I have suggested elsewhere that logic is not a ruling passion among the British. My problem in writing this apocalyptic tale in a style suited to the importance of its subject is in fact that there is a particular, somber, officious foolishness about it all, and a forthright miserliness which it was, until lately, my error to consider beneath the dignity of governments.
We are all accustomed to horror stories about nuclear plants. There are so many tales of near-catastrophe that they are almost soothing. Any dire information elicits a “Did you hear the one about—?” response, as if no story could be quite the worst, as if one’s being impressed by any particular set of revelations is naive, or a perverse sort of optimism, since it seems to assume that things work reasonably well anywhere.
British stories are of another order, however, because for them safety as we understand it was never a primary objective. An anecdote is related from time to time about how Clement Atlee, Prime Minister at the end of the Second World War, ordered that Sellafield (then Windscale) should have absolute priority in obtaining building materials. But the instruction was marked “Top Secret,” so no one was allowed to read it, and therefore the builders had to compete for materials without any preference shown to them. For the British, the idea that government conduct is based on fluke is exculpatory. The government has no positive obligation to see that a policy is carried out competently or humanely, or to correct its past failures. It strains belief that a country which had just come through a war, and which had lived since 1911 with the Official Secrets Act, under which the whole of “public” business has the status of military secret (the better to confound the Hun), could not handle a straightforward matter of military procurement. Since Windscale/Sellafield was a munitions manufacturing site before it became a plutonium factory, mere inertia should certainly have assured it some preferential treatment. The anecdote does at least acknowledge that the plant was and is shoddily built, and a great deal of evidence is available to prove that this is indeed the case.
The report of a recent inquiry into cancer deaths near the plant remarks gently, “While there is ample evidence of a real and sophisticated concern with the safe operation of the plant, it has to be said that some of the plant was installed many years ago.”15 James Wilkinson, science correspondent for BBC-TV, finds French waste disposal methods “tidy,” while British arrangements are astonishingly “tatty.”16
Oddness and awkwardness surround every transaction that involves information in Britain, whether the taking of it in or the giving of it out, as the Atlee anecdote suggests. There is clearly a deep cultural ambivalence about information. It is a power vested in the innermost counsels of the state. And then the state can claim to have failed to generate it, as in the matter of health data and radiation levels, or it can reject information it finds not to its liking, as in the matter of recent reports of structural flaws at these old nuclear sites. The plants were designed to operate for twenty years. In 1976, when the first were due to close, the Labour government in the person of its telegenic Minister of Environment, the awfully ferocious radical and pretty persistent gadfly of entrenched interests, Anthony Wedgwood “Red Tony” Benn, after a lot of study, decided to keep the plants running. This is perhaps an instance of Benn’s ability to set his populist enthusiasms to one side.
Despite the implications of design limits and the building of these postwar plants out of materials about which no one seems prepared to say anything kind, except that they were inexpensive, official statements of the risks these plants pose boggle the mind by invoking the far reaches of the infinitesimal.
“Odds” always imply, amazingly, that there is some sort of safe landing on the other side — a plant might start up, waltz through its productive life, skirting every danger, and then be done and gone. The time that has passed from the fall of Troy to the present day will not bring humankind halfway to the end of the problems any one of these plants creates in the course of quiet, impeccable functioning. Consider for example that calculations of the warming of the earth and the rising of the sea have Sellafield and a great many other sites under water in the next century. Reactors are called “breeders” and nuclear materials are described as “fertile,” and in fact the functioning of a reactor even in the best circumstances is the gestation of ferocious elements this suave little planet was never meant to contain. Tapping electricity from such a phenomenon is like setting the house on fire to toast marshmallows.
Since Calder Hall has been singled out for faulty design, there is special cause for worry. This old reactor, opened by the Queen in 1956 at Windscale and said by the British to have been the first reactor in the world to generate electricity on a commercial scale, does, after all, share a site with the largest repository of nuclear waste in the world, and nuclear wastes differ from egg shells and potato peelings in that in storage they must be constantly and solicitously tended. They are simply reactor cores that have become too fissile, too radioactive, to be used to generate electricity. To describe them as “spent” is entirely misleading. Like reactor cores they generate enormous amounts of heat and require continuous cooling. This failing, they burn voraciously, through concrete. The Russians were able to cover over their damaged core and to contain the release of radiation by burying the reactor in lead and boron, for the time being at least, or so we are told. But the effort required was gigantic. The problems involved in keeping radioactive wastes safely stored are about the same as in keeping a reactor stable. So a major accident in a waste storage site, where tons of reprocessed plutonium are stored also, would set in train a series of consequences that could put all previous misfortune very far in the shade. As the Russian events made clear, a nuclear accident is difficult to contain because it creates circumstances in which it is hard to keep other reactors at the same site under control. At Sellafield, the problem would be many times compounded by the nature of the establishment.
In 1958 the Russians had an explosion in a nuclear waste dump at Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains, a not especially famous disaster that took towns from the map, depopulated hundreds of square miles of countryside, possibly killing hundreds of people, according to the Russian physicist Zhores Medvedev, and filled Russian scientific journals with distinguished contributions to research into the impact of cesium 137 and strontium 90 on biological systems. Russia is very large, and has growing reason to be glad for all that space. Britain cannot sidestep the full consequences of its errors, nor can Europe pull back its skirts from the mess that will be made if any such thing should happen in England.
If Americans have heard about the Sellafield nuclear waste dump and plutonium factory, they have heard the name Windscale, which appears from time to time with little or no elaboration in lists of nuclear accidents. The Windscale fire of 1957, which for our purposes is the history of the public-relations strategies surrounding the event, bears an uncanny, not to say unnerving, similarity to the recent accident in the Ukraine. Windscale was the most serious accident in a nuclear reactor before Chernobyl. It occurred in a graphite-moderated reactor with the sole function of producing plutonium for British bombs. Its causes were promptly located in “human failure” rather than in any problems with the design of the reactor, which was said before the fire to have provided the model for British power-generating reactors, and after the fire to resemble them hardly at all. An inquiry found that staff had undertaken an experiment at a time when the reactor was going through a routine maintenance procedure, just as their Russian counterparts did thirty years later. The nature of the British experiment has never been revealed because it was defense-related. On these same grounds the real composition of the radioactive fallout from the accident has only gradually begun to be acknowledged. According to new accounts, it was very much more virulent than originally claimed.