The British government has just decided to build a pressurized water reactor at Sizewell, in England, after an inquiry that seems to have satisfied notions of rigor by continuing for months and producing, literally, scores of tons of testimony, and to have satisfied definitions of civility by ending with funny-hat party. As always with such inquiries, the government set the terms of the question and appointed the inquiry chairman, who not only presided over the affair but also determined its outcome — which is not binding on the government. Every bet is covered. The issue at Sizewell was whether the plant to be built was to be an advanced gas-cooled reactor, a British design, or a Westinghouse-type pressurized water reactor (PWR). Environmentalists were allowed to testify, though what they said against nuclear power itself was necessarily extraneous, and they appeared, when the time came, funnily hatted. The famous weight — that is, heft — of the information gathered in this inquiry certainly reflects the fact that elaborate cases can be made against the construction of reactors of either kind. Yet it is cited as evidence of the great deliberation with which Britain approaches nuclear decision making.
The committee chairman, Frank Layfield, decided in favor of the PWR, a decision that confirmed the wisdom of the government, which had favored it from the first. The decision was supported with assurances that the American design would be brought up to British safety standards. This may not involve great expense. Sizewell is already the center of a leukemia “cluster.” Both Sellafield and Dounreay satisfy British safety standards. Less extraordinary plants must therefore fall within them quite effortlessly.
In 1983 it seems a spill occurred at Sellafield which caused the beaches to be closed for months. This was one of those clustered events which must make the management at Sellafield, together with the British government and any lover of mankind, say alas and alack. In my credulous days I considered this an authentic and significant event, but I have begun to realize it bears scrutiny badly. I was living in England that year, and not long before the spill was reported, as I perused The Guardian, I came upon a little article on a back page in which it was stated that experts had begun to believe that it was more harmful to ingest plutonium than had previously been thought. Of course I was startled. For just then American public opinion was turning over as if for the first time the fact that we and our great competitor were acting as impresarios for the Day of Doom. Of all the terrors we had prepared for ourselves, nothing compared with plutonium, according to the lore shared at dinner parties among the thoughtful classes. The word “plutonium” leaped at me, conditioned as I was. I began to notice mention of this substance and its ilk in the news almost daily.
One accepts the news, for some reason. A fiction writer has to braid events into a plausible sequence. But the news is simply a series of reported incidents which, one assumes, manifest varieties of accident and causation, plausible if they were known. There are no grounds for this assumption. Sometimes the news reads suspiciously like unusually clumsy fiction. In litigious America, with its habit of trials and investigations, we always attempt to establish a narrative on the order of who did what to whom and why. This approach is full of problems, the chief one being that people become loyal to one narrative or another and lose interest in objectivity, together with respect for information that fails to confirm a favored version of plot and character. I can only assume many Americans read the same articles I read. They swarm that island, to the utter weariness of the natives and one another. But England is established, in their narrative, as a mild and scrupulous old nation which, like the lion in Mark Twain’s unfallen Eden, gorges on strawberries. So they see and do not perceive, hear and do not understand, full of that awe which Toqueville, precisely wrong, said Americans were incapable of feeling.
According to our narrative, poor Europe must endure our crude embrace or fall into one more crushing. It is a funny story, really. All the troglodyte behavior for which we can never apologize abjectly enough, all the stationing of troops and sticking the world full of missiles, are the single bond that ties us to Europe, the one proof, never sufficient, of loyalty and love. We make ourselves the worthy object of our own contempt for the sake of a civilization much richer and more populous than the Soviet Union.
We cannot absorb or retain information which would establish Europe as a major and not at all a brilliant actor in contemporary history. We have sacrificed our humanity to preserve countries that connive in the production of the worst sort of explosives and toxins and their release into the environment. There is nothing pleasant in this fact. It has no place in the story. When the Russians hear all the prattle about Western values they must surely assume they permit plutonium dumping. Who can argue? It may be more than their absolutist history that prevents them from being converted by the force of Western example.
I often wonder how the Russians interpret the silences and omissions in American journalism. Every country is ridiculous in its own way. We are at our most ridiculous when we imagine our bold, hectoring press with its armor of legal protections informing us, in some meaningful sense. Any grumbling about its excesses is shamed to silence by a reminder of the great freedom the press must have in order to do its great work. It is impossible to know the extent of its misfeasance without leaving the country. When Americans speak of its failures, they usually impute them to public indifference to foreign affairs, as if fine, plump articles on these subjects withered on the shelves, as if the American consumer pinched an item about former Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme’s secretly developing nuclear weapons over an eighteen-year period, and squeezed an item about the British secret service raiding the offices of the New Statesman and the BBC, and rejected them both in favor of an update on the Betty Ford clinic. News of the affairs of the world is not readily available to Americans. I believe this may be true for Russians and Chinese. If the origins of isolation are different in the three countries, that is less important than the fact of isolation, which is equally incompatible with democracy in every case.
The American zeal for establishing a narrative context for events may falsify as much as it clarifies. But it does at least set events one beside another to see how they cohere, and it acknowledges the importance of actors, who are assumed to be responsible and accountable for what they do. British news, by comparison, is simply a series of revelations. For thirty years a pool of plutonium has been forming off the English coast. The tide is highly radioactive and will become more so. The government inspects the plant and approves the emissions from it. The government considers the plant poorly maintained and managed, and is bringing pressure to lower emissions. The government is expanding the plant and developing another one in Scotland. Foreign wastes enter the country at Dover and are transported by rail through London. Finished plutonium will be shipped from Scotland into Europe by air. Whose judgment and what reasoning lie behind these practices and arrangements? The question is never broached. Information merely accumulates, without effect. The British government, the great constant behind the notional shifts of management, the proprietor and stockholder, never loses its ability to reassure the public, assuming the lofty role of inquirer into its own doings and finding nothing seriously amiss, nothing a little finger wagging will not put right, a little expression of lack of confidence in the management. It is very much as if the object of these revelations was to let the public know what it must accept.