According to the International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology (1986) “Plutonium is chemically active and toxic.” According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Physics (1962), whose contributors are overwhelmingly British academic and government scientists, including J. E. Gore, who contributed the article I quote, research into the physical properties of plutonium has been complicated by “difficulties in handling the metal, such as its high toxicity.” So far as I can discover, no description of plutonium as other than chemically and radiologically toxic and as carcinogenic is reflected in reference literature.
The waste-disposal booklet says, “There is no proven instance of a human being suffering from plutonium intake.” This is a favorite quibble. Leukemia, multiple myeloma, and lung cancer, though they are all associated with plutonium, cannot in any single case be proved to have been caused by it, supposedly, though they occur in high numbers in a plutonium-contaminated environment. Since each may have another etiology, so might all of them. Therefore, high cancer and leukemia rates cannot be said to be caused by exposure to plutonium, the causal link is not proven, and plutonium is exonerated. All this deserves its own chapter in any history of modern thought, simply because its consequences are epochal.
The booklet describes a regime of fastidious caution governing the operation of a “reference” plant, something between an actual, a hypothetical, and a projected system for fabricating nuclear fuel. “Windscale” is mentioned twice, never with reference to its accidents. In the midst of murky descriptions of contamination swabbed up with cotton and of the polishing of windows, under the heading “Special Problems,” we are given a description of plutonium which concludes that there are no special problems. And yet the booklet describes how plutonium 241 will continuously decay into americium 241, with the release of beta and gamma radiation, so that “the specific external risk for plutonium operators is steadily increasing with time.” The section concludes, “This may become especially embarrassing during waste handling operations.” So even in claiming a good character for plutonium it puts aside the matter of its virulent decay product, for the management of which no guidance is offered, unless to be braced for embarrassment.
Why this little document should have been produced I have no idea, or how it could be read by anyone even moderately conversant with these issues and not inspire amazement and alarm. I think the official imprimatur may have dazzled skeptics. In any case, the radiological assumptions that governed British treatment of plutonium at the start of this decade are stated very openly and authoritatively here.
On the basis of the practices and assumptions described in these publications of Her Majesty’s government, and taking into account the age and size of the plant, reckon what impact Sellafield is liable to have had. Add reports of radiation-associated illness, stern government inquiries with their implied disavowal of responsibility, and international protests, which in 1986 resulted in a vote in the European Parliament to close the plant down. The general purport of journalistic accounts, always to be considered suspect in their particulars, is confirmed.
If there is anything to the theory that a lump of plutonium the size of a grapefruit is toxic enough to destroy life on earth (I encountered this theory on the front page of The (London) Observer, in a chatty little story which included the information that the British government had poured that quarter ton of plutonium into the waters off the British coast) then the jig is up. I see no point in rushing to this somber conclusion, though it is very difficult to find any authority that will give plutonium a significantly better character.
West German animal tests are said to have demonstrated that a thousandth of a gram of plutonium killed dogs and rats in a matter of days. I have grown cynical enough to judge a piece of information by its effect, whatever its source. When a scientist declares that a speck of plutonium will kill a rat in a period of days, he is saying a spill of plutonium would create an unconcealable disaster. Then that part of a quarter ton which, over years, must have entered the environment and the food chain should have felled Britain by this time. The belief that overwhelming catastrophe would be the consequence of plutonium contamination implies anything less spectacular is proof that plutonium contamination has not occurred.
The official secrecy of Britain reflects the assumption that information damaging to the government should be contained where possible. Employees of the National Health Service must sign the Official Secrets Act, a fact which in this context sheds new light on the economic value of both the Act and the Health Service. There are no grounds for crediting public health data generated under such conditions, especially where it might inhibit a policy so enthusiastically pursued as Sellafield has been. Still, effects of radiation must have been limited enough, by the standards of the exposed population, to seem tolerable. Since Britain’s industrial history has made occupational illness and injury commonplace, passivity relative to such problems is a settled feature of life. Effects will be more conspicuous over time, reflecting the cumulative and incremental enhancement of exposure which will come with further releases of wastes, and the decay of plutonium into americium, a more intensely radioactive element, and the continuing action of surf and tide in bringing the wastes ashore. Perhaps the limits of physical endurance will be reached before the limits of docility. That is usual in such cases.
To put the matter briefly, I am writing about the radioactive contamination of a populous landscape — wastes from the plant can be measured on every coast of Britain — without special confidence in any description of plutonium, and without more than anecdotal evidence of the consequences of radiation exposure for public health. Grossly elevated rates of childhood leukemia and lymphoid malignancies in the area are conceded, though their significance is thought to be uncertain. In the Ravenglass Estuary near the plant, concentrations of plutonium are 27,000 times “background” levels, established by residues left from atomic testing which officials claim are high enough to create problematic contamination in the area, and which therefore must provide such calculations with a hefty multiplicand. Recently, officials have claimed to have no figures on levels of background radiation in Britain. Such discrepancies are commonplace. The Ravenglass Estuary near Sellafield once had a nesting population of 24,000 gulls and five other varieties of seabird. It is now virtually extinct. Eggs from the diminishing flock are radioactive, but no conclusion can be drawn from this fact.
As it happens, on the east coast of Ireland there have been numerous cases of Down’s Syndrome and leukemia, and in England in the area of Sellafield, as fate would have it, houses have been found to be contaminated with plutonium. In response to the charges that the plutonium factory is to blame, both these phenomena were laid, by British officials, to the detritus of atmospheric testing, brought down by rain. Jonathan Schell, in The Fate of the Earth, remarks that there are such “hot spots,” though he does not name any of them. Given the importance of British experts in the councils of the world nuclear enterprise, I wonder if their thinking is reflected in this hypothesis. I wonder if other “hot spots” are coincidentally centered around other nuclear facilities.
It is surely odd that ascribing health problems to the bomb tests would seem to anyone to exculpate Sellafield. If plutonium that falls from the clouds is harmful, then plutonium that comes in on the wind and the tide is no doubt harmful as well. After all, a woman in Cumbria who found that her house was contaminated when she sent her vacuum cleaner bag to the United States to be analyzed was obliged by law to sell the house at a very low price because it had a defect — the contamination. Apparently no law requires that the defect be corrected. One must conclude, however, that the British feel plutonium in one’s house is something to be avoided or, failing that, regretted. Radiation is found in particularly high concentrations, one thousand times background levels, in household dust in the area, subsequent inquiry has shown.