Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

by Marilynne Robinson

  The gist of the article is that radiation has indeed received a bad press. Workers accept the risk with “a kind of quiet pride,” a risk that compares favorably with those of other industries, or at least bears comparison flattering to both traditional industry and the nuclear industry. The quiet pride of Sellafield workers, we are told, is like the attitude of miners toward the risks of lung disease or cave-ins. This is a disturbing evolution in industry apologetics, since it was supposedly the benevolent hope of the nuclear industrialists to relegate such suffering to the brutal past.

  There are stories in the press which give insight into the obscurity surrounding the health issue, for example, one in the The (London) Times41 about a man named Harry King, who worked inside the Sellafield plant in a room with an inoperative air filter. He was found to have been exposed to an overdose of plutonium. In the course of time his teeth and hair fell out. He developed cataracts, and finally died of brain cancer. BNF paid his widow £8,000 compensation but did not accept responsibility for his death. The physician at Sellafield, Dr. Jack Strain, has said that when workers are contaminated it is explained to them that no one has ever developed side effects from working in the nuclear industry. This assurance might have required some revision after Chernobyl, though perhaps not, given its fairly spectacular imperviousness to deaths like Mr. King’s. BNF, as of February 28, 1986, the date of the Times article, had paid £246,233 in compensation to Sellafield widows. This includes an award of £120,633 in 1985 to the family of a member of management staff.42 The company is initiating morbidity payments to those of its workers who are in the way of succumbing—to Weltschmerz, presumably.

  These attentions do not fall like the gentle rain from heaven. BNF holds hearings at which claims for compensation are accepted or denied, on what basis God knows, unless it is the poignancy of the tale. If no one dies from working in a nuclear plant, obviously no one can be more or less deserving of compensation on other than sentimental grounds. Certainly the anguish of dying from nameless causes is much intensified by developing cataracts and losing one’s teeth and hair. So there would exist a humanitarian basis for such selectivity. And BNF has made cancer its favorite charity, and is therefore no doubt particularly moved when this malady appears among its work force.

  Most cases are denied hearing in the first place—94 out of 164, according to the article in The Times, which explains that BNF had set up its compensation system to avoid the expense and delay of legal procedings. This is an impressive tribute to the government’s faith in their objectivity, more striking in view of their stated lack of confidence in the plant’s management during this same period. The figures suggest settlements in sixty-eight cases averaging less than £300, or about $500. An indication of the job status of those who do most of the dying, presumably. Thrift, at least, appears to be served by the arrangement.

  The importance of the assertion that no one dies from working in a nuclear plant to those responsible for the management of Sellafield would seem to militate against pure objectivity in adjudicating the grievances of those who feel a family member has in fact died from working in the nuclear industry. To admit to responsibility in any death would establish that there are conditions in which exposure to radioactive materials traumatizes the human organism fatally. The ramifications of such a concession would be very great, the uproar among widows and orphans being only a leitmotif. For it is the impeccable safety record of the industry itself as much as anything that predisposes the government to view with skepticism any suggestion that they might be creating health problems in the general public. In fact, comb the literature as I may, I find no allusion to experiments of any kind that bear out the view of the authorities about the nature of radioactivity. Rather than producing research that indicates the degree of innocuousness of radioactive materials required to justify practices at Sellafield, they defend themselves with claims that their harmfulness cannot be proven. “An observed association between two factors does not prove a causal relationship,” in the words of the Black Report on childhood leukemia near Sellafield.

  There are many occasions in which it seems that the interests of industry must influence scientific research. The Black Report, granting elevated levels of both radiation and leukemia in the area of Sellafield, and observing that irradiation is the only known cause of this illness, recommended research to discover other possible causes. Subsequently the Human Leukemia Virus Centre has been founded in Glasgow to research the role of viruses in the onset of leukemia, specifically in the phenomenon of leukemia clusters.43 Such excesses within geographical areas have been found near many British nuclear sites.

  Since both leukemia and irradiation depress the immune system, I suppose we will all be kept busy reading about viral infections associated with cancer. It will be implied, I am sure, that observed association should be construed as causal relationship.

  An article published in the New Scientist in 1986 titled “Clampdown at Sellafield” describes a bold and assertive government that has “decided to step in and curb airborne radioactive pollution from nuclear plants,” startling both BNF and environmentalists “by announcing plans to set both an overall limit and numerical limits for specified radionuclides and groups of radionuclides.”44 Interestingly, this initiative was taken just at the same time the cloud was floating west from Chernobyl, and thus, presumably, by those very same gentlemen so unschooled in such matters as to have boggled at big words like “isotope.” This little article goes on to explain: “At present, airborne emissions are monitored—but there are no specific authorisations, as there are for liquid discharges, to control permitted levels of gases, mists or dusts containing radioactive contamination.” However, the article notes serenely, “the company is worried that it may have problems keeping to the new limits if it wants to maintain the throughput of its reprocessing activities while vital pollution control plant is out of action during maintenance.” In other words, no variety of emission is controlled at all except what comes down the pipeline, and the priority given to “throughput” is such that the plant continues to function even while “vital pollution control plant,” whatever that can amount to, is out of commission. Once again, it is surely reasonable to wonder what all the NRPB’s research was for, if these emissions have been unlimited all these years.

  This is no Faustus legend. Science is not at the root of the problem, nor is an overweaning desire for knowledge, or perhaps even power. The plutonium factory at Sellafield merely thrives on the failures of science, as an undertaker thrives on the failures of medicine. Any great curiosity about the mysteries of Being would have led these gentlemen to read up on their stock-in-trade—a pardonable hubris, surely, beside the incurious good cheer with which they have scattered it over the landscape. The refuse collector in Brazil who stripped the lead shielding off the capsule of cesium 137 to sell it was engaging in a naive commerce, very modest in scale but similar in kind to the commerce centered in Sellafield. He did not know what he was doing. It is as if the refuse collectors at Sellafield do not know what they are doing, either. Cesium 137 is among the contaminants released in important quantities through their pipeline into the sea, and among those toxins most present in seafood. The terrible deaths of the people in Brazil who came in contact with this substance indicate that harm is to be feared from exposure to it. Yet not until the accident at Chernobyl, when it fell over Europe and was treated, briefly despite its persistence, as a public health problem on the Continent, was it treated as a problem in Britain, where it has accumulated in the environment for decades.

  But can I suggest that men who have long mingled with the premier nuclear scientists and technicians of the world do not know what they are doing when they pour radioactive materials into the European environment? Is another conclusion possible? This is not a rhetorical question. While behavior of the kind I describe is what one fears of terrorists, and while there can only be malice at the bottom of policies so abusive that an enemy might blanch at the thought of oc
casioning such everlasting, indiscriminate harm, still is it to be imagined that these men have quite knowingly set out to do what they have done?

  They must have known better once.

  A London Times supplement devoted to Calder Hall, on the occasion of its commencing operation in October 1956, included an essay titled “How the reactors were planned,” written by B. L. Goodlet, engineer in charge of design study, which described radiation hazards as follows:

  The term contamination implies loose radioactivity—dust or droplets—which may be absorbed into the body through skin abrasions or by breathing, eating or drinking. The counter-measures against contamination are complete enclosure of all processes involving radioactive materials and rigorous controls of the effluent—gaseous, liquid, and solid—from all plants using radioactive substances. 45

  The plants were not designed to meet this standard, however, and over the years theory seems to have conformed itself to practice, becoming primitive and improvised to suit the needs of the industry.

  I think moral aphasia might be a useful concept. It is no doubt apparent from my long approach to Sellafield that in my view a civilization with such a pervasively violent history, in the course of which it has acquired the highest estimation of its own decency and mildness, has developed a peculiar trick of mind, not to be called a divided nature, since the conviction of particular goodness always one way or another justifies or conceals or expedites really remarkable transgression.

  Any schoolchild knows better than to do what these men do, transporting toxic materials over thousands of miles of sea despite the risks of accident or seizure—do we know these things have never happened?—or bringing them across the Channel, and through London by train, and then storing them in quantity among leaking silos and earth ditches, until they can be bathed in solvents, the greater part of the uranium 235 and plutonium 239 extracted from the resulting broth, and the rest flushed into the sea. Then plutonium 239—bomb-grade, that is—is stored at Sellafield, or returned by sea or by air to whomever it was that sent it to Britain as waste, so that it can abide forever as plutonium in undisclosed quantities in unknown hands in a world not remarkable for stability or, as I have just demonstrated, good sense.

  In 1976 then-vice-chairman of BNF, Julian Avery, was reported by The (London) Times to have answered concerns about the possibility of terrorist actions in a “plutonium economy” with the remark that it is not plutonium but terrorism that should be eliminated.46 Presumably Northern Ireland demonstrates the ease with which this is to be accomplished.

  Like so many of the world’s sorrows, Sellafield, then Windscale, grew directly out of World War II. The United States attempted, after the success of the Manhattan Project, to monopolize nuclear technology, excluding the British along with everyone else despite the early prominence of British physicists in atomic research and despite their contributions to the building of the bomb. Newspapers and magazines of the period make it clear that relations between Britain and America after the war were not especially cordial. A member of Congress declared himself no more pro-British than pro-Russian, in response to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered in Missouri, which raised hackles among the American public by seeming to propose an Anglo-American alliance.

  The closing down of access to technology seems to have been a reflex of pure alarm by a government that had arrived rapidly, though still too late, at a sense of the perils of “proliferation.” Since the United States never had any sort of corner on the relevant science—British accounts of the evolution of nuclear physics hardly include an American name—there is little reason to doubt that the attempt to control it was futile from the beginning. Margaret Gowing, historian of the British nuclear enterprise, declares that the bomb was their invention. I would eagerly concede them that distinction.

  In any case, the British received no special treatment from us in the matter of atomic weapons development. As a result, they set about developing them on their own, with no other resources than “green fields and grey matter,” in a phrase of the period, and with such urgency that the construction of the plant at Sellafield was, as I have said, supposedly compromised by materials shortages brought on by the war. Since this fact is now used to account for the plant’s spectacular history of accidents, no major reconstruction of the basic plant can have been undertaken when time and the availability of materials allowed. Whether the jerrybuilding of the site was indeed a product of haste or not, the haste is notable in itself. The possession of atomic weapons established nations as powers, and Britain, still an empire at the time, was determined to keep its place in the counsels of the mighty. The United States may have been pressured by a fear that the Germans would develop the bomb first, and Russia may have been driven by the fear of conceding such an overwhelming advantage to a possibly hostile American government, but the British seem to have understood earliest the status-conferring properties of these new weapons. Their haste had no justification in terms of any threat to their safety. It must be laid to pique, and to a desire to retain their importance in the world. They had made a fresh demonstration of the practical value of their empire in the war just concluded, summoning troops from the ends of the earth. But Britain (perhaps England would be better here) seems always to have felt so vulnerable, in the matter of its wealth and importance, that any course of action or any policy could be justified as the expedient of desperation. Though Britain enjoyed greater relative wealth and dominance for a longer period of time than any other power after Rome, its behavior has always been predicated on littleness. At the end of World War II Britain had by far the strongest economy in Europe, and banks full of savings. There was no more pressing need for cheap than for hasty nuclear development. Yet both are treated now not only as justified in themselves but as excusing their inevitable consequences. A great continuing belief in the wisdom of early weapons policy is reflected in the ability of the Labour Party to destroy any electoral advantage that seems about to accrue to it by proposing that Britain rid itself of nuclear weapons. The party seems now headed for marginalization on the unaided strength of this issue, even while its constituency has a great practical need for a functioning party—a need which, in fairness, Labour is poorly suited to fill in any case, less so since Mrs. Thatcher abolished the elected major city governments that were Labour’s power base.

  Britain has never had to justify to its people the possession of nuclear weapons on any grounds other than their assuring that the country would continue to cut an impressive figure on the world stage. It has never had to excuse the slovenliness with which the great enterprise was gone about on any grounds other than Britain’s littleness and poverty. Presumably it is the country’s exceptional depth of civilization, or its gift for taking the long view, that elevates it above the level of poseur in the minds of its people. In any case, it is assumed that Britain should be a world power, that extraordinary methods are necessary to make it one, that developing nuclear weapons was an appropriate course to take in assuring Britain’s place among nations. While we and the Russians pardoned ourselves as the defenders of opposed systems which we were persuaded could bring justice and the alleviation of suffering to other societies and generations, Britain, typically, scrabbled to shore up its own interests, narrowly defined. Seldom departing in public from the values with which Americans identify themselves, except to add emphasis in one instance, urge temperance in another, and imply, through a certain fretfulness, that the whole thing would be better if it were not so crudely managed, the British nevertheless acquired nuclear weapons to establish their independence from the United States, in heat and haste that look like desperation. Denied the use of testing sites in America, they considered exploding atomic bombs in Scotland and Yorkshire, and finally arranged to use Maralinga in the Australian interior, which they left severely contaminated with plutonium, as it remains to this day, as well as islands off the Australian coast, sending one especially notorious cloud drifting across the mainland from Monte Bello. N
ow, of course, the British test in Nevada.

  The materials for these handsome acts of national self-assertion have come from Windscale/Sellafield and from Calder Hall, the plutonium-producing, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at the same site. As a plant primarily designed for the production of plutonium, with electricity generation as an ancillary function, Calder Hall served as prototype for the first generation of nuclear reactors in Britain. There has never really been a second generation. Not only were military and civilian uses not distinct, the former took priority over the latter in determining reactor design for both uses, since the reactors are not especially efficient as producers of electricity. Dounreay, in Scotland, was launched very early, in 1959—a breeder reactor, the wave of the future, or so it was thought at the dawn of the nuclear age, and so it may prove to be, insofar as these developments have not precluded a future. Plutonium would be needed to fuel such plants when the technology was perfected. Perhaps the British decision makers hoped to be the first into the field, with a prototype for the breeder and a supply of the material to run it. Export sales have always been a consideration of the first importance in the development of nuclear power.

  Britain’s history especially predisposes it to keeping a world market in view, so perhaps such an explanation would account for the otherwise strange decision to build so many plutonium-producing plants, more than have ever been required to supply the fantastic demands of nuclear weapons development in the United States, for example. British strategic nuclear weapons seem to be numbered, for the purposes of international reckoning. Since even the British Parliament has no access to defense information, and since governments can conceal nuclear capabilities as they choose, the seeming disproportion between the scale of Britain’s plutonium production and its apparently modest defense needs is not based on information of sufficient quality to merit brooding over. Understating numbers of warheads would reduce pressure on Britain to enter into arms control negotiations, while overstating them would enhance national prestige at little cost and little risk, the force being meant to trigger grander events, not to sustain an exchange on its own.