It will become very clear that I do not invest great faith in any of my sources, no more in specialist publications than in those produced by self-styled champions of this unthinkably savaged planet. I have not written a “history” of Sellafield, because I doubt that it really has one, except insofar as a shopkeeper’s ledger is a history. The supposed events that surround it seem purely epiphenomenal. To maunder on about leaks and fires is a bad joke in light of the fact that reactor cores are broken down and poured into the environment routinely and continuously. Such pother normalizes Sellafield, so that grave men can compare its “safety record” with those of other plants and industries.
Sellafield simply grows. Inquiries in 1976 and 1984, which enthralled the British press with calculations of peril and tales of malfeasance, coincided with two great expansions of the plant. I have read that in 1964 Sellafield was directed from defense toward commercial development by government policy. Commercial uses for radioactive materials are older than defense uses, however, and the British government are simply the last people in the world to arrive late at any chance to make money. So I am not sure that the plant has ever undergone any change at all, except in size. Its new facilities are being constructed at great expense (to the Germans and Japanese), to make it capable of extracting uranium and plutonium from new kinds of nuclear wastes.
The one thing always to be borne in mind is that, on the coast of Britain, wastes from a plutonium factory are poured into the environment every day. This is easily demonstrated from a little document, prepared by the British government Central Office of Information, printed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, titled Nuclear Energy in Britain. I will quote first from the version published in 1976.
It comes as a disappointment to discover in such documents an important degree of impressionism in technical-sounding terms like “low-level” waste or “low-activity” waste. “Low-level” seems to mean no more than that the contaminant is intermixed with something else — it is on tissues, gloves, or overalls, or as the British use the term, it is in water, or in air. “Low-activity” wastes are relatively stable and persistent materials, like plutonium. So the effluents from Sellafield, insofar as plutonium is concerned, are low-level and low-activity; that is, widely distributed and with us forever. The pamphlet tells us, “Low-activity liquid wastes are normally discharged into public sewers, rivers, or coastal waters.” It tells us, too, that “volatile fission products krypton, xenon and iodine,” high-activity wastes, are in “effluent streams” and are also “discharged, after treatment where required, to the atmosphere at heights necessary to secure adequate atmospheric dilution,” though in future they may have to be stored “until their radioactivity has decayed.” High-activity gases are vented from smokestacks into that rainy climate in the full flower of their brief lives, routinely, so that they in effect combine the worst characteristics of volatility and persistence. The pamphlet informs us that “the major source of radioactive waste is the chemical reprocessing of irradiated fuel elements,” and looking to the future, or perhaps merely speculating, it remarks that along with other modifications “it should also be possible to remove toxic elements such as plutonium from waste streams.”
This amounts to a fairly straightforward description of the routine release of toxic and radioactive materials. A revised version of the same publication, printed in 1981, says, “Low-level gaseous and liquid waste can be dispersed directly to the environment where the dilution of the waste is sufficient to avoid any significant risk to the population.” Notice what latitude the word “significant” allows to the expression of cultural values. Further, “two main sources of low activity liquid effluent arise at Windscale [that is, Sellafield]: water discharged from the fuel storage ponds and waste streams arising in the chemical plant. These are discharged into the Irish Sea through a twin pipeline which extends 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) offshore.” An insight into the meaning of “low-level” is provided later in the same paragraph: “Low-level radioactive waste is also disposed of in concrete-lined steel containers at sea, in the deep North Atlantic Ocean, some hundreds of miles from land.” This is done in accordance with the provisions of two agreements with truly wonderful names, the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972) and the Multilateral Consultation and Surveillance Mechanism for the Sea Dumping of Radioactive Waste. According to the report, international inspectors come along to watch the barrels go over the side. In any case, low-level waste is the kind of thing one encloses in concrete and drops into the remote depths of the Atlantic, when one is not dispersing it directly into the environment.
These publications of Her Majesty’s government document the essential fact, which is never disputed, that Sellafield pours plutonium and other radioactive substances into the sea and air. A booklet published in 1981 for the Commission of the European Communities, edited by J. R. Grover of the nuclear research center at Harwell, U.K., titled Management of Plutonium Contaminated Waste, makes a series of startling assertions about plutonium oxide which are apparently meant to justify the practice: that “its density is nearly that of lead which reduces strongly the possibility of it blowing over long distances”; that “it cannot be assimilated by plants or transmitted via biological routes”; that “in water its solubility is virtually zero. Therefore it cannot be transported by water.”
In the first place, plutonium oxide forms extremely fine particles that become suspended in air, as the pamphlet itself acknowledges when it says of plutonium that “in a dusty form it is pyrophoric”—capable of igniting spontaneously in air. That this risk is compared to the danger of explosions in “other dusty operations” in industry merely restates the fact that plutonium oxide tends to become highly particulate. The pamphlet also describes dispersion of plutonium-contaminated gases through smokestacks, a practice which surely assumes that plutonium can be carried by the wind, since wide dispersion is supposed to render it harmless. The booklet actually defines gaseous plutonium-contaminated waste as “just the effluent air from plutonium process areas,” an apparent acknowledgment that plutonium oxide is readily airborne.
As to the transmission of plutonium “via biological routes,” plutonium concentrates in the liver, kidneys, and bone marrow, according to other authorities. This is to say that it passes into the food chain — into black pudding and kidney pie, for example.
The suggestion that plutonium cannot be transported by water because it does not dissolve in water suggests to me that the writer is not highly observant. Anyone who has hosed down a sidewalk is in a position to enlighten him.
The pamphlet goes on to say: “(a) There is no known chemical toxicity of plutonium, (b) The genetic effects of plutonium are negligible, (c) The carcinogenicity of plutonium is relatively inactive through all the routes of absorption except by inhalation because of the poor excretion of plutonium in that situation.”