When Henry VI brought England to ruin in the fifteenth century, there was some debate as to whether the King was a saint or an imbecile. In either case, since he could not be expected to understand the evil that went on around him, he was not to be faulted for it. The British government is, as an idea, some such specter of irreducible innocence and sanctity, liable to being badly served in the very degree that it is innocent. This could very well be nothing more than the survival of some especially successful medieval public-relations campaign. Why old myths should be assumed to be more respectable in their origins than new ones I do not know. The point is simply that the phantom sovereign, always to be revered and never held to account, is a major part of the phenomenon of political sovereignty in modern Britain.
Yet clearly the government—“ministers,” in the terms of Michael Kenward’s New Scientist article — is always decisively involved in what happens. It reserves to itself truly extraordinary powers. For example, the NRPB corporate plan will give the government an idea of the board’s plans and activities “in words of as few syllables as possible,” that is, appropriate to the understanding of imbeciles. Yet the reason for preparing a plan the ministers might understand is to allow them to override it: “If the government wants to point its watchdog at new scents, then at least it has something to go on, some false trails to abandon.” So this “independent” watchdog agency is to allow its agenda to be set by the government, which is also the nuclear industrialist and trash collector.
The NRPB is reported to be “embarrassed” financially and hinting obliquely for a little increase in staff. This is poignant. It is always touching to see how British institutions struggle against the hard demands of government thrift. It is also an instance of the enormous power of the government to expedite its policies by omission. By failing to fund its monitoring agency at an adequate level, it is preparing a defense for itself and the agency as well, in the event that things are done now which will someday have to be disowned. The government is rendering itself less competent, preparing a more thoroughgoing deniability, perhaps to constrict the painful environmental information of recent years, scant as it has been, or perhaps in preparation for the greatly expanded plutonium extraction and waste storage and dumping that will take place at Sellafield and Dounreay in the near future.
In its straitened circumstances the NRPB has begun to accept privately contracted work, though it is said to be loath to do so because these projects take time away from basic research on the biological effects of radiation. In other words, private interests share with the government the right to set the agenda of Britain’s “radiation watchdog.”
At the same time, the NRPB maintains Britain’s place in the nuclear councils of the world, because “Britain has to live with international standards on radiation if it is to persuade the public that it is behaving responsibly.” According to the article, such standards “tend to be cooked up” by international committees. This kind of language gives a fair sense of the function and standing of such regulations. The legalism of our culture predisposes Americans to believe in their potency. But the British do not assign any significance even to standards they set for themselves, when advantage lies in ignoring them. Crown Immunity is an elegant concept and an important fact. It means that law is not considered fit to act as a restraint on government. That this notion shades off into similar protections of private economic interests is an aspect of the problem the British have always had in making distinctions between government on the one hand and economic power on the other. The extraordinary devotion of a government enterprise like British Nuclear Fuels to profit has been much encouraged by ministers of both parties. Considerations normally assumed to weigh in the thoughts of government — for example, foreign policy, an art which must pass into desuetude as trade in plutonium spreads through the world — obviously count for little over and against profit. There is absolutely nothing else to be gained. Yet profit must be overtaken fairly quickly by an array of misfortune.
This is very alarming. Members of the British Parliament are employed as paid lobbyists and are not required to declare the interests whose advantage they are paid to seek in their role as Parliamentarians. An arrangement so well suited to invite and express venality might be expected to produce it in a very pure form. Yet no mere mammonism is sufficient to account for so dismal a project as Sellafield, and what the New Scientist article refers to serenely as “the propensity with which British Nuclear Fuels polluted the Irish Sea with its radioactive discharges.”
This piece of journalistic muddle will give a fair sense of the form in which information appears in the British press. I am extremely reluctant by now to postulate guile, simply because this strange pattern is so ubiquitous.
As often, very bad news is presented obliquely, in tones that suggest a special good fortune is being described, a government full of humanity in the form of foible and limitation. The actual news content in the piece is startling. The government disavows competence in matters nuclear but will curtail and direct the work of those who are competent to advise it. The staff of this supposedly independent agency is headed by a health physicist present at the creation of the world’s dirtiest nuclear facility. Greenpeace members, described as floating offshore from Sellafield and “watching in amazement as effluent gushed out through the pipe,” go afterward to the NRPB to see if they have been irradiated by a system constructed with its director’s blessing. The board scientists have marketed their time to private companies and therefore cannot “expand their knowledge of the biological effects of radiation,” yet they are called in to advise on “the effects of the radiation that seeps out of Sellafield on people living in the area.” The board sits in on international committees to persuade its own public that “Britain” is behaving responsibly. Radon gas “pervades every home in the country.”
As if to refine upon perfection, the article concludes that Chernobyl has brought attention to the need to study the biological effects of radiation, having only two paragraphs before alluded to the radiation exposure of the population near Sellafield. Since this radiation exposure is precisely the responsibility of John Dunster, among others, it conforms entirely to my model of the workings of the British official mind that such questions should focus on an event in the Ukraine.
John Dunster also figures very prominently in Patrick J. Sloyan’s article on Sellafield in New York Newsday, May 20, 1986. It seems he has a map on his office wall where he can point to the “lake” of plutonium Sellafield has created off the British coast, an “almost 300-square-mile elliptical area at the end of the pipeline,” the residue of the more than 500,000 curies of plutonium the plant has poured into the sea. What does John Dunster say as he ponders Lake Plutonium? “‘So damn expensive, hard to believe they throw it away.’”36
But this remark raises a very important question. To say that plutonium is expensive is to say it is valuable. In fact, only plutonium 239 is usable in nuclear plants or weapons. An article in New Statesman reports that there is no limit on releases of the unstable isotope plutonium 241, and that 550,000 curies of it have been released into the sea.37 Are only those emissions limited or measured that represent straightforward economic loss? By “plutonium” do Dunster and others mean only plutonium 239?
John Dunster can take heart, however, if he is oppressed by the loss of plutonium. Walter Marshall, who looks in photographs like Tweedledum, but who has been made a lord for his previous accomplishments and is head of the Central Electricity Generating Board, has found plutonium in nature, surely the crown of his career. Recently he has given lectures in which he reassures the public that the small amount of plutonium released in a recent, much ballyhooed accident was only equivalent to the plutonium “naturally present in the top yard of soil over an area of just five square miles.” This perspective was admiringly reported by James Wilkinson, BBC-TV science correspondent.38 A streak has been added to the tulip. It seems to be this man’s happy genius to bring perspective to nuclear issues. He is reported to have won applause at a meeting of the British Nuclear Forum by saying that the effects of radiation exposure within the Chernobyl exclusion zone would be “no worse than smoking a couple of extra cigarettes a year.”39