To compete with great success in a sophisticated industry requires and implies sophistication. This success is based not on technical competence so much as on an amazing gift for concealing the obvious. And the trick is working even now. Why should the food given hypothetical “volunteer” children be laced with plutonium? Why should the autopsy tissue of actual children, who were in no sense volunteers, be tested for plutonium? Why not radioactive iodine, which is vented from the plant’s stacks? Why not cesium 137, which flows into the sea, contaminating meat and milk and fish? Better still, why not all three, with a lashing of chemical solvents that break down reactor cores and a soupçon of the uranium dumped daily by the chemical plant up the coast? Plutonium is only an aspect of the problem, and not the most acute by any means. If the emphasis on it is intentional, it is shrewd, because it tends to simplify and therefore minimize the problem.
Bother about the stolen minutes makes the alleged suggestion sound more untoward than it really is, measured against other reported policies. An article published in The Guardian titled “Radiation tests ordered on Sellafield food” describes a plan by the government “to take samples of food to test whether it has been contaminated” by a recent series of leaks from the plant.30 The tests were to be coordinated by the National Radiological Protection Board, the incredibly feckless agency responsible for monitoring public exposure to radiation. The point of the study will be “to try to establish how much radioactive waste has entered the food chain” (italics mine). The design of the study is very interesting. “A sample of the local population will be asked to buy twice as much of the food they normally purchase over a seven-day period.” One half of the food “will then be analysed in government laboratories.” Clearly the object is to establish levels of intake. Otherwise food would simply be tested at random. In other words, the thing to be established is how much “radioactive waste” is eaten by individuals — what tastes or habits or budgetary considerations might result in high levels of ingestion. Ethically, this is more than a little similar to the disclaimed suggestion that, in The Observer’s words, “Cumbrian children be given food contaminated by radioactivity.” While children are neither explicitly included in the later study, nor excluded from it, they are among the population whose food is presumed to be contaminated. And since they are not prevented from eating it, or provided other food, whether their exposure is noted by scientists or not is a question of very little interest.
And still there is the matter of singling out food as the “pathway” of radiation exposure. The spills into the sea and air could impinge in all sorts of ways. More to the point, as usual they are treated as novel and alarming, though the whole landscape has been exposed to accumulative contamination for decades.
The 1976 Nuclear Energy in Britain, the British government publication mentioned earlier, describes as follows the work of the Biology Department of the National Radiological Protection Board: “In order to derive appropriate standards for air concentration and maximum permissible body content, the distribution, retention and excretion characteristics of these materials [plutonium, americium, and curium] following their intake by experimental animals is studied.” Also studied are “the mechanisms of production of chromosome aberrations by ionising radiations.” Interestingly, these passages do not appear in the 1981 edition of the same pamphlet. They certainly indicate that the government has sponsored research by the NRPB of a kind to clarify the issue of the health effects of plutonium contamination. Yet the government claims to have no such information, as for example in the case of the Black Report on the leukemia deaths of Cumbrian children in 1984.
According to the 1976 edition of Nuclear Energy in Britain, “the most important route of entry of radioactive substances into the body is by inhalation and deposition in the lungs.” Yet inquiries always imply that ingesting these materials would be the most important source of exposure to them, even in an environment where household dust is radioactive. Again, focusing on one “route of entry,” like focusing on plutonium, makes the contamination seem much less complex and pervasive than it obviously is.
Reading over the news of decades, one grows accustomed to certain faces, which appear from time to time in the murky chiaroscuro of photographs like fish nosing up against the side of a tank, a little startled to be reminded again that there is a world to which they are of interest. The fine, mild face of John Dunster appears from time to time. I saw it recently on my own television screen. He and other British worthies had been enlisted to explain the nature and consequences of the events at Chernobyl to the American public. They were gravely reassuring.
The most recent news I have of John Dunster is an article from the British magazine New Scientist by Michael Kenward, describing yet again the work of the National Radiological Protection Board.31 The New Scientist is always of interest, being widely read in America, and being a trove of cryptogrammatic journalism. So an article on the NRPB is of interest for a number of reasons.
The NRPB, we are told, is pinched by lack of money. British journalism often adopts a cozy tone in discussing parsimony, especially where it is seen to abet incompetence in the government. A recent role filled by the NRPB, after Chernobyl, was “the matter of advising the government, few of whose ministers knew an isotope from their elbow.” This same government has been running a nuclear rag-and-bone shop for decades. Considering the very great decisions, great in terms of their consequences, that Britain has made for the whole world, in massively polluting the sea, in producing plutonium in quantity, and in treating the stuff of doom as an article of commerce, it has taken upon itself a positive obligation to be capable of even finer discriminations. The NRPB is, according to the article, a small, besieged organization, which lost fifty staff members to budget cuts between 1980 and 1982, and which still struggles with a shrinking budget. It was obliged at the time of Chernobyl to inform its government of the consequences of radioactive contamination. No one in Whitehall, no advisor for the Ministry of the Environment or the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, entities responsible for approving waste dumping and emissions — and they do approve, heartily — none of these people was competent to describe the nature of radioactive contamination.
This may seem odd, among the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, yet I am very inclined to believe it. Rather than being seen as reducing the government’s authority, ignorance actually seems to bolster it, amateurism being a term of praise among these people. There is really no reason to imagine the Minister of the Environment swotting up on the mutagenic properties of alpha-emitters when the possession of such information could only bring regret, given that the British environment is already salted with them and that the government is committed to a policy of always greater waste accumulation in that densely populated island, and that neither law nor custom demands competence from him, even of the most general kind, any more than they expose him to the painful obligation to speak the truth in these matters of pressing national and international interest.