Certainly the most striking effect of all the revelations to this point has been to produce quiet, while the government launches into the vast program of construction that will make Britain an ever greater center of plutonium extraction and waste dumping. Some of the writers and publications from which I have taken information seem courageous. But then since none of these articles seems to have done more than to inoculate public opinion against bad news still to come, how is a foreigner to judge any writer’s intent? No hearing will convene to assess the wisdom of shipping radioactive wastes through a populous capital, or dumping them into the sea, or extracting weapons materials from them to be shipped by air into Europe, and through North America to Japan. Bad news only intensifies the prevailing resignation.
I noticed the little article about possible adverse effects of ingesting plutonium. It was feared, the article said, that children absorbed the material many times more readily than adults. Soon afterward the matter of the contamination of the beaches of Cumbria arose. First an employee of the plant, nameless and faceless as figures in this narrative very often are, stopped to tell a young family not to allow their children to play on the sand. They wrote to their Member of Parliament, who raised a question about conditions near the plant. At about this time, a Greenpeace boat went out to cap the pipeline by way of protesting the gush of radioactive materials and solvents into the weary sea.
This is a very strange little story by itself. Something over a million gallons go down that pipeline in the course of a day. Could people working under water actually hope to cap a double pipeline through which so much toxic liquid was flowing? Capping the pipeline at Sellafield, if it could be done, would seem to involve the risk of backing up this enormous outflow, flooding the beach or the interior of the plant, a dubious piece of environmentalism. Their ability to close the pipe was said to have been taken seriously by someone and foiled. The mouth had been changed so that the cap they had prepared for it would not fit, a fact that led to speculation in the press about government surveillance of Greenpeace.
As the event was reported, these Greenpeace divers first went into the sea at the mouth of the pipeline, to take silt samples. They surfaced again through a slick, and discovered, when a Geiger counter in the boat indicated radioactivity at 1,500 times “normal” levels, that they were contaminated. Thus was discovered the great slick that closed the beaches of Cumbria, that made them get up and move, like Birnam Wood. (I have never seen a photograph of this giant convoy of trucks, moving back and forth, presumably for weeks, so I cannot speculate on the methods used to avoid spreading contamination en route to the site of disposal, wherever that may have been. Plant management denied the beaches were being removed. A large decontamination effort was undertaken, however, and since flotsam and seaweed in themselves could hardly have been sufficient to sustain such an effort, I incline to believe the reports that sand itself was removed. Testimony at the trial of BNF for its management of this incident described levels of radiation at ten thousand times background. 48While it is not possible to assign any precise meaning to such figures, they clearly indicate an extreme situation. The trucks disappear from later accounts altogether. So does the attempt to cap the pipeline.)
Some days passed between the contamination of the Greenpeace divers and the closing of the beaches, which seems to have been the time it took for BNF to acknowledge that anything unusual had occurred. It has never been clear to me whether they did not know a spill had occurred, or whether they did not consider the event unusual. In all such events, delayed response is characteristic.
If the spill was serious enough to require a significant effort of decontamination, it would certainly have been prudent as well to relocate children and pregnant women while the decontamination was proceeding. When I imagine these residues of spent fuel, oxides fine enough to be carried in solvents into the sea and then to be brought in again by the tides and winds, I can only imagine that they would be highly particulate, and that when the sand was disturbed they would be winnowed out by any movement of the air, unless the sand was wet, in which case they would seep out with the moisture. In other words, I cannot imagine how the repair of the beaches could have failed to have intensified the contamination of the area, in terms of unavoidable human contact with it.
I find the going a little hard when I try to imagine a boat full of bright young men, literate in matters nuclear, with a Geiger counter on board, on their way to take silt from the floor of this notorious sea. Why did they go on this mission? Because radioactive wastes were being disgorged into the sea, at that very site. Did they expect to be contaminated, diving down to the plutonium-spewing orifice? Clearly they did not. It was supposedly an oily slick that made them radioactive when they returned to the boat. Where would this slick have come from? That pipeline. Therefore, they no doubt dived as well as surfaced through it. So here is the problem. Why would fit young men with their lives before them, diving near the pipeline because it released radioactivity, and who had a Geiger counter along, not test the condition of the water before they entered it? Putting aside the apparent fact of one particular slick, how can it have come as a surprise to them that they were contaminated, and why should they have treated the discovery that they were as meaning something exceptional had happened? If they really thought this radioactive emission problem was only of such magnitude that one could dive into the thick of the most prolonged and intense contamination in the world and rise out of it as fresh as Wordsworth’s Proteus, then they might make more profitable use of their time selling toy seals — the kind most resistant to radiation in the environment, as these conservation-minded folk are no doubt aware.
In fairness, Greenpeace seems to have a Geiger counter problem. Here we read how they had one along in the boat. But then when Chernobyl blew, the only Geiger counter that was used to provide readings on levels of radioactivity on the west coast of Britain belonged to a high-school science class. Surely we might have expected a flood of independent information from this sun-bronzed band of nuclear foes, since they do have Geiger counters, as this story proves. Yet they seem not to use them to maximum effect, and that is a pity, all the more so because their shortcomings in this regard replicate precisely those omissions of government, industry, the regulatory agencies, and the scientific community which create the aura of mystery around Sellafield, an uncertainty a little monitoring could so quickly dispel.
But let us return to the matter of narrative. Let us suppose the facts discussed so far were to be construed for the uses of fiction, and the writer was obliged to impose on them or discover in them that order of reasonableness and plausibility which could keep the reader from flinging the book out the window. Clearly the nuclear activists could not leap into the most radioactive sea in the world at the eye of its contamination and then register amazement that their Geiger counter was agitated. They might at most sail out and sail back in again. The idea of capping a pipeline from which comes a massive flow of toxic materials clearly must be scrapped on grounds of implausibility. And the detail concerning the contamination of the divers and their boat had best be crossed out, too, since the reader would wonder about the other ships in the Irish Sea that day and the catches pulled up through the toxic film and stowed in contaminated hulls and carried away into ports and countries where the name of Sellafield is never heard — America, for example. These environmentalists would no doubt be expected to think in larger terms than merely their own persons and property. According to reported testimony at the pollution trial — the first in British nuclear history — there were people on the beaches that day and fishing boats off the coast.49