Strange as it seems, the explosion at Chernobyl has been turned to great advantage, and with worrisome ease. That such a major event should seem to have had such limited effect is used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of all anxieties about man-made radioactivity in the environment. A recent essay in The Observer launches off with an attack on the press by a Cumbrian man named John Allan, comparing reports which described more loss of life at Chernobyl than Russian authorities subsequently confirmed, to reports about Sellafield — also, according to Mr. Allan, lies meant to sell newspapers.40 Typically, the article compares the dangers of working in a nuclear plant to those of coal mining, and notes that closings of mines and steelworks have made the area overwhelmingly dependent on Sellafield in any case. Then it establishes that plutonium contamination incidents, called by the workers “taking a bit of ploot,” are entirely commonplace. Dr. Jack Strain, head of the medical staff at Sellafield, told a reporter that if they informed doctors whenever their patients among the work force were contaminated, “we would be writing 100 letters a day.” A man named Jim Horspool, apparently involved with Sellafield from its early days, propagates the view “that a certain amount of radiation could be beneficial.” As such people always do, he adduces the fact that we are exposed to radiation in nature. “‘Chadung,’ he cried. ‘That was a cosmic ray going straight through. Chadung. There goes another one.’” Then we are introduced to “Atomic Stan,” the worker contaminated in 1957, when he was among those who put fire hoses into the burning Windscale reactor. He describes having looked into the core itself. The son of a stonemason who died in middle age of stone dust in his lungs, Stan is now seventy-one and smoking thirty cigarettes a day. The article describes tours of the plant arranged by BNF, and an exhibition which demonstrates the radioactivity of Cornish granite and of a luminous watch face.
The gist of the article is that radiation has indeed received a bad press. Workers accept the risk with “a kind of quiet pride,” a risk that compares favorably with those of other industries, or at least bears comparison flattering to both traditional industry and the nuclear industry. The quiet pride of Sellafield workers, we are told, is like the attitude of miners toward the risks of lung disease or cave-ins. This is a disturbing evolution in industry apologetics, since it was supposedly the benevolent hope of the nuclear industrialists to relegate such suffering to the brutal past.
There are stories in the press which give insight into the obscurity surrounding the health issue, for example, one in the The (London) Times41 about a man named Harry King, who worked inside the Sellafield plant in a room with an inoperative air filter. He was found to have been exposed to an overdose of plutonium. In the course of time his teeth and hair fell out. He developed cataracts, and finally died of brain cancer. BNF paid his widow £8,000 compensation but did not accept responsibility for his death. The physician at Sellafield, Dr. Jack Strain, has said that when workers are contaminated it is explained to them that no one has ever developed side effects from working in the nuclear industry. This assurance might have required some revision after Chernobyl, though perhaps not, given its fairly spectacular imperviousness to deaths like Mr. King’s. BNF, as of February 28, 1986, the date of the Times article, had paid £246,233 in compensation to Sellafield widows. This includes an award of £120,633 in 1985 to the family of a member of management staff.42 The company is initiating morbidity payments to those of its workers who are in the way of succumbing — to Weltschmerz, presumably.
These attentions do not fall like the gentle rain from heaven. BNF holds hearings at which claims for compensation are accepted or denied, on what basis God knows, unless it is the poignancy of the tale. If no one dies from working in a nuclear plant, obviously no one can be more or less deserving of compensation on other than sentimental grounds. Certainly the anguish of dying from nameless causes is much intensified by developing cataracts and losing one’s teeth and hair. So there would exist a humanitarian basis for such selectivity. And BNF has made cancer its favorite charity, and is therefore no doubt particularly moved when this malady appears among its work force.
Most cases are denied hearing in the first place—94 out of 164, according to the article in The Times, which explains that BNF had set up its compensation system to avoid the expense and delay of legal procedings. This is an impressive tribute to the government’s faith in their objectivity, more striking in view of their stated lack of confidence in the plant’s management during this same period. The figures suggest settlements in sixty-eight cases averaging less than £300, or about $500. An indication of the job status of those who do most of the dying, presumably. Thrift, at least, appears to be served by the arrangement.
The importance of the assertion that no one dies from working in a nuclear plant to those responsible for the management of Sellafield would seem to militate against pure objectivity in adjudicating the grievances of those who feel a family member has in fact died from working in the nuclear industry. To admit to responsibility in any death would establish that there are conditions in which exposure to radioactive materials traumatizes the human organism fatally. The ramifications of such a concession would be very great, the uproar among widows and orphans being only a leitmotif. For it is the impeccable safety record of the industry itself as much as anything that predisposes the government to view with skepticism any suggestion that they might be creating health problems in the general public. In fact, comb the literature as I may, I find no allusion to experiments of any kind that bear out the view of the authorities about the nature of radioactivity. Rather than producing research that indicates the degree of innocuousness of radioactive materials required to justify practices at Sellafield, they defend themselves with claims that their harmfulness cannot be proven. “An observed association between two factors does not prove a causal relationship,” in the words of the Black Report on childhood leukemia near Sellafield.
There are many occasions in which it seems that the interests of industry must influence scientific research. The Black Report, granting elevated levels of both radiation and leukemia in the area of Sellafield, and observing that irradiation is the only known cause of this illness, recommended research to discover other possible causes. Subsequently the Human Leukemia Virus Centre has been founded in Glasgow to research the role of viruses in the onset of leukemia, specifically in the phenomenon of leukemia clusters.43 Such excesses within geographical areas have been found near many British nuclear sites.