emotions offshore, in what they take to be a favorable climate, among solvent institutions. In imagination they have escaped ruin, growing rich as their neighbors grew poor. These people do not want to hear bad news.

But there is a real world, that is really dying, and we had better think about that. My greatest hope, which is a very slender one, is that we will at last find the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in the faith that life is good and to be preserved, to recognize the grosser forms of evil and name them and confront them. Who will do it for us? E. P. Thompson? Greenpeace? The Duke of Edinburgh? The Washington Post? We have to walk away from this road show, consult with our souls, and find the courage, in ourselves, to see, and perceive, and hear, and understand.