Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  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, an
d 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.