Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  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 Russ
ians, 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. Pe
rvasive 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.