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

by Marilynne Robinson

  As it is, the question has been left in obscurity. Why should a release of uranium that occurred in the fifties have had this dreadful impact on children whose parents were children at the time? If it suggests either chromosome damage or the retention of radioactive substances in the bodies of young women which affect fetal development, then the contamination should manifest itself in other forms besides leukemia. The uranium was apparently vented into the air. Therefore lung cancer would be a likely aftereffect, and the delay in its onset comprehensible. However, only one group of leukemia deaths in one village were within the limits of the study, so other forms of impact of radioactivity were neither sought out nor taken into account where they made themselves manifest. I lay myself open to the charge of cynicism by suggesting that this particular emission was granted its special importance because it occurred under the old management, before BNF took control of the plant. The imputation of carelessness, of bad record keeping, is cast back on the UKAEA, and the present management is unsmirched.

  Oddly enough, only days after Dr. Black’s results had been, in essential ways, shored up by the discovery of an emission of uranium sufficient to account, by his system of reckoning, for the leukemia deaths of the children of Seascale—a release of uranium from the plant occurred twenty-two times greater than that to which these deaths of children had been more or less attributed. How did the management respond? With public assurances—the Irish were making a fuss—that the release had been approved by the government, was wholly intentional, and presented no threat to anyone. After all, according to former BNF chairman Con Allday, uranium is the most common element in the earth’s crust.53 He informed the public that the Irish Sea is full of many thousands of tons of naturally occurring uranium. Therefore, another half ton of Sellafield uranium could hardly matter. The (unnamed) chemical plant up the coast releases as much every day—a fact never taken into account in calculating radiation doses, so far as I can discover. In conclusion he laid anxiety about Sellafield to “fear born of ignorance.” He does not say whose ignorance inspires this fear.

  Other aspects of the nuclear issue are as thoroughly nonsensical. It is said that refusal by the Seamen’s Union to man dump ships has ended nuclear waste disposal by Britain into the open sea in the last few years. Since international agreements to stop such dumping have been ignored routinely, there is no great reason to imagine that the action of a labor union will have had a restraining influence, especially on Mrs. Thatcher. The advantage to the government of this action is that it creates obscurity around the situation without the government’s having to disavow its policy, should it resume dumping or be found never to have stopped.

  In any case, the merits and demerits of ocean dumping from ships—the kind that has supposedly been desisted from—are mulled over in the press as gravely as anyone could wish, though not altogether usefully. The complexities of underground storage are explained with reference to the fact that high-level wastes must be isolated for thousands of years. This information comes as a little shock to one aware of disposal practices at Sellafield, as do the qualms about dumping in the open sea. Jim Slater, former head of the Seamen’s Union, spoke of organizing industrial action against Sellafield, and Miss Jean Emery, a leader of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, has pointed out the absurdity of fretting over the malign consequences of ocean dumping when the quantity that has been put in the Irish Sea from Sellafield is twice as great as that dumped over the sides of ships.54 But in general the press seems content to leave all this unreconciled. Despite the supposed halt to the practice, press reports of “stolen minutes” from a meeting of the ministry whose function is to approve dumping at sea record anxiety that the loading of an oversized container, one of special thickness, would tip off the press that plutonium was being dumped, and that this would in turn shake public confidence in ocean dumping.† This is very odd, this glimpse of a government bundling plutonium up in an especially heavy containment and then still chary of being seen to put it in the sea at all. This same ministry has approved all the uncontained disposal that occurs from Sellafield. A cynic might wonder again if this image of a cautious and stalemated government has been planted to create characterizing detail at odds with the plain, brute persistence of actual policy.

  While British scientists study the relative merits of bores in shale or granite, salt mines, vitrification, or implantation in the seabed as disposal methods suited to materials which must be isolated for periods significant even on geologic time scales, other British scientists ponder the fact that the human placenta has not proved a sufficient protection for the human fetus from plutonium ingested by the mother. Granite is inappropriate to contain plutonium because water can pass through it. The inappropriateness of the placenta for the same function apparently eludes scientific understanding. Unfortunately, while the deficiencies of granite, and doubts about other methods of long-term isolation, have delayed the development of these methods, the same prudential concern has not prevented the disposal practices which rely altogether on frail human flesh. What, after all, should be protected from a notorious mutagen if not a human fetus? This is clearly another instance where industrial practice has run ahead of scientific knowledge, if not in fact away from it. It may be germane here to point out again the great economic advantages entailed in flushing plutonium into the environment. If thrift is a factor, any other method will be hard pressed to compete, more especially now that the horse is out of the barn.

  The British ponder costly strategies for disposing of nuclear waste, nuclear power being the only viable long-term energy source for a country that is closing down its coalfields and selling its oil abroad. Faint hearts are scolded for refusing to deal with this hard reality. No mention is made, of course, of the fact that Britain goes looking for trouble, first by soliciting foreign custom for their disposal industry, second by using reprocessing as a disposal method, when the solvents involved multiply the volume of toxic waste more than a hundred times, and third by failing to invest in new plants, which at one time could have set some bounds to the dreadfulness of the enterprise by limiting leaks and spills. The nuclear waste disposal industry, also known as the plutonium industry, slipstreams behind nuclear power as the price that must be paid for industrial vigor. No one seems to dwell upon the fact that the price is paid in Britain for industrial vigor in Germany and Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.

  Of course they do not bear this cost alone. World commerce in toxins, like every kind of commerce, must suffer from accident and spillage. A traffic in waste destined to end up in the sea is not likely to be obsessively cautious. And then it does end up in the sea, just off the coast of Europe. While Europeans make protesting noises from time to time, their governments pay for these services. The egregiousness of Britain’s industrial offenses simply reflects the international role that has been delegated to it, that its peculiar notions of self-interest have caused it to seize upon. Meanwhile, Sweden, a Sellafield client, is constructing a state-of-the-art subsea depository that may be in fact more immune to accidents than most human contrivances. It sounds very impressive, and if it should fail, the wastes so cautiously isolated will at worst only mingle with the Swedish wastes that pass through the pipeline at Sellafield.

  I do not know whether I am describing the kind of dissociated behavior that would come with genuine denial, or simply a public-relations stunt, which plays shrewdly on a sad tendency in the public to cling to any little sign of competence on the part of those entrusted with their well-being. On the face of it, all the shielding and tunneling and vitrifying are predicated upon calculations of the dangers of these substances which take them to be extraordinarily great and persistent. So the experience the Europeans have had living alongside seas contaminated with the entire range of radioactive substances produced in reactor cores has not led their specialists to take a more sanguine view of their impact on the environment. This seems to me a fact worthy of note, in light of continuous British assurances tha
t no harm has been done.

  Clearly major questions have never been resolved concerning the rights of a national government toward the people and the terrain entrusted to its care. To dispose of either, to sell the health and posterity of one, the habitability of the other, for money, is a perfection of high-handedness beside which all other examples pale. Even to the extent that the mass of people can be thought of as entering into this bargain freely and knowingly, they have sold—for employment, or for some notion of national interest—the well-being of their descendants, which was never theirs to sell, and in the short or medium term, the well-being of the descendants of every mote of life that stirs on the face of the earth. If this has happened in a society which can be called, in any degree, open, free, and democratic, then we had better look at it very seriously indeed. Our own open, free, and democratic country lives in an informational vacuum that makes us a danger to ourselves and a terror to everyone else. No one is any freer than he wishes to be. The apparatus of democracy becomes a sort of Soviet constitution in every instance where there is no will to animate it.

  The British are amazingly docile. It is a trait they admire in themselves, and for which they are admired. They have been set apart, among all the developed nations, to endure the insupportable, and they have done it with the quietness and goodwill for which they are legendary. We have justified our reputation for impenetrable ignorance, meanwhile, winging in to drop a tear on the grave of Dorothy Wordsworth and snap a few photos of a gentler world. For forty years, since the end of the Second World War, people have asked how such vile things could have happened as those that deviled Europe in the thirties and forties. The answer is, because anything can happen.

  American books on nuclear issues usually omit to mention Britain at all. Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth is a distinguished recent example of this tendency. This earnest call to repentance sees nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States as the one great peril to the world’s survival—implying one great solution, that we “put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.”55 It is as if history proceeded by referendum, and a grand exertion of collective goodness would put the planet out of harm’s way. I have the greatest respect for Schell’s religious and democratic zeal, but there is a tendency among committed democrats like us to believe all significant problems must be somehow suited to our solutions, as our pious elders thought their trials were always suited to their strengths. Cleansing the world of weapons is a relatively simple problem beside cleansing the sea of tons of radioactive sludge, and cleansing the air and the earth, and discovering and limiting the varieties of harm already done. Putting wastes into the sea has been the work of a few bureaucrats. Taking them back out again will be impossible, no matter how aroused and enlightened public opinion might someday become. The problem has been and is now outside democratic political control, first of all because books about nuclear issues do not tell the public the problem exists.

  It is a very comfortable thing to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made—that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century.

  Mr. Schell explains that, if a nuclear weapon destroyed a nuclear power plant, the radioactive material from the core and the wastes of the plant would be much more virulent and persistent than fallout from the bomb that destroyed it. Then imagine ripe old cores broken down chemically and poured into the environment through a pipeline, or through chimneys and smokestacks. This happens routinely, along the coasts of England and Scotland, and along the coast of France.

  Clearly it is not meaningful to say that any sort of permission giving on the part of the public, such as is implied in the existence of nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Schell, lies behind this waste dumping. The people exposed to it are assured that it is not especially harmful. Books and movements which define nuclear peril primarily and even exclusively in terms of nuclear weapons and superpower rivalry confirm these assurances. British people have no grounds whatever to imagine that their situation, notorious as it is, would not impinge on the awareness of a writer who had undertaken so great a subject as the fate of the earth. They must assume therefore that if their radioactive sea does not merit a mention, it cannot be so great a problem after all. I do not believe that Mr. Schell has intentionally excluded information that would complicate the grand simplicity of his thesis. I think he is among those legions who are emotionally incapable of accepting the historical importance of stupidity and furtiveness.

  Mr. Schell locates our problems in national sovereignty, by which he means a sort of national self-love, so potent as to make us contemplate a defense that would destroy us. I locate them in the kind of sovereignty that has always been expressed in exploiting and disposing of the lives over which history and accident have given “governments” authority. The fact is that the world public arrives at this parlous moment with a grinding history behind it, badly educated, starved of information, full of sad old fears and desperate loyalties, injured in its self-regard, acculturated to docility and stoicism. The world’s most favored public, our own, is educated thoroughly and badly, starved of information, and flattered as to its own importance, while it is made incompetent in the use of the power it has. There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry out policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient.

  If the world were as Mr. Schell represents it, a place where we make our problems and can unmake them, a place where all those warheads represent public hostility toward the Soviet Union, and a new gospel of love can therefore free us of them, the world would be very simple, simpler than any city, or family, or psyche, or dream. The hostility of Americans toward Russians is an invention of polemicists. If the Soviet Union is authoritarian, so are most countries. While atheism is espoused by its government, religion seems to flourish among its people. Western European cultures, by contrast, are atheist in fact, at street level, and that has never struck us as any abomination or unbridgeable divide. Like most things, it has never struck us at all. If Russia ceased to appear to us as a threat, we would probably simply forget it, as we do most of the world most of the time. The tendency of this country to be engrossed in itself makes it ill suited to sustaining large-scale, long-term interest of any kind in the outside world. But we are told constantly that the government of the Soviet Union has aggressive intentions, and we remember just enough modern history to know what that can mean. Presumably the Russian state of mind is some version of this, mutatis mutandis, and people may well unite to eliminate nuclear weapons, at least in the countries that acknowledge having them and, unlike Britain and France, are willing to submit to international agreements to control them.

  Nuclear weapons can be produced at short notice by anyone in possession of fissionable materials, of course, but even if they are not simply replaced in secret after they are destroyed in public, fissionable materials will continue to be produced, and toxic and radioactive materials of even greater virulence than those used in bombs, through the routine functioning of nuclear power plants, so many of which were built to produce bomb-grade plutonium as well as electricity, and will continue to produce it for as long as they are used for power generation. So at best these diabolical substances will accumulate as wastes rather than as warheads, but more toxic because they will not be dissipated in the upper atmosphere but will burn or leak into the ground or simply be buried or dumped somewhere, as in fact most wastes have been for forty years. In the long term it will not matter whether national sovereignties destroy their “enemies” or merely t
hemselves and their neighbors. The fate of the earth will be the same.

  An October 1987 article in The New York Times56 informed those of its readers capable of absorbing the information that an agreement, classified along with the analysis which supported it, had been signed by our Secretaries of State and Energy, to permit flights carrying plutonium from Britain and France to Japan to land and refuel in Anchorage. This is the kind of situation in which one regrets that there is not more attachment to “national sovereignty,” in Jonathan Schell’s sense of the phrase. The governor of Alaska has sued to have the shipments blocked, and has failed to win a restraining order. How unfortunate for him that the issue arose just when other stories of greater urgency, for example the television evangelism scandals, were filling the front pages of America’s newspapers. The governor’s suit charges that “thousands of pounds” of plutonium will pass through Anchorage, and quotes a physicist from the University of Michigan to the effect that “plutonium is one of the most, ‘if not the most,’ toxic substances known to humans. Inhaling a microscopic speck could lead to cancer.” That is, of course, the usual formula for describing the toxicity of plutonium.

  I doubt that our Secretaries of State and Energy have considered and signed such an agreement casually. It is entirely possible that they signed it to prevent the refuelings from occurring in Seattle or Los Angeles, without approval, and without special security measures. After all, this commerce is being run by people who see no harm in “taking a bit of ploot.” Small amounts of plutonium would be easy to conceal, in the absence of any special precautions. A letter to the governor, Steve Cowper, signed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said that approval for these flights “will be conditioned upon a number of safety requirements such as transfer exclusively by air (to minimize time spent in international transit), use of a cask certified to withstand a crash, armed guards, redundant communications and detailed contingency plans.” If the conditions the Secretary sets out are not met, how will he know? If they are met in 10 percent of shipments, while the other 90 are stowed away in other passenger or cargo flights, will he be the wiser? Most European power plants are built on national boundaries. Therefore any accident will be half the problem of another government. Aside from its being an interesting comment on their view of the safety of their own industries and a telling comment on all the gasps of surprise, at the time of Chernobyl, that nuclear reactor accidents know no boundaries, it reveals a certain willingness to let foreigners bear the brunt of risky policies. If plutonium burned in an airliner crash, would anyone know? Would the discovery of these residues afterward be laid to a non-domestic source? I suspect the real nature of this “agreement” is simply a plea to the Europeans and Japanese to tell us what they are doing and when they are doing it. The threat to end the permission only threatens us with uncontrolled movement of plutonium through our hemisphere, no problem to the Japanese, who are accustomed to seeing their wastes dumped into European coastal waters, and no problem to the Europeans, who consider this an excellent business to be in despite self-inflicted contamination on a scale no accident could visit on us here.