Local reports of the event described an explosion, a fire, and a massive release of radioactivity. Official reports described the core temperature rising to red heat, and a release of radioactive gases mainly trapped in filters above the pile. Subsequent revisions of the official account concede that there was indeed a fire, and a cloud of radioactivity, which contaminated England, Ireland, and Europe. No one was evacuated. A reassuring press account describes children in the nearby village of Seascale playing in the streets.
Comparison in this regard is to the advantage of the Russians, who only delayed evacuation, and who only temporized for a few days about the severity of their problem. Satellites and monitoring devices may enforce candor, at least at the discretion of the governments or firms who operate them. In 1957 an extraordinary degree of concealment was possible. One “casualty” was acknowledged, in quotation marks because he was only contaminated, and was to be seen the next day wearing rubber gloves while playing dominoes in a pub. He was said to have been among those workers who trained fire hoses directly on the burning reactor core when other attempts to cool it failed.
Men from other facilities were brought in to work in forty-minute shifts. Some were said to have collapsed, but officials denied this robustly. They declared that no one had suffered any harm. The fire in the reactor core was out of control for two days, even according to early reports. The pile had been functioning for seven years, so its inventory of radioactive materials would have been much more virulent than that in the plant at Chernobyl. There was no containment structure. Dousing such a fire with water would inevitably produce, at best, radioactive steam in enormous quantities. Water was poured into the core for twenty-four hours.
The physicist in charge of the routine maintenance operation was found to have had no manual of instructions for carrying it out. This was seen as a collective responsibility and no disciplinary action was taken. So, as at Chernobyl, an extraordinary concatenation of misjudgments produced an accident which had no implications for the nuclear industry as a whole. As at Chernobyl, amazing good fortune prevented the consequences of disaster from being as severe as might have been expected, at least according to the newspapers. Prime Minister Macmillan assured the Parliament weeks after the Windscale accident that there was no evidence of harm to any person, animal, or property. This is remarkable, considering that milk produced in a 200-square-mile area around the plant had been confiscated and poured into, of course, the sea, during those same weeks. Now the British attribute about 260 cases of thyroid cancer to the accident. Perhaps in 2017 the Russians will also revise their original estimates of the seriousness of Chernobyl.
In this early event features highly characteristic of British handling of nuclear issues are already fully apparent, not least typical being the singling out of thyroid cancer as the one result of a reactor core fire. This follows logically on the pouring out of milk as the one measure settled upon to protect the population at the time of the fire, in its turn a consequence of emphasis on the release of radioactive iodine. All sorts of things would have come from a plutonium-producing pile in which graphite and uranium burned for days, and there would have been an array of aftereffects. But thyroid cancer is said to have a high cure rate, so that only a few deaths need be attributed to the fire if this kind of cancer is treated as its only consequence. Cancer of the breast or lung, also radiation-associated, would imply many more deaths. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note here again that Britain leads the world in lung cancer deaths.
Recent concerns about the consequences of exposure to radiation focus, just as arbitrarily, on clusters of childhood leukemia, which seem, for the purposes of those who document them, to mean rates of mortality which exceed national averages by about 1,000 percent. In any but the grimmest circumstances, such excesses should be relatively rare. In fact, they have been found near many British nuclear sites. This phenomenon is usually associated, speculatively and again arbitrarily, with environmental exposure to plutonium, though there are many other radiation sources in the environment. The association of foetal X-rays with childhood leukemia demonstrated by the British physician Dr. Alice Stewart indicates that even a brief, discreet exposure to radiation is sufficient to predispose a child to this illness. Narrowing of the terms in which a problem is to be understood remains a flourishing art.
Fully present also in the Windscale affair is the tendency to treat every problem as a public-relations problem first of all. Asked in Parliament whether he would publish the government report on Windscale or support a proposal for further inquiry, Prime Minister Macmillan agreed to consider these steps, “but he was also interested in maintaining the tremendous and unique reputation of our scientists in this field throughout the world,” according to the Times report of parliamentary discussion of the accident.17
Public safety, where it is in conflict with prestige and export prospects, has no standing. This exchange was reported about three weeks after the accident, when even short-lived contaminants would still have been present in significant amounts. Yet the public was told from the first it was safe to eat local vegetables and to let cattle graze in the open air. These assurances came in the face of protests by farmers and by construction workers employed at the site.
Twenty years later, at the time of the Windscale inquiry of 1977, which yielded the decision to expand the plant’s role as waste dump and plutonium factory, half the mortality data on workers was found to be missing from the files.18 Those that existed were thought sufficient to provide an estimate of the plant’s safety. There is no reason to doubt that the prestige of British nuclear development did indeed emerge unscathed from the events at Windscale, and every reason to look for its influence in other quarters, especially on our own industry, which has served as a catch basin for the brain drain.
The American trade publication Nuclear News reports respectfully on the affairs of the British industry, alluding to radioactive discharges and emissions with a serenity I can only find alarming, since its readership is usually represented as earnestly concerned with preventing measurable “radiation doses” to the public from nuclear sites. British assurances of the harmlessness of such exposure are reported at length, without any hint of skepticism, and without any of the detail or specificity a lay person might hope the specialist community would demand.
After Chernobyl, a British report, highly critical of the Russians, was described in an article which quoted Walter Marshall, head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, as saying no such accident as Chernobyl could occur in Britain because “the overriding importance of ensuring safety is so deeply engrained in the culture of the nuclear industry that this will not happen in the U.K.”19
There are said to have been three hundred accidents at Windscale/Sellafield since the core fire. Such figures are meaningless. Accidents are creatures of definition. An industry that ignores every standard of caution is almost proof against accident. There have been events that required buildings to be closed and abandoned, there have been fires. There was once a flood. None of these approach the normal functioning of the plant as sources of contamination. But a history of accident gives the place a kind of respectability, implying standards and scruples.