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

by Marilynne Robinson

  I noticed the little article about possible adverse effects of ingesting plutonium. It was feared, the article said, that children absorbed the material many times more readily than adults. Soon afterward the matter of the contamination of the beaches of Cumbria arose. First an employee of the plant, nameless and faceless as figures in this narrative very often are, stopped to tell a young family not to allow their children to play on the sand. They wrote to their Member of Parliament, who raised a question about conditions near the plant. At about this time, a Greenpeace boat went out to cap the pipeline by way of protesting the gush of radioactive materials and solvents into the weary sea.

  This is a very strange little story by itself. Something over a million gallons go down that pipeline in the course of a day. Could people working under water actually hope to cap a double pipeline through which so much toxic liquid was flowing? Capping the pipeline at Sellafield, if it could be done, would seem to involve the risk of backing up this enormous outflow, flooding the beach or the interior of the plant, a dubious piece of environmentalism. Their ability to close the pipe was said to have been taken seriously by someone and foiled. The mouth had been changed so that the cap they had prepared for it would not fit, a fact that led to speculation in the press about government surveillance of Greenpeace.

  As the event was reported, these Greenpeace divers first went into the sea at the mouth of the pipeline, to take silt samples. They surfaced again through a slick, and discovered, when a Geiger counter in the boat indicated radioactivity at 1,500 times “normal” levels, that they were contaminated. Thus was discovered the great slick that closed the beaches of Cumbria, that made them get up and move, like Birnam Wood. (I have never seen a photograph of this giant convoy of trucks, moving back and forth, presumably for weeks, so I cannot speculate on the methods used to avoid spreading contamination en route to the site of disposal, wherever that may have been. Plant management denied the beaches were being removed. A large decontamination effort was undertaken, however, and since flotsam and seaweed in themselves could hardly have been sufficient to sustain such an effort, I incline to believe the reports that sand itself was removed. Testimony at the trial of BNF for its management of this incident described levels of radiation at ten thousand times background. 48While it is not possible to assign any precise meaning to such figures, they clearly indicate an extreme situation. The trucks disappear from later accounts altogether. So does the attempt to cap the pipeline.)

  Some days passed between the contamination of the Greenpeace divers and the closing of the beaches, which seems to have been the time it took for BNF to acknowledge that anything unusual had occurred. It has never been clear to me whether they did not know a spill had occurred, or whether they did not consider the event unusual. In all such events, delayed response is characteristic.

  If the spill was serious enough to require a significant effort of decontamination, it would certainly have been prudent as well to relocate children and pregnant women while the decontamination was proceeding. When I imagine these residues of spent fuel, oxides fine enough to be carried in solvents into the sea and then to be brought in again by the tides and winds, I can only imagine that they would be highly particulate, and that when the sand was disturbed they would be winnowed out by any movement of the air, unless the sand was wet, in which case they would seep out with the moisture. In other words, I cannot imagine how the repair of the beaches could have failed to have intensified the contamination of the area, in terms of unavoidable human contact with it.

  I find the going a little hard when I try to imagine a boat full of bright young men, literate in matters nuclear, with a Geiger counter on board, on their way to take silt from the floor of this notorious sea. Why did they go on this mission? Because radioactive wastes were being disgorged into the sea, at that very site. Did they expect to be contaminated, diving down to the plutonium-spewing orifice? Clearly they did not. It was supposedly an oily slick that made them radioactive when they returned to the boat. Where would this slick have come from? That pipeline. Therefore, they no doubt dived as well as surfaced through it. So here is the problem. Why would fit young men with their lives before them, diving near the pipeline because it released radioactivity, and who had a Geiger counter along, not test the condition of the water before they entered it? Putting aside the apparent fact of one particular slick, how can it have come as a surprise to them that they were contaminated, and why should they have treated the discovery that they were as meaning something exceptional had happened? If they really thought this radioactive emission problem was only of such magnitude that one could dive into the thick of the most prolonged and intense contamination in the world and rise out of it as fresh as Wordsworth’s Proteus, then they might make more profitable use of their time selling toy seals—the kind most resistant to radiation in the environment, as these conservation-minded folk are no doubt aware.

  In fairness, Greenpeace seems to have a Geiger counter problem. Here we read how they had one along in the boat. But then when Chernobyl blew, the only Geiger counter that was used to provide readings on levels of radioactivity on the west coast of Britain belonged to a high-school science class. Surely we might have expected a flood of independent information from this sun-bronzed band of nuclear foes, since they do have Geiger counters, as this story proves. Yet they seem not to use them to maximum effect, and that is a pity, all the more so because their shortcomings in this regard replicate precisely those omissions of government, industry, the regulatory agencies, and the scientific community which create the aura of mystery around Sellafield, an uncertainty a little monitoring could so quickly dispel.

  But let us return to the matter of narrative. Let us suppose the facts discussed so far were to be construed for the uses of fiction, and the writer was obliged to impose on them or discover in them that order of reasonableness and plausibility which could keep the reader from flinging the book out the window. Clearly the nuclear activists could not leap into the most radioactive sea in the world at the eye of its contamination and then register amazement that their Geiger counter was agitated. They might at most sail out and sail back in again. The idea of capping a pipeline from which comes a massive flow of toxic materials clearly must be scrapped on grounds of implausibility. And the detail concerning the contamination of the divers and their boat had best be crossed out, too, since the reader would wonder about the other ships in the Irish Sea that day and the catches pulled up through the toxic film and stowed in contaminated hulls and carried away into ports and countries where the name of Sellafield is never heard—America, for example. These environmentalists would no doubt be expected to think in larger terms than merely their own persons and property. According to reported testimony at the pollution trial—the first in British nuclear history—there were people on the beaches that day and fishing boats off the coast.49

  Without offending the reader unduly, the tale could be told in this way: Greenpeace declares the coast to be contaminated, couching the information, so as to make this fact seem surprising, in terms of the pipeline anecdote. After a few days, BNF admits that there has been an accident. In the fiction, this delay would make the spill seem less alarming and egregious than it would if the management responded with any kind of haste. At last they admit that solvents were indeed accidentally flushed into the sea. The beaches are closed, hauled away, replaced, and declared safe, though strollers are advised not to pick up bits of flotsam, which are still hot. Except for the removal of the beaches, no extraordinary measures are taken to protect anyone. We know from experience with conventional oil slicks how they devastate coasts and aquatic life. This slick, we are to believe, drifts in and is blotted up and hauled away—to some corner of that vast kingdom where radioactivity can do no harm, or back to the sea, to resume life as a slick. Obviously the beach must be considered radioactive over the long term, or there would be no point in moving it. So wherever it was put, it will be radioactive, over the long term.

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nbsp; This makes narrative sense, if the point and object of it all is the removal of severe radioactive contamination from the area of Sellafield. It would be very easy to imagine reasons for doing this. Putting aside the matter of any particular episode of contamination, the beaches had absorbed contaminants for years. The great concentration of radioactivity in surf and in seaweed and flotsam would make this inevitable. At some point it would have to become a problem, more especially because the area is the site of an enormous construction project which will continue over years of time. (Former BNF chairman Con Allday has written that instruments for sensing radioactivity inside Sellafield are so sensitive that alarms are sometimes triggered by the materials from which the plant is built. Where the materials are local and the construction reasonably recent, this may not be proof of great sensitivity, after all.) Perhaps the residues, filtering through the sand over all those years, have begun to stratify. Plutonium 241 goes critical in very small quantities. Criticality is a vast release of energy, deadly to anyone exposed to it. Sellafield as an environment is unique in history, and I have read nothing to guide me in imagining what would happen if, fifteen feet under the sand, a few tablespoons of volatile isotope converged. It might be an incident that would spoil a picnic. I have read that at Hanford in Washington State shifting of soil was required because wastes had seeped into it and were accumulating dangerously. The analogy here seems potentially useful. According to the New Scientist, in 1986 the Central Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry of the Environment suggested that “it would be prudent to place restrictions on any development along and off the coast near Sellafield which could disturb the concentrations of radioactivity building up in mud and silts.”50

  Maybe the beaches at Sellafield had begun to glow in the dark. Islands in the Pacific that were used for atomic testing glowed for years, and contamination levels at Sellafield are like those at testing sites. That would be an excellent reason for hauling the sand away. The matter arose conveniently in the winter months, avoiding any great disruption of the tourist season, at least for American tourists.

  Then, too, cancers were accumulating at a rate that would be difficult to ignore. Just at this time a report by James Cutler prepared for Yorkshire Television stimulated a government-appointed commission to look into the leukemia deaths of children in Seascale, the village nearest the plant; the inquiry was headed by Dr. Douglas Black. The Black Report was a response to anecdotal information collected by television journalists, in the event, but the kind of story liable to gain currency even when doctors are legally prohibited from giving out information that is not officially authorized, as in Britain. The physical environs of the plant would have constituted a natural history of contamination, a geological record of a sort, if models and extrapolations were made to take into account tides and seepage and the rest. We must curse the luck that has apparently caused this resource to be lost to science. This is all the more true because the Black Report made a considerable point of stressing the difficulties and uncertainties of establishing dose levels and exposures, and all the more true because a standard defense of practices at Sellafield has been that contaminants disperse in the sea or become somehow fixed to the sea floor.

  If Sellafield occupied a cultural terrain where there were such things as liability and culpability, what has happened would appear very like a destruction of evidence. It seems not to have been an act of prudence as that word is normally understood, because nothing was done to decontaminate local houses and shops. I conclude this from the fact that those tested at the time of the Black Inquiry, months later, were found to be contaminated with plutonium and other substances, and this was treated as a surprise. A project was then launched to vacuum houses in the Sellafield area with specially fitted machines, and to do the same in areas well away from nuclear facilities, to determine whether there was any correlation between cancer rates and plutonium in the domestic environment. The project does not seem terribly well designed. The point is to dissociate cancer from radioactive contamination, and the scientific hoovering is to demonstrate, presumably, that there is more radioactive material in houses near nuclear plants than in those at some distance from them. I am at a loss to know what in such information could either surprise or reassure. This demonstration will be made, however, and cancer rates compared, to illustrate that cancer can flourish unabetted by a nuclear power plant. Again, while this can no doubt be proved, there is nothing here to surprise or reassure, either. It is known that near Sellafield the rate of childhood leukemia exceeds the national average by ten times. Where comparable anomalies occur seemingly without exposure to radiation implicated in the deaths of the Cumbrian children, it should be incumbent upon health authorities to look for the causes of these other anomalies. They may be the quirks of statistics, or they may be viruses, or they may be proximity to a chemical waste disposal plant, or to a hospital, since these have been found to dump radioactive iodine used for diagnostic testing into the water system, or to any of the industries that pour detritus into the air and into rivers and estuaries, or even proximity to a rail line along which wastes would pass on the way to Sellafield, or any combination of these factors. If the health consequences of Sellafield blend into larger patterns of public health in Britain, it is because the environmental practices of the nuclear industry are consistent with those of other industries in that befouled country. Finally, the Black Commission concluded that it could offer a limited assurance of the safety of the Cumbrian environment, and so the issue was more or less resolved, at least to the satisfaction of the government.

  Yet sometimes the health consequences of radioactive contamination are explicitly conceded. In the recent case of the Black Report, uranium released from the plant was belatedly acknowledged to be a lethal carcinogen through the following sequence of events. Dr. Black, inquiring into the deaths from leukemia among children in the village of Seascale, concluded that emissions from the Sellafield plant could not be blamed because the number of deaths was in excess of the number he felt could be projected from the emissions that were supposed to have occurred. According to him, emissions would have had to be forty times as great to account for the actual rate of death. Now, this line of reasoning was ingenious rather than persuasive, in the view of many. The Black Report, with its measured (that is, equivocal) reassurance, seemed open to doubt.

  Dr. Black, in a reply to critics, wrote: “Since the report came out, we have been notified of further cases, and indeed asked to include them. We cannot validly do this until the figures in other electoral wards have been brought up to date for comparison.”51 Since so much is made by Sellafield’s defenders of the fact that the number of child deaths—ten—is too small to be significant, though in so small a population it yields an excess rate of 1,000 percent the national average, it is strange to minimize the significance of new cases, appearing within months of the publication of Dr. Black’s report. If other electoral wards are in so unhappy a state as to cushion this rate of excess, God help them.

  Dr. Black explains that a cause-and-effect relation between radiation and leukemia will be established if lower emissions, which he says are being achieved, bring lower rates of illness. In other words, future leukemia excesses will exonerate the plant, as present ones have done. This is such a pretty piece of reasoning, I will not spoil it with talk of half-lives.

  But just in the nick of time a man came forward with information which saved the day. In the fifties, when the plant was still under the management of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, a release of uranium occurred which was, uncannily, forty times as great as had been shown in the records. 52 The man who came forward was a former employee, who had left years before, disgruntled by the fact that releases of radioactivity from the plant were higher than acknowledged. He and a colleague tested the levels of radioactivity in their homes, found them unsettlingly high, and decided to leave the area. But he surfaced to make his telling revelation about an incident in which uranium was released into the
environment. The information was opportune in a number of ways. It tended to confirm the accuracy of the Black Inquiry’s projections. It associated leukemia with radioactive contamination, but it located the source of the anomaly in a single, discrete episode of contamination. Out of good nature I do not dwell on the persistence of uranium in the environment.

  By implication this one episode of contamination being exactly sufficient to satisfy the Black Inquiry’s projections, there is nothing else the inquiry failed to take into account. While the plant is implicated in these deaths of children, the rest of the information it gave the inquiry about its operations was at the same time vindicated. (It is sometimes reported that the NRPB, that body whose frequent service to the public has by now made it familiar to my readers, supplied the inquiry with its figures. But if they missed this decisive infusion of uranium into the environment, they must be substantially dependent on industry figures in any case.) Thrift may well have been a factor in the design of the investigation. And in fairness, it had only recently seemed prudent to the government to decontaminate the local beaches, as I have said, and this would necessarily have reduced the value of the area around Sellafield as a source of information, though not to the point where industry estimates need have become the exclusive source.

  One feels continuously a sense of lost opportunity. For example, if it seemed appropriate to these inquirers to reason from an excess of childhood leukemia, over and above what their figures led them to predict, to an exoneration of the plant as the cause of leukemia, and if the discovery of the release of uranium undercut this argument by appearing to account precisely for these deaths, could not that first happy conclusion, that the plant was not to blame, have been rescued by drawing attention to the fact that there are elevated rates of leukemia in other villages around Sellafield, and up and down the coast? If excess is exculpatory, then Sellafield is clearly as benign as a clover patch.