The article has a tone of having taken a deep breath and made a fresh start, which invites readers to forget what they may have read yesterday. After all, at the time of this article, British nuclear issues had been filling the press, including the New Scientist, since the fall of 1983, about thirty-one months, and had arisen in pressing forms at intervals since the late fifties. Yet it is as if Britain were an enchanted island, its government aroused from Keatsian indolence only by an alien east wind. In fact, the government at first insisted Chernobyl had not had a significant effect on Britain. And, to clinch the argument, it did not test for contamination. Or it was testing, but a rain began to fall and the NRPB had to move its instruments indoors to keep them from getting wet — another New Scientist version of the story.32 Or it tested only in England, one cauliflower and one cabbage in the northwest, one sample of spring greens in the center, elsewhere “two of parsley, four of spinach, four of cauliflower, one of rhubarb, fourteen of cabbage, five of broccoli, four of eggs, and a single trout,”33 like supper in a Peter Rabbit story. In an article published before the extent of contamination came to light, the New Scientist reported matter-of-factly that “people would have received, on average, 0.008 millisieverts extra in one week from radioactivity in the air … 0.002 millisieverts from drinking tap water for one week …” etc. These calculations to the third decimal place came from the Ministry of the Environment, the parsley testers, and were presented under the title “A lot of fuss about a few millisieverts.”34 Information seems to have a very short half-life. For weeks the British bought and consumed highly radioactive food, specifically lamb contaminated because the pastures were hot. Then hundreds of thousands of sheep and lambs were removed from the market — temporarily, of course. Need I say, the areas along the Irish Sea and in Scotland — coincidentally, those most affected by radioactivity from Sellafield and Dounreay — proved to be especially badly contaminated?
Interpreted as it is in Kenward’s article, the delay in government response is attributable to the outré and uncongenial character of the circumstances these ministers are suddenly obliged to deal with. There is no allusion to the oddness of the fact that the government does not routinely monitor radiation levels around its two most important and controversial installations, though both have histories of accident and both have been associated with elevated cancer rates, and both have been the subject of international protests.
It will be remembered that Chernobyl came to world attention first because it set off an alarm in a nuclear plant in far-off Sweden. If radiation came down with special vengeance in the regions of these two British nuclear installations — which are represented as technical miracles except when they are being defended as old and shabby — surely their alarms should have responded at some point and the fact should have been reported to the British government, since every government in the Northern Hemisphere was watching the effects of Chernobyl in those days.
One may imagine alarms that never sound, or alarms that sound so often they are not attended to. However it may have been, Britain declared itself unaffected by the cloud from Chernobyl, during the time, perhaps, that the NRPB was describing to ministers the prevalence and health implications of the elbow. The article says that in the days after Chernobyl this “radiation watchdog” worked overtime “to supervise the monitoring of air and rain from the east.” They must have forgotten to switch something on.
The article that has set me to pondering is a comprehensive description of the work of the NRPB, which the organization itself was outlining in a “corporate plan” just at the time of Chernobyl. (I must ask my reader not to be put off by acronyms. I am persuaded, more or less, that they exist to repel inquiry, to suggest expertise, and also to suggest drab toil taken on for the rest of us by those whose blood is thin enough to make tedium congenial, and to starve out the full-blooded vice and full-blown madness that might rage among others entrusted with such great responsibilities. Such officious nonsense is a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on doors behind which things are transacted which should disturb us all.)
John Dunster himself is quoted describing the organization he directed thus: “‘The board aims to establish an overall policy in radiation protection that provides a proper standard of safety without unduly hampering the beneficial practices giving rise to exposures.’” In other words, it exists to adjust exposure standards to “‘beneficial practices.’”35 The director of the NRPB, longest-serving member of its international counterpart, believes that practices giving rise to radiation exposure can still be beneficial. One craves elaboration. Yet there would be little value in it. As the article notes parenthetically, “(It isn’t the NRPB’s job to decide on the government’s policy, so, as Dunster admits, ministers are quite free to ignore the board’s advice.)” So the policy is merely “advice,” which “ministers”—who, as we have just been told, tend not to know isotopes from elbows — can ignore. This is most wonderful.
Writers on government sometimes remark that Britain has had trouble generating a concept of the state. The problem of the state of Britain is that while on the one hand nothing seems really independent or distinct from government, on the other hand, when responsibility is to be located, the government recedes like a dream and is nowhere to be found.
We have seen in Michael Kenward’s article how the curtain rose on ministers all unsuited to deal with nuclear issues at the time of Chernobyl. In 1970, we are told, the government set up the NRPB “when it realized that all of the organizations in Britain with any knowledge of radiation and its effects on people were part of the nuclear establishment and were, therefore, compromised in the eyes of the public.” This nuclear establishment was and is a creature of the state, funded, shielded, and patronized by the government, and flourishing in the balmy atmosphere of Crown Immunity, where no acts of Parliament apply, and under the protection of laws affecting national defense and commercial confidentiality as well as the Official Secrets Act, and under the supervision of ministers who have not made themselves competent in the area of their responsibility, and who are very much inclined to waive such standards as the government pretends to. If the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, which carried out the policies of the government, became discredited, why was the government itself not discredited? Why does it have no obligation to generate and enforce standards of practice for which it will answer to the public? And what is a government, in any case, that can shed a compromised institution like a dirty shirt? When the UKAEA was abandoned in favor of the NRPB, the new entity was staffed from the ranks of its predecessor, with John Dunster as its head. British Nuclear Fuels, which now operates Sellafield, was created in the same way for the same reasons. The plutonium factory itself had its name changed from Windscale to Sellafield to rid it of an evil reputation. Recently that company’s management was replaced, because the government lost confidence in it. The new management immediately retained the services of a public-relations firm. It now shares advertising space with Greenpeace.
This changing of letterheads and images neither promises nor effects any change in government policy or industry practice. “Practice” at Sellafield merges quite indistinguishably with accidents and spills and faulty record keeping, in any case. So, while there are no meaningful standards, the greater problem is the unsuitability of the facility to comply with standards should they exist. Again, this hapless plant is and always has been the exclusive property of the British government.