The article has a tone of having taken a deep breath and made a fresh start, which invites readers to forget what they may have read yesterday. After all, at the time of this article, British nuclear issues had been filling the press, including the New Scientist, since the fall of 1983, about thirty-one months, and had arisen in pressing forms at intervals since the late fifties. Yet it is as if Britain were an enchanted island, its government aroused from Keatsian indolence only by an alien east wind. In fact, the government at first insisted Chernobyl had not had a significant effect on Britain. And, to clinch the argument, it did not test for contamination. Or it was testing, but a rain began to fall and the NRPB had to move its instruments indoors to keep them from getting wet—another New Scientist version of the story.32 Or it tested only in England, one cauliflower and one cabbage in the northwest, one sample of spring greens in the center, elsewhere “two of parsley, four of spinach, four of cauliflower, one of rhubarb, fourteen of cabbage, five of broccoli, four of eggs, and a single trout,”33 like supper in a Peter Rabbit story. In an article published before the extent of contamination came to light, the New Scientist reported matter-of-factly that “people would have received, on average, 0.008 millisieverts extra in one week from radioactivity in the air … 0.002 millisieverts from drinking tap water for one week …” etc. These calculations to the third decimal place came from the Ministry of the Environment, the parsley testers, and were presented under the title “A lot of fuss about a few millisieverts.”34 Information seems to have a very short half-life. For weeks the British bought and consumed highly radioactive food, specifically lamb contaminated because the pastures were hot. Then hundreds of thousands of sheep and lambs were removed from the market—temporarily, of course. Need I say, the areas along the Irish Sea and in Scotland—coincidentally, those most affected by radioactivity from Sellafield and Dounreay—proved to be especially badly contaminated?
Interpreted as it is in Kenward’s article, the delay in government response is attributable to the outré and uncongenial character of the circumstances these ministers are suddenly obliged to deal with. There is no allusion to the oddness of the fact that the government does not routinely monitor radiation levels around its two most important and controversial installations, though both have histories of accident and both have been associated with elevated cancer rates, and both have been the subject of international protests.
It will be remembered that Chernobyl came to world attention first because it set off an alarm in a nuclear plant in far-off Sweden. If radiation came down with special vengeance in the regions of these two British nuclear installations—which are represented as technical miracles except when they are being defended as old and shabby—surely their alarms should have responded at some point and the fact should have been reported to the British government, since every government in the Northern Hemisphere was watching the effects of Chernobyl in those days.
One may imagine alarms that never sound, or alarms that sound so often they are not attended to. However it may have been, Britain declared itself unaffected by the cloud from Chernobyl, during the time, perhaps, that the NRPB was describing to ministers the prevalence and health implications of the elbow. The article says that in the days after Chernobyl this “radiation watchdog” worked overtime “to supervise the monitoring of air and rain from the east.” They must have forgotten to switch something on.
The article that has set me to pondering is a comprehensive description of the work of the NRPB, which the organization itself was outlining in a “corporate plan” just at the time of Chernobyl. (I must ask my reader not to be put off by acronyms. I am persuaded, more or less, that they exist to repel inquiry, to suggest expertise, and also to suggest drab toil taken on for the rest of us by those whose blood is thin enough to make tedium congenial, and to starve out the full-blooded vice and full-blown madness that might rage among others entrusted with such great responsibilities. Such officious nonsense is a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on doors behind which things are transacted which should disturb us all.)
John Dunster himself is quoted describing the organization he directed thus: “‘The board aims to establish an overall policy in radiation protection that provides a proper standard of safety without unduly hampering the beneficial practices giving rise to exposures.’” In other words, it exists to adjust exposure standards to “‘beneficial practices.’”35 The director of the NRPB, longest-serving member of its international counterpart, believes that practices giving rise to radiation exposure can still be beneficial. One craves elaboration. Yet there would be little value in it. As the article notes parenthetically, “(It isn’t the NRPB’s job to decide on the government’s policy, so, as Dunster admits, ministers are quite free to ignore the board’s advice.)” So the policy is merely “advice,” which “ministers”—who, as we have just been told, tend not to know isotopes from elbows—can ignore. This is most wonderful.
Writers on government sometimes remark that Britain has had trouble generating a concept of the state. The problem of the state of Britain is that while on the one hand nothing seems really independent or distinct from government, on the other hand, when responsibility is to be located, the government recedes like a dream and is nowhere to be found.
We have seen in Michael Kenward’s article how the curtain rose on ministers all unsuited to deal with nuclear issues at the time of Chernobyl. In 1970, we are told, the government set up the NRPB “when it realized that all of the organizations in Britain with any knowledge of radiation and its effects on people were part of the nuclear establishment and were, therefore, compromised in the eyes of the public.” This nuclear establishment was and is a creature of the state, funded, shielded, and patronized by the government, and flourishing in the balmy atmosphere of Crown Immunity, where no acts of Parliament apply, and under the protection of laws affecting national defense and commercial confidentiality as well as the Official Secrets Act, and under the supervision of ministers who have not made themselves competent in the area of their responsibility, and who are very much inclined to waive such standards as the government pretends to. If the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, which carried out the policies of the government, became discredited, why was the government itself not discredited? Why does it have no obligation to generate and enforce standards of practice for which it will answer to the public? And what is a government, in any case, that can shed a compromised institution like a dirty shirt? When the UKAEA was abandoned in favor of the NRPB, the new entity was staffed from the ranks of its predecessor, with John Dunster as its head. British Nuclear Fuels, which now operates Sellafield, was created in the same way for the same reasons. The plutonium factory itself had its name changed from Windscale to Sellafield to rid it of an evil reputation. Recently that company’s management was replaced, because the government lost confidence in it. The new management immediately retained the services of a public-relations firm. It now shares advertising space with Greenpeace.
This changing of letterheads and images neither promises nor effects any change in government policy or industry practice. “Practice” at Sellafield merges quite indistinguishably with accidents and spills and faulty record keeping, in any case. So, while there are no meaningful standards, the greater problem is the unsuitability of the facility to comply with standards should they exist. Again, this hapless plant is and always has been the exclusive property of the British government.
When Henry VI brought England to ruin in the fifteenth century, there was some debate as to whether the King was a saint or an imbecile. In either case, since he could not be expected to understand the evil that went on around him, he was not to be faulted for it. The British government is, as an idea, some such specter of irreducible innocence and sanctity, liable to being badly served in the very degree that it is innocent. This could very well be nothing more than the survival of some especially successful medieval public-relations campaign. Why old myths should be assumed to be more respectable
in their origins than new ones I do not know. The point is simply that the phantom sovereign, always to be revered and never held to account, is a major part of the phenomenon of political sovereignty in modern Britain.
Yet clearly the government—“ministers,” in the terms of Michael Kenward’s New Scientist article—is always decisively involved in what happens. It reserves to itself truly extraordinary powers. For example, the NRPB corporate plan will give the government an idea of the board’s plans and activities “in words of as few syllables as possible,” that is, appropriate to the understanding of imbeciles. Yet the reason for preparing a plan the ministers might understand is to allow them to override it: “If the government wants to point its watchdog at new scents, then at least it has something to go on, some false trails to abandon.” So this “independent” watchdog agency is to allow its agenda to be set by the government, which is also the nuclear industrialist and trash collector.
The NRPB is reported to be “embarrassed” financially and hinting obliquely for a little increase in staff. This is poignant. It is always touching to see how British institutions struggle against the hard demands of government thrift. It is also an instance of the enormous power of the government to expedite its policies by omission. By failing to fund its monitoring agency at an adequate level, it is preparing a defense for itself and the agency as well, in the event that things are done now which will someday have to be disowned. The government is rendering itself less competent, preparing a more thoroughgoing deniability, perhaps to constrict the painful environmental information of recent years, scant as it has been, or perhaps in preparation for the greatly expanded plutonium extraction and waste storage and dumping that will take place at Sellafield and Dounreay in the near future.
In its straitened circumstances the NRPB has begun to accept privately contracted work, though it is said to be loath to do so because these projects take time away from basic research on the biological effects of radiation. In other words, private interests share with the government the right to set the agenda of Britain’s “radiation watchdog.”
At the same time, the NRPB maintains Britain’s place in the nuclear councils of the world, because “Britain has to live with international standards on radiation if it is to persuade the public that it is behaving responsibly.” According to the article, such standards “tend to be cooked up” by international committees. This kind of language gives a fair sense of the function and standing of such regulations. The legalism of our culture predisposes Americans to believe in their potency. But the British do not assign any significance even to standards they set for themselves, when advantage lies in ignoring them. Crown Immunity is an elegant concept and an important fact. It means that law is not considered fit to act as a restraint on government. That this notion shades off into similar protections of private economic interests is an aspect of the problem the British have always had in making distinctions between government on the one hand and economic power on the other. The extraordinary devotion of a government enterprise like British Nuclear Fuels to profit has been much encouraged by ministers of both parties. Considerations normally assumed to weigh in the thoughts of government—for example, foreign policy, an art which must pass into desuetude as trade in plutonium spreads through the world—obviously count for little over and against profit. There is absolutely nothing else to be gained. Yet profit must be overtaken fairly quickly by an array of misfortune.
This is very alarming. Members of the British Parliament are employed as paid lobbyists and are not required to declare the interests whose advantage they are paid to seek in their role as Parliamentarians. An arrangement so well suited to invite and express venality might be expected to produce it in a very pure form. Yet no mere mammonism is sufficient to account for so dismal a project as Sellafield, and what the New Scientist article refers to serenely as “the propensity with which British Nuclear Fuels polluted the Irish Sea with its radioactive discharges.”
This piece of journalistic muddle will give a fair sense of the form in which information appears in the British press. I am extremely reluctant by now to postulate guile, simply because this strange pattern is so ubiquitous.
As often, very bad news is presented obliquely, in tones that suggest a special good fortune is being described, a government full of humanity in the form of foible and limitation. The actual news content in the piece is startling. The government disavows competence in matters nuclear but will curtail and direct the work of those who are competent to advise it. The staff of this supposedly independent agency is headed by a health physicist present at the creation of the world’s dirtiest nuclear facility. Greenpeace members, described as floating offshore from Sellafield and “watching in amazement as effluent gushed out through the pipe,” go afterward to the NRPB to see if they have been irradiated by a system constructed with its director’s blessing. The board scientists have marketed their time to private companies and therefore cannot “expand their knowledge of the biological effects of radiation,” yet they are called in to advise on “the effects of the radiation that seeps out of Sellafield on people living in the area.” The board sits in on international committees to persuade its own public that “Britain” is behaving responsibly. Radon gas “pervades every home in the country.”
As if to refine upon perfection, the article concludes that Chernobyl has brought attention to the need to study the biological effects of radiation, having only two paragraphs before alluded to the radiation exposure of the population near Sellafield. Since this radiation exposure is precisely the responsibility of John Dunster, among others, it conforms entirely to my model of the workings of the British official mind that such questions should focus on an event in the Ukraine.
John Dunster also figures very prominently in Patrick J. Sloyan’s article on Sellafield in New York Newsday, May 20, 1986. It seems he has a map on his office wall where he can point to the “lake” of plutonium Sellafield has created off the British coast, an “almost 300-square-mile elliptical area at the end of the pipeline,” the residue of the more than 500,000 curies of plutonium the plant has poured into the sea. What does John Dunster say as he ponders Lake Plutonium? “‘So damn expensive, hard to believe they throw it away.’”36
But this remark raises a very important question. To say that plutonium is expensive is to say it is valuable. In fact, only plutonium 239 is usable in nuclear plants or weapons. An article in New Statesman reports that there is no limit on releases of the unstable isotope plutonium 241, and that 550,000 curies of it have been released into the sea.37 Are only those emissions limited or measured that represent straightforward economic loss? By “plutonium” do Dunster and others mean only plutonium 239?
John Dunster can take heart, however, if he is oppressed by the loss of plutonium. Walter Marshall, who looks in photographs like Tweedledum, but who has been made a lord for his previous accomplishments and is head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, has found plutonium in nature, surely the crown of his career. Recently he has given lectures in which he reassures the public that the small amount of plutonium released in a recent, much ballyhooed accident was only equivalent to the plutonium “naturally present in the top yard of soil over an area of just five square miles.” This perspective was admiringly reported by James Wilkinson, BBC-TV science correspondent.38 A streak has been added to the tulip. It seems to be this man’s happy genius to bring perspective to nuclear issues. He is reported to have won applause at a meeting of the British Nuclear Forum by saying that the effects of radiation exposure within the Chernobyl exclusion zone would be “no worse than smoking a couple of extra cigarettes a year.”39
Strange as it seems, the explosion at Chernobyl has been turned to great advantage, and with worrisome ease. That such a major event should seem to have had such limited effect is used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of all anxieties about man-made radioactivity in the environment. A recent essay in The Observer launches off with an attack on the press by a
Cumbrian man named John Allan, comparing reports which described more loss of life at Chernobyl than Russian authorities subsequently confirmed, to reports about Sellafield—also, according to Mr. Allan, lies meant to sell newspapers.40 Typically, the article compares the dangers of working in a nuclear plant to those of coal mining, and notes that closings of mines and steelworks have made the area overwhelmingly dependent on Sellafield in any case. Then it establishes that plutonium contamination incidents, called by the workers “taking a bit of ploot,” are entirely commonplace. Dr. Jack Strain, head of the medical staff at Sellafield, told a reporter that if they informed doctors whenever their patients among the work force were contaminated, “we would be writing 100 letters a day.” A man named Jim Horspool, apparently involved with Sellafield from its early days, propagates the view “that a certain amount of radiation could be beneficial.” As such people always do, he adduces the fact that we are exposed to radiation in nature. “‘Chadung,’ he cried. ‘That was a cosmic ray going straight through. Chadung. There goes another one.’” Then we are introduced to “Atomic Stan,” the worker contaminated in 1957, when he was among those who put fire hoses into the burning Windscale reactor. He describes having looked into the core itself. The son of a stonemason who died in middle age of stone dust in his lungs, Stan is now seventy-one and smoking thirty cigarettes a day. The article describes tours of the plant arranged by BNF, and an exhibition which demonstrates the radioactivity of Cornish granite and of a luminous watch face.
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution Page 16