The use of Cumbrian lakes as reservoirs for cities sheds an interesting light on the practice of expressing cancer rates as multiples of regional or national rates. The runoff from the mountains would surely concentrate contaminants in the drinking water of large populations. The nearness of Sellafield to Manchester and Liverpool is seldom alluded to, but there are hundreds of thousands of people living within the range of its effects. So far as I can discover, illness in such populations only serves to make health anomalies nearer the plant appear less exceptional, harder to “detect.”
Information, for want of a better word, is always suspect, and it is continuously undercut. On page 1 of The (London) Times of May 21, 1985, there appeared an article titled “‘Plutonium food’ sought for children,” an article which fairly epitomizes the complexities of following this issue in the British press. It was said to be based on leaked minutes of a meeting of representatives of government agencies whose duties and expertise were relevant to the situation at Sellafield, including the Department of Health and Social Services. The stolen minutes were supplied to a parliamentary committee by Greenpeace. At this meeting it was allegedly proposed that “volunteer” children should be given plutonium-laced food to see how it affected their bodies. The proposal was roundly denounced by the committee. One of those present is reported to have said, “‘How many parents would volunteer their children? Are we living in the real world?’”
The DHSS should have whatever data there might be about the human impact of radioactive contamination in Britain. While one is struck by the low level of moral refinement that would be reflected in the notion of feeding a toxin to children to observe whether and how they are poisoned, stranger by far is the apparently profound naivete reflected in such a suggestion. To act as though no information on the subject exists, and that the way to develop information would be to perform an experiment on human children, is truly remarkable, though this latter may reflect a sensitivity to the views of animal-rights groups, which are mighty in Britain. The Enclyclopaedia Britannica has a thing or two to say about the toxicity of plutonium, and there is a scientific literature of some quality and interest which should be known, or at least known to exist, by individuals who have made plutonium their stock-in-trade.
In this case it was subsequently reported in The Observer that Greenpeace had been “condemned by the House of Commons Environment Committee for falsely alleging that it had been suggested that Cumbrian children be given food contaminated by radioactivity.”28 In the same article, for good measure, it was also reported that a former Greenpeace spokesman had signed on as advisor to a new scheme for depositing wastes in the sea floor. In light of the peculiarities of British press and secrecy laws, I think it is always reasonable to wonder about such things as “leaked minutes,” because it seems extremely likely that any leaked information is actually planted. For why should the publication of such information not bring down penalties, when, under the same government, the offices of the BBC and the New Statesman have been raided and searched by the police, The Observer has been forbidden to allude to information contained in certain of its own articles (having to do with a book by a former MI5 agent), and so on? The authenticity of the reported suggestion is said in the Times article to have been confirmed by the managers of Sellafield, British Nuclear Fuels, who explained that”the idea of feeding children contaminated food was not a serious suggestion; it was a throw-away remark.” The chairman of the committee and a Conservative MP are both named in the article as harshly critical in their reaction. It was the chairman who put the question about living in the real world. Perhaps the government wished to distance itself from BNF, in preparation for new management and implied reform. It may be that this select committee wanted to get its ignorance on record — where ignorance is exculpatory ’tis folly to be wise. The subsequent renunciation of the minutes does no more than to cast doubt on their authenticity, nuancing the effect, so that the question of competence can remain unresolved.
But the oddest thing of all is that, as the Times article implicitly acknowledges, the feeding of plutonium to children living in the area of Sellafield is entirely redundant. The children there have already been fed plutonium. Another suggestion reportedly offered at the meeting was that “placentas and still-born children should be analysed for concentrations of radioactivity.” Reports in other sources indicate that this is in fact being done. Another article in The Times reports confirmation by officials that aborted and stillborn babies, afterbirths, and children who die in accidents are tested for plutonium concentrations.29 Children have been experimented upon ab ovo and, together with shellfish-eating fishermen who have been used for “monitoring,” they constitute two ends of a continuum whose intervening stages might be inferred. And of course there are the children dead of leukemia, whose peers and siblings surely bear watching, and all the presumptive plutonium eaters of Cornwall and northern Wales and northern and western Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It surely would be strange to respond to having fed plutonium to children with the suggestion, even as a “throw-away remark,” that plutonium should be fed to children. To propose that the thing should be done is to deny that it has been done already. To renounce the report that such a proposal was ever made intensifies this denial. Then all the outrage directed against what is as if merely suggested or alleged puts those who act out disapproval in a proper moral position. The parliamentary committee meeting is like a ritual in which reality is magically altered, evil is resisted, and sanity affirmed, an effect reiterated in the subsequent, quite plausible denial that this remarkable proposal was ever made. But as I write and as you read, plutonium is flowing into the human environment, courtesy of this same government.
Perhaps I should use my own reaction to interpret this artifact, this putative stolen glimpse into epochal deliberations, reported in a reputable newspaper favorably disposed to government and industry. At first I thought, These people are very foolish, very ignorant, and, I imagined, dabblers, sheltered incompetents. I forgot that, when the huge state and private companies which have marketed nuclear construction and equipment, as well as radioactive materials, and have undertaken the transporting of wastes — and the supply of expertise — are taken into account, the British nuclear industry is old, vast, highly elaborated, and profoundly influential. And I forgot that these people have pulled off the public-relations coup of all time, inverting every rule, pouring out “routinely” all the toxins we are always assured no foreseeable accident could release from any reactor, doing so without qualm or hesitation, without any loss of face or of moral confidence. Only think how many people outside Britain have known this for decades and never said a word.