The output and commerce reflected in all this are clearly of startling magnitude. What Sellafield reflects in terms of the intentions of those who set all this in motion is probably not a simple question. The more secretive and narrowly based decision making is, the more eccentric it becomes, and often things happen for reasons that are foolish or bizarre, and therefore elude all surmise. Plutonium is an extraordinary substance, both waste and commodity, costly and dangerous to keep, dangerous and profitable to sell. Where it exists in quantity, as it does in Britain because of its Magnox reactors, and more recently because its expanding of reprocessing services brings in the plutonium-rich wastes of a great part of the world, there would be considerable pressure to find ways to use or be rid of the stuff. Ninety percent of the nuclear waste that has been dumped into the sea has been put there by Britain, presumably as a function of its role as universal dustman.
I speculate that the origins of it all may lie in that first decision to produce nuclear weapons, which led to the development of a plutonium-producing reactor, which was subsequently sold abroad as a power-generating reactor. A notable feature of the British Magnox reactor is that it produces wastes which cannot be stored for long periods. Reprocessing is a solution to this problem.
National prestige as well as enormous sums of money are at stake in all nuclear transactions. When Chernobyl exploded, supplanting the fire at Windscale as the most serious nuclear plant accident in history, Britain is reported to have brought pressure to bear on Italy to prevent it from closing a Magnox reactor; that is, one of the type of Calder Hall and the other British reactors of the first generation, and similar to the one at Chernobyl.47 (British and Soviet physicists worked together in the pioneering days, so the similarity of their industries may suggest intellectual cross-pollination.) The economic interest of Britain as an exporter of nuclear technology, and also the interest of the British government in avoiding anxiety at home about the safety of these old reactors, seems to have prevailed over Italy’s disquiet.
Italy is among the countries whose waste is reprocessed at Sellafield. A benefit of selling reactors abroad which produce unstable wastes might be that the buyer will also be obliged to pay for the disposal of spent fuel rods. The potentialities for turning a profit are considerable, given the will. The history of Sellafield certainly demonstrates the injustice of Mrs. Thatcher’s chiding her countrymen for being laggard in this regard, by the way. But then it is always the case that people find themselves deficient in the things that in fact matter most to them, or seem to them most admirable, and in which they are least liable to be remiss. The British berate themselves with excessive caution, and with being slow about putting scientific discoveries into commercial application. Any student of the history of Sellafield will surely find them innocent on both counts.
It is clear from articles in the press of the time that the first British reactors were not considered an optimum design, even by those responsible for building them. That they should be gas-cooled was a choice encouraged by thrift. Since the old plants continue to function, long after the end of their design life, their deficiencies are by no means matters of academic interest, any more than their characteristic of producing “waste” with a high plutonium content.
Building reactors whose waste could not be stored locked Britain into reprocessing continuously and on a large scale. Sellafield, which was built to make fissile materials for bombs, has assumed the civil function of waste dumping, in the course of producing the same fissile materials. It has made an officious and energetic show of managing the unmanageable. Its patrons or clients in other governments have in fact done the same thing. They have evaded the most important and costly problem created by nuclear energy by paying the British to take if off their hands, temporarily, since winds and currents assure that their problems will not remain solved for very long. In the meantime, they can appear to have mastered this most difficult technology, and they can propagate their versions of it through the world. The clientele of Sellafield is a Who’s Who of technologically advanced countries: Japan, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and Sweden. France has its own pipeline into the sea at Cap de la Hague on the English Channel.
The relation between the civil and military functions of Sellafield is never clearly defined — a fact which limits its accessibility to EEC inspection, among other advantages. One Christopher Hinton engineered the pipeline and received an honor for it from that same government which forbade him to mention it in public. This discretion is consistent with anxieties about the wisdom of dumping toxins into the sea. Yet there is no indication that concepts like cumulative impact or long-term consequences were brought to bear in making the decision, though Britain was embarking on a policy whose course would be measured in decades at the least. The silence about the pipeline must indicate lingering doubt, or the anticipation of criticism of the kind that came up at the United Nations in 1958, when John Dunster defended the dumping as an experiment. While the results of this “experiment” revealed contamination — though at levels acceptable to the government — a more characteristic defense of Sellafield asserts that plutonium, being almost as heavy as lead, will lie on the sea floor, presumably somehow inert. Water passing through lead pipes is contaminated. So it seems logical that currents and tides passing across a sea floor on which rests a pool of sludge, including plutonium ash, would also become contaminated. In neither case does weight impede the process. Here again it should be borne in mind that plutonium has never been the sole or primary radioactive material released into the environment. So its peculiarities could not in any case justify the emissions from Sellafield.
While I am no physicist, I do know that radioactivity was observed in nature in the first place because certain substances give off small amounts of heat. Plutonium, and especially americium, into which it is converted as it decays, give off heat. Modest as my experience of the natural world might be, I am bold enough to suggest that when heat-generating materials are spread across the floor of a northern sea, a new influence on the movement of water is introduced. In Britain, even at this hour, learned men are struggling to account for the ferocious toxicity of spume in this unhappy region. I believe my hypothesis might be of use. Since contaminated water would be warm, it would come to the surface. The contaminants, being warm, and continuously warming the water around them, would not sink again. At the same time, more contaminants would be added from below. So the model according to which substances which are carried into the sea in water suddenly become impervious to being dispersed by water once they are in the sea seems flawed on several grounds.
Of course I am proceeding backward from observed phenomena, such as radioactive spume, radioactive sand, and radioactive wind. But this method is certainly superior to insisting on the appropriateness of a model which runs counter to observed phenomena. An amateur’s interest in the virulence of spume might distract attention from what really is a more important question — that is, why, with plutonium and all the rest pouring into the environment daily, it should be important to determine by what process the surf has become especially hot. The source of the problem is not far to seek, and the nearest way to containing it is equally clear. While dumping continues at an accelerating rate, with no prospect except for invidious change, to trace the movement of radioactivity from the bottom of the water to the top seems a misappropriation of effort. It is of a kind with the sponsorship of cancer research by British Nuclear Fuels, in that it tends to distract attention away from a situation that is extremely straightforward, toward its intractable consequences. Research projects and furrowed brows and a fluttering of white coats, things full of reassuring implications, at the same time create an aura of mystery where all is as plain as day.