In May 1984 virtually no rain will fall at Maralinga – only 22.6 millimetres for the whole month, falling in small bursts on four days. The bright, mild and mostly rainless days are conducive to the meticulous scientific testing of the radiation physics of the site, a search for any remaining traces of the radioactive elements let loose by the British nuclear tests. The scientists are making use of the most fundamental properties of radioactivity to do their search. Over time, radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium undergo a physical transformation. The unique nature of these elements means that they emit several different kinds of electromagnetic rays (alpha, beta and gamma rays). As they do so, their properties and even their mass change. These rays have fundamentally different properties. Alpha radiation, made up of energetic streams of positively charged particles, is easily thwarted – alpha radiation can’t penetrate thick paper. Beta radiation consists of beams of electrons, which have a negative charge. It can penetrate more deeply, but a sheet of light metal such as aluminium will stop it. Gamma rays are like x-rays and can be stopped only by heavy materials such as lead.
These rays and other products of the unique nuclear physics of radioactivity can be detected. The scientists have come equipped to do this – to use their field equipment and later laboratory analysis to work out how much radioactivity this old site actually contains. The scientific authorities charged with this task are confident that they know what is there, based on information provided to Australia by the British. This due diligence survey will simply confirm the past surveys and reports. Dr Geoff Williams, Dr Malcolm Cooper and Mr Peter Burns are part of the small team of radiation specialists at Maralinga. Their job is to conduct some routine scientific investigations of the site so it can be officially handed back from the federal government to South Australia. After that, the land will be returned at last to its traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja people, who were displaced and dispersed in their hundreds by the British nuclear weapons tests that ended over 20 years ago.
At the time of this expedition to the site, which also includes scientists from the South Australian Health Commission, Williams, Cooper and Burns work for an organisation called the Australian Radiation Laboratory (ARL). It was once called the Commonwealth X-Ray and Radium Laboratory and will later change its name to the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) as its role shifts with the imperatives of the day. Each of these scientists will end up being involved in the story of Maralinga for years after this eye-opening trip to the South Australian desert. What they will find here will shock them, and soon after, the many layers of secrecy that have buried Maralinga will be stripped away.
For Geoff Williams in particular this visit starts a long association. He does not know about Maralinga from his schooling at Balwyn High in Victoria or his science degrees at Melbourne University; he first heard the name in 1978 as a young postdoctoral researcher working in the School of Molecular Sciences at Sussex University in the UK. Before that, like just about everyone growing up in Australia at the time, Williams knew nothing about Maralinga, a great Australian secret, barely recognised as part of this nation’s history. This trip is the first of dozens of expeditions he will make here on his way to becoming a leading expert on radioactive waste safety. He loves the beauty of the place, the sand dunes and mulga and birds, and takes the occasional moment to savour it.
By 1984, some aspects of the Maralinga story have been in the media for a few years. The South Australian media started to take an interest in 1976. The tone of their stories has been mostly negative, in contrast to the media reports from when the British nuclear tests were underway. By the 1970s, the events at Maralinga and the other test sites were no longer viewed with the same patriotic equanimity as they were at the time. An Adelaide taxi driver has told Williams that the people of Adelaide once regarded the Maralinga operation as a flag-waving exercise, and they had been proud to help Britain become great again following the war. But now, the driver said, you won’t find a person in Adelaide with a good word to say about the nuclear tests.
Despite the newly acquired media scepticism about the British tests, though, the scientific community is reasonably confident that the anecdotes of non-experts who know nothing about radioactivity overstate the dangers of the site. After all, the British scientists and military personnel did surveys and clean-ups before they left, and while a significant portion of this information remains top-secret, those in the know believe the site will be safe for the Indigenous owners to take over. The director of ARL Dr Keith Lokan has taken the prescient decision that the scientists working at Maralinga should not have formal security clearances, so as not to be tainted by reading the classified British record. So the Australian scientists will be able to speak about and publish freely everything that they discover at Maralinga, unconstrained by secrecy laws. Significantly, Maralinga is so far the only former nuclear weapons test site that has reverted from military to civilian hands. Once the handover is complete, everyone can move on. It feels like an obscure era in Australian history that is fast receding in the memories of the few people directly involved.
The ARL team has access to reports left behind by the British nuclear test authorities not classified as ‘top-secret atomic’ that tell them more or less what to expect. An abridged version of the Pearce Report, compiled by the British nuclear physicist Noah Pearce, sets out an account of the physical conditions at the site.
Pearce was part of the legendary nuclear elite, the small handful of sound inner-circle scientists from the AWRE headed by the dapper and distinguished Professor William Penney, the leader of the British tests in Australia. Pearce came to Australia for the first British test, Hurricane, at the Monte Bello Islands in 1952. He was involved with the two Totem bomb tests at Emu Field in 1953. He did not come to Maralinga until 1958 because he was diverted to the British hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific at Christmas Island (later Kiritimati), now part of Kiribati. But in the early 1960s, he directed safety arrangements for the highly dangerous plutonium tests from his home base in Aldermaston, visiting Maralinga only occasionally. After overseeing the clean-up operations at the site, he wrote a report. A heavily edited version of this report has been publicly available since 1979, tabled in federal parliament after media pressure, but the full report is secret, open only to those with sufficient security clearance. The federal minister for Mines and Energy Peter Walsh will release the full report later in 1984 as a direct response to the ARL’s Maralinga trip.
The Pearce Report has created considerable confusion over the decades because it is totally wrong about some centrally important things, most notably the level of plutonium contamination. More than 22 kilograms of plutonium was exploded in the Vixen B tests at Maralinga. Pearce said that 20 kilograms of this was safely buried in 21 concrete-topped pits dotted around the perimeter of a firing site called Taranaki, about 40 kilometres north of Maralinga village. On the basis of this information, Australia allowed the UK to sign away its responsibilities for the site in 1968. The Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee (AWTSC) was the Australian body responsible for monitoring the British testing program to ensure the safety of the Australian environment and its population. John Moroney, its long-time secretary, will later tell the scientists that it would have been ‘ungentlemanly’ for Australia to question the edicts of the British atomic scientists at the time.
The first week on the ground at Maralinga, which begins on 22 May, proceeds uneventfully. At first, Burns, Cooper, Williams and their team think that the information in the Pearce Report is accurate. They are unable to read it themselves but have been given a summary by Moroney, now head of the Radioactivity Section at ARL. Their initial observations accord with the Pearce assertions – uniform radiation of a microcurie in the old money, or 40 kilobecquerels under the more recent measurement system, per square metre, which is close to normal and no cause for concern. (A kilobecquerel is 1000 becquerels, the international standard unit of radioactivity.) The
scientists are not wearing protective clothing; they walk in shorts under the clear Maralinga sun, up and down the dusty grid at Taranaki carrying their radiation gauges. They are careful men, but they know that many myths about radiation have no basis in reality. People ignorant of the physics of radioactivity have a tendency to hysteria – a natural fear of the unseen and unknown. Based upon the data in the Pearce Report the scientists believe that they could stand at the site for hundreds of hours and even, hypothetically, throw handfuls of dust into the air and breathe it in, and still they would get only their annual ‘safe’ dose.
They start efficiently, knowing that a political circus is about to descend that may slow them down. A delegation headed by the South Australian premier John Bannon and Senator Peter Walsh, accompanied by an entourage of media, is scheduled to arrive on a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) plane on 24 May. Although the scientific trip has been arranged for months, it happens to have been scheduled only a month or so after the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) investigative public affairs show Four Corners screened an exposé about a ‘nuclear veteran’ dying in Adelaide who blames his service at Maralinga for his illness. By now, Maralinga is a fixture in the Australian media. Veterans have been making allegations since the South Australian RAAF veteran Avon Hudson blew the whistle in 1976 and became the face of nuclear veteran anger; he will continue his campaign for decades, his outrage undiminished by the years. The initial media rumblings of 1976 were followed by a series of landmark investigative reports by Brian Toohey in 1978. Then the Adelaide Advertiser ran a high-profile feature series on the plight of the nuclear veterans in 1980. The Maralinga issue, dormant between 1957 (when even superficial media coverage effectively ended, six years before the final atomic experiment) and 1976, is now a media staple.
Radiation scientists can generally do without political and media attention, because it always brings misinformation. Burns, Cooper and Williams have no reason to be glad that Maralinga has bubbled to the surface again. Often journalists approach them for comments about a radiation issue then misquote them in their stories or sensationalise the issue to suit some agenda. Radiation is dangerous, the scientists acknowledge, but the average person thinks it is a thousand times more dangerous than it actually is. The media sometimes play into these fears, distorting radiation research.
If the media have an agenda, so do the politicians. The scientists joke among themselves that the visiting politicians will probably take credit for the scientific expedition, despite it having been arranged long before the current spate of media interest. They are right, of course – an announcement that the scientific expedition is the federal and state government response to the renewed public interest in Maralinga is not far away. The scientists will laugh about it for years to come.
The scientists are not overly concerned with the history of this remote desert location. They are scientists – they are interested only in the evidence they find, not in assigning blame for past political decisions. They come to the task with open eyes as well. They know that the Brits have not been overly forthcoming with assisting in the process of preparing the site for the handover. The British are still being tight with their information about Maralinga, too. A large amount remains classified and unavailable to Australian authorities, years after the site shut down. Nothing has really changed since the days of the tests.
At its heart, this tale turns on a power imbalance between the British test authorities and the country that provided the expansive territory they needed to set up a permanent nuclear test facility. Changing global attitudes to nuclear weapons and international agreements to limit atmospheric nuclear testing meant that the permanent site was in active service for only seven years. It has lain more or less idle since 1963, other than some clean-up operations.
Maralinga has been of no interest to the British since they struck the 1968 agreement with Australia, ending their responsibilities to the site. The agreement was predicated on the assumption that Britain thoroughly decontaminated the site and cleared the debris to the satisfaction of the Australian Government. In 1977, political pressure forced another survey, carried out by ARL and the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, which perpetuated the conclusions of the Pearce Report. So, too, did the 1983 report AIRAC (Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council) 9, which will soon be discredited. None of these reports has come close to the truth. Instead they have clouded the issue both politically and scientifically. In 1979, though, after a major public outcry sparked by Brian Toohey’s stories in the Financial Review in October 1978, the British were forced to send military personnel to remove drums full of salt imbued with plutonium buried at the Maralinga airfield. They did so reluctantly and only after prolonged negotiations. Pearce himself visited Maralinga for 48 hours in 1978 during those negotiations and reaffirmed his 1968 report. That incident was nothing more than an inconvenience.
The scientists get on with their environmental monitoring work as best they can, diverting briefly for the visit from the pollies and the journos, who drop by for four hours on Thursday. ARL head Keith Lokan arrives with the official party and helps to show them around, explaining what the scientists are doing. The day is mild and dry. The scientists have not detected any serious contamination, but they have found a few areas that show higher than expected activity. Lokan briefs the journalists about these ‘hotspots’ – small areas of intense radiation – during the visit. A famous moment occurs when he searches for one that was previously discovered. The political party stand outside the fenced-off TM101 testing site, about 20 kilometres to the northeast of the old Maralinga village. Suddenly the radiation monitor starts screaming, right under the foot of one of the male journalists, who quickly jumps back. Peter Walsh’s tough female press secretary instantly remarks, ‘Now your balls will drop off!’ to laughs all round. Among the media is the British journalist Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who will later co-write a book on Maralinga with Denys Blakemore, Fields of Thunder: Testing Britain’s Bomb. She looks around the abandoned site, with its barbed wire, radiation warning symbols and concrete-topped pits, and writes, ‘More ominously, teams from the Australian Radiation Laboratory guiding the ministerial team showed the presence of radioactive material on the surface of the range with their constantly clicking Geiger counters’.
The political and media trip to the site is largely symbolic, designed to distance the two Labor governments – the new Hawke government in Canberra and the Bannon state government – from the Maralinga fallout that dogged the previous Fraser government. As Lloyd-Roberts writes, ‘The representatives of the Federal and South Australian Governments were there jointly to express their regret that the atomic test series had ever been allowed to take place in Australia and to pledge their support for all investigations into the possible harm done to servicemen, Aborigines and the environment’.
The Australian newspaper has sent reporter John Stanton, who quotes Walsh and Bannon, and ARL director Lokan, as they survey the contaminated areas. Lokan wields handheld Geiger counters. The radiation chief, while pointing to the dangers of plutonium as a cause of lung cancer, also wishes to allay any fears of the visiting party, or longer term visitors, about the immediate dangers of the area. Stanton quotes him saying, ‘There was no evidence the ploughed plutonium was being further spread by wind erosion. But the pollutant could be present in dust, although this would generally have to be breathed for long periods before it would pose a health risk’.
When the politicians and journalists depart, the scientists get back to work. According to a prearranged strategy, they start their survey on the outer limits of the enormous range and work their way in. Part of their work involves field observations using their Geiger counters, and the rest involves measurements of soil samples back at their laboratory in Melbourne. The samples are taken in a standard way using a cylindrical corer device. Three samples are taken from each small area, the soil combined and sieved through a 1-millimetre mesh to remove larger stones and then stor
ed in bags. Later they will be scanned for gamma ray emissions, an excellent diagnostic test for americium-241, which indicates the presence of alpha-emitting plutonium. Because radiation abounds in nature, the scientists also pick up soil samples from outside the weapons test areas to check for naturally occurring uranium, unrelated to the nuclear tests, that may contribute to their readings.
The scientists take in their surroundings. They see lots of small pieces of rusty metal lying around the concrete firing pads, some old pieces of metal tubing or boxes and other scraps. The large infrastructure on the range, though, is long gone – either blown up during the experiments, buried in pits during the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby or removed from the site. The scientists see some electrical components such as cables and connectors, but they find no radioactivity on them. In 1979, several new concrete plinths were erected at Taranaki, and at Emu Field further north, adorned with messages advising visitors to the sites that nuclear tests had taken place there. Before that, back to 1967, visitors would have had little idea of this, since the test era fences and signs were removed in Operation Brumby.
The laborious field measurements and sample collection proceed smoothly. To obtain data on the state of contamination at the site, the Australian team divides the Maralinga range into a grid and walks from end to end taking and recording measurements as they go, as the British Radiation Survey (RADSUR) team did in 1966. They cut the site up into 600 metre by 1 kilometre rectangles and walk up and down, taking a measurement every 20 metres. To preserve the battery power of the field monitors, the instruments are turned off after each measurement and the clicking sound is not activated. This means that the area between each measurement stop is not monitored, a gap that is later recognised as significant.
Atomic Thunder Page 3