Britons figure prominently in world organizations which generate standards the British violate with a special flagrancy. How do these gentlemen resolve the contradictions of their national and international roles? John Dunster, health physicist at Sellafield in its formative stages, early defender of its plutonium dumping, has since become one of the two longest-serving members of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, which establishes exposure standards for the Western world.
Such contradictions abound. It seems there is a branch in Cumbria of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, an organization of doctors appalled by the darker potentialities of the age. They meet in premises available to them, according to an article in the New Statesman, on the condition that they say nothing against Sellafield.20
An editorial in the British magazine New Scientist, accusing the American press of fueling anti-Soviet hysteria by demanding information about the accident at Chernobyl, remarked, “If the Soviet authorities want their people to die in ignorance, then it is up to them.”21 The issue of secrecy opens on the very largest questions of legitimacy and social order. There is a consensus in British life that keeping up appearances is a thing to be done at any cost. There can be no doubt that the appearance of reasonableness, morality, and good order is deeply important to them, of great value in its own right. Pervasive as secrecy-enforcing laws and conventions are, no one ever seems to refuse to talk about anything. Secrets are kept by saying something other than the truth. According to an article in The Guardian, a report on the Windscale fire published in 1983 by the National Radiological Protection Board described the original report by John Dunster, its head until 1987, as “spurious.”22 I am describing a very remarkable culture.
Putting aside such obvious mystifications as missing data, other issues seem to lurk behind the Windscale accident which would make its significance, great as it was, only relative. A Labour MP, asking for explicit assurances that the drinking water for the city of Manchester, which comes from lakes in Cumbria, was safe, said, “Before the accident happened some very strange things had been taking place in the Windscale area, though no public information has been given.”23 An article in The (London) Times addressed the issue of nuclear waste disposal, which seems to have been implicated in the public mind in the events at Windscale. The article explains patiently that the two were not related, that the siting of the reprocessing plant near the reactors was merely convenient and had no bearing on events at the reactors. It was just at this time that complaints arose at the United Nations about plutonium dumping from Windscale. British scientists experimented with incinerating plutonium in Australia. I suspect that some such toying with disposal methods may have gone on before the accident, whether or not such experiments were connected with it, and that the contamination from the core fire may simply have frosted the cake.
So early on, the assumptions upon which Windscale/Sellafield would operate were already firmly established. In the article about waste disposal published after the accident at Windscale, The Times describes the division of radioactive materials into three groups: those that are sufficiently short-lived to be managed by a limited period of storage; strontium go and cesium 137, which are too long-lived to be treated in this way and for which commercial uses should therefore be found; and a few materials “so long-lived that the amount of radiation they contribute is not significant.”24 By this must be intended plutonium and uranium, both low-activity and long-lived. The article explains that “as a matter of common sense rather than science, it has been fairly generally accepted that so long as the total additional radiation is small compared with natural radiation the amount of harm done, if any, is unlikely to be detectable.” Especially if health data turn up missing.
The British approach to the disposal problem is sufficient to deal with the entire world output of waste, according to The (London) Times in 1957. Fully twenty years before the decision was made public, the commercial or scientific (or common sense) rationale for Sellafield was already fully formed. That is to say that, in twenty years, the thinking of those responsible for the operation of the plant did not develop.
In 1977 Dr. Geoffrey Schofield, chief medical officer at Sellafield, testifying for the plant’s expansion, said plutonium had become “a great bogeyman.”25 It would be tempting to say that the cleverest class of the cleverest nation wagered on the innocuousness of long-lived fission products in broadcasting them over the landscape, if it were not the case that they have always permitted flagrantly damaging materials, specifically strontium 90 and cesium 137, to pour into the environment as well. Interestingly, an essay titled “The Guarantee of Safety: Protection Built In,” by the Group Medical Officer of the Atomic Energy Authority, included in the supplement published by The (London) Times a year before the accident, when Calder Hall was opened, said, “It is important to note that the British nuclear power programme has been so planned that these chemical processes [that is, reprocessing] will be carried out at one or two sites remote from the power stations; by this arrangement, the complicated problems of protection against the risks of radioactive contamination will be isolated in the chemical processing plants and will be excluded, therefore, from the nuclear power stations.”26 Reprocessing at Windscale/Sellafield has never been remote or isolated. As this passage implies, it has never been designed to obviate contamination by any other means.
The issue of the super-addition of man-made to natural background radiation still arises, still in the same terms. If an increase in radiation in the environment is small as a percentage of background, no harm has been done. Now, if this were believed in good faith, surely there would be publicly available figures for background radiation to serve as a basis for measuring any increase. Such figures are said not to exist. Complicating factors are adduced; for example, that levels of natural radiation vary from place to place. But then measurement devices can be moved from place to place. Weapons testing has enhanced radiation levels in the environment. But if radiation levels were established, the impact of other sources could be measured nevertheless. If public-health decisions are made on the basis of supposed safe rates of increase of radiation exposure, it surely behooves those who make such decisions to supply themselves with a basis for their calculations. Lately the meaning of the word “background” is shifting, so that it refers simply to whatever is there, with the implication that existing levels are safe. What constitutes the area to be described as “background”? If the only significant source of radiation for a mile in every direction is the fish in my soup, what comfort can I find in the fact that, averaged out over some unspecified area, the radiation “dose” is insignificant?
These calculations are rather insanely abstract. Contrary to vivid experience, Sellafield apologists seem to imagine that the wastes put into the environment are in fact “dispersed.” So they speak often of “undetectable” harm, the kind that is owed to the plant but cannot be attributed to it. For them the word means something very like “nonexistent.” Sellafield officials are reported to have asked the area county council — in which Sellafield is well represented — for permission to raise emissions.27 The new levels would produce, by the reckoning of the council’s radiation expert, one extra cancer a year. It was agreed that this undetectable death would probably occur in the population near the plant. Permission was granted. Of course that was when the death from cancer of one child in sixty in Seascale, the nearest village, was still undetected. Radiation-induced cancers among the Sellafield work force are undetected, because the plant management has never accepted that any cancer has resulted from working there, though it admits contamination is commonplace.