Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  Wells’s anticipation simply demonstrates the fact that the British nuclear enterprise has never been innocent; that is, naïve. It is no more than a reprise of the sad old compulsions around which British social order has always turned. Such behavior would be modified, if not forbidden, if questions as to its wisdom or decency were ever raised in good faith. It is neither modified nor forbidden.

  It is almost unimaginable that this industry could coexist with any lucid awareness of its implications, but this only means that our models for describing human behavior are fundamentally wrong. I suspect a better grasp of it awaits our recognition of major anomalies, that our conception of the fabric of motivation and causality must be warped into shapes that accommodate observable phenomena, with denial, dissociation, and atavism acknowledged as potent entities, like quarks and black holes. We should know by now the inadvisability of constructing a universe around local notions of reasonableness and plausibility.

  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 virtu
ally 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.