Without offending the reader unduly, the tale could be told in this way: Greenpeace declares the coast to be contaminated, couching the information, so as to make this fact seem surprising, in terms of the pipeline anecdote. After a few days, BNF admits that there has been an accident. In the fiction, this delay would make the spill seem less alarming and egregious than it would if the management responded with any kind of haste. At last they admit that solvents were indeed accidentally flushed into the sea. The beaches are closed, hauled away, replaced, and declared safe, though strollers are advised not to pick up bits of flotsam, which are still hot. Except for the removal of the beaches, no extraordinary measures are taken to protect anyone. We know from experience with conventional oil slicks how they devastate coasts and aquatic life. This slick, we are to believe, drifts in and is blotted up and hauled away — to some corner of that vast kingdom where radioactivity can do no harm, or back to the sea, to resume life as a slick. Obviously the beach must be considered radioactive over the long term, or there would be no point in moving it. So wherever it was put, it will be radioactive, over the long term.
This makes narrative sense, if the point and object of it all is the removal of severe radioactive contamination from the area of Sellafield. It would be very easy to imagine reasons for doing this. Putting aside the matter of any particular episode of contamination, the beaches had absorbed contaminants for years. The great concentration of radioactivity in surf and in seaweed and flotsam would make this inevitable. At some point it would have to become a problem, more especially because the area is the site of an enormous construction project which will continue over years of time. (Former BNF chairman Con Allday has written that instruments for sensing radioactivity inside Sellafield are so sensitive that alarms are sometimes triggered by the materials from which the plant is built. Where the materials are local and the construction reasonably recent, this may not be proof of great sensitivity, after all.) Perhaps the residues, filtering through the sand over all those years, have begun to stratify. Plutonium 241 goes critical in very small quantities. Criticality is a vast release of energy, deadly to anyone exposed to it. Sellafield as an environment is unique in history, and I have read nothing to guide me in imagining what would happen if, fifteen feet under the sand, a few tablespoons of volatile isotope converged. It might be an incident that would spoil a picnic. I have read that at Hanford in Washington State shifting of soil was required because wastes had seeped into it and were accumulating dangerously. The analogy here seems potentially useful. According to the New Scientist, in 1986 the Central Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry of the Environment suggested that “it would be prudent to place restrictions on any development along and off the coast near Sellafield which could disturb the concentrations of radioactivity building up in mud and silts.”50
Maybe the beaches at Sellafield had begun to glow in the dark. Islands in the Pacific that were used for atomic testing glowed for years, and contamination levels at Sellafield are like those at testing sites. That would be an excellent reason for hauling the sand away. The matter arose conveniently in the winter months, avoiding any great disruption of the tourist season, at least for American tourists.
Then, too, cancers were accumulating at a rate that would be difficult to ignore. Just at this time a report by James Cutler prepared for Yorkshire Television stimulated a government-appointed commission to look into the leukemia deaths of children in Seascale, the village nearest the plant; the inquiry was headed by Dr. Douglas Black. The Black Report was a response to anecdotal information collected by television journalists, in the event, but the kind of story liable to gain currency even when doctors are legally prohibited from giving out information that is not officially authorized, as in Britain. The physical environs of the plant would have constituted a natural history of contamination, a geological record of a sort, if models and extrapolations were made to take into account tides and seepage and the rest. We must curse the luck that has apparently caused this resource to be lost to science. This is all the more true because the Black Report made a considerable point of stressing the difficulties and uncertainties of establishing dose levels and exposures, and all the more true because a standard defense of practices at Sellafield has been that contaminants disperse in the sea or become somehow fixed to the sea floor.
If Sellafield occupied a cultural terrain where there were such things as liability and culpability, what has happened would appear very like a destruction of evidence. It seems not to have been an act of prudence as that word is normally understood, because nothing was done to decontaminate local houses and shops. I conclude this from the fact that those tested at the time of the Black Inquiry, months later, were found to be contaminated with plutonium and other substances, and this was treated as a surprise. A project was then launched to vacuum houses in the Sellafield area with specially fitted machines, and to do the same in areas well away from nuclear facilities, to determine whether there was any correlation between cancer rates and plutonium in the domestic environment. The project does not seem terribly well designed. The point is to dissociate cancer from radioactive contamination, and the scientific hoovering is to demonstrate, presumably, that there is more radioactive material in houses near nuclear plants than in those at some distance from them. I am at a loss to know what in such information could either surprise or reassure. This demonstration will be made, however, and cancer rates compared, to illustrate that cancer can flourish unabetted by a nuclear power plant. Again, while this can no doubt be proved, there is nothing here to surprise or reassure, either. It is known that near Sellafield the rate of childhood leukemia exceeds the national average by ten times. Where comparable anomalies occur seemingly without exposure to radiation implicated in the deaths of the Cumbrian children, it should be incumbent upon health authorities to look for the causes of these other anomalies. They may be the quirks of statistics, or they may be viruses, or they may be proximity to a chemical waste disposal plant, or to a hospital, since these have been found to dump radioactive iodine used for diagnostic testing into the water system, or to any of the industries that pour detritus into the air and into rivers and estuaries, or even proximity to a rail line along which wastes would pass on the way to Sellafield, or any combination of these factors. If the health consequences of Sellafield blend into larger patterns of public health in Britain, it is because the environmental practices of the nuclear industry are consistent with those of other industries in that befouled country. Finally, the Black Commission concluded that it could offer a limited assurance of the safety of the Cumbrian environment, and so the issue was more or less resolved, at least to the satisfaction of the government.