Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  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 plutoni
um 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.