Yet sometimes the health consequences of radioactive contamination are explicitly conceded. In the recent case of the Black Report, uranium released from the plant was belatedly acknowledged to be a lethal carcinogen through the following sequence of events. Dr. Black, inquiring into the deaths from leukemia among children in the village of Seascale, concluded that emissions from the Sellafield plant could not be blamed because the number of deaths was in excess of the number he felt could be projected from the emissions that were supposed to have occurred. According to him, emissions would have had to be forty times as great to account for the actual rate of death. Now, this line of reasoning was ingenious rather than persuasive, in the view of many. The Black Report, with its measured (that is, equivocal) reassurance, seemed open to doubt.
Dr. Black, in a reply to critics, wrote: “Since the report came out, we have been notified of further cases, and indeed asked to include them. We cannot validly do this until the figures in other electoral wards have been brought up to date for comparison.”51 Since so much is made by Sellafield’s defenders of the fact that the number of child deaths — ten — is too small to be significant, though in so small a population it yields an excess rate of 1,000 percent the national average, it is strange to minimize the significance of new cases, appearing within months of the publication of Dr. Black’s report. If other electoral wards are in so unhappy a state as to cushion this rate of excess, God help them.
Dr. Black explains that a cause-and-effect relation between radiation and leukemia will be established if lower emissions, which he says are being achieved, bring lower rates of illness. In other words, future leukemia excesses will exonerate the plant, as present ones have done. This is such a pretty piece of reasoning, I will not spoil it with talk of half-lives.
But just in the nick of time a man came forward with information which saved the day. In the fifties, when the plant was still under the management of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, a release of uranium occurred which was, uncannily, forty times as great as had been shown in the records. 52 The man who came forward was a former employee, who had left years before, disgruntled by the fact that releases of radioactivity from the plant were higher than acknowledged. He and a colleague tested the levels of radioactivity in their homes, found them unsettlingly high, and decided to leave the area. But he surfaced to make his telling revelation about an incident in which uranium was released into the environment. The information was opportune in a number of ways. It tended to confirm the accuracy of the Black Inquiry’s projections. It associated leukemia with radioactive contamination, but it located the source of the anomaly in a single, discrete episode of contamination. Out of good nature I do not dwell on the persistence of uranium in the environment.
By implication this one episode of contamination being exactly sufficient to satisfy the Black Inquiry’s projections, there is nothing else the inquiry failed to take into account. While the plant is implicated in these deaths of children, the rest of the information it gave the inquiry about its operations was at the same time vindicated. (It is sometimes reported that the NRPB, that body whose frequent service to the public has by now made it familiar to my readers, supplied the inquiry with its figures. But if they missed this decisive infusion of uranium into the environment, they must be substantially dependent on industry figures in any case.) Thrift may well have been a factor in the design of the investigation. And in fairness, it had only recently seemed prudent to the government to decontaminate the local beaches, as I have said, and this would necessarily have reduced the value of the area around Sellafield as a source of information, though not to the point where industry estimates need have become the exclusive source.
One feels continuously a sense of lost opportunity. For example, if it seemed appropriate to these inquirers to reason from an excess of childhood leukemia, over and above what their figures led them to predict, to an exoneration of the plant as the cause of leukemia, and if the discovery of the release of uranium undercut this argument by appearing to account precisely for these deaths, could not that first happy conclusion, that the plant was not to blame, have been rescued by drawing attention to the fact that there are elevated rates of leukemia in other villages around Sellafield, and up and down the coast? If excess is exculpatory, then Sellafield is clearly as benign as a clover patch.
As it is, the question has been left in obscurity. Why should a release of uranium that occurred in the fifties have had this dreadful impact on children whose parents were children at the time? If it suggests either chromosome damage or the retention of radioactive substances in the bodies of young women which affect fetal development, then the contamination should manifest itself in other forms besides leukemia. The uranium was apparently vented into the air. Therefore lung cancer would be a likely aftereffect, and the delay in its onset comprehensible. However, only one group of leukemia deaths in one village were within the limits of the study, so other forms of impact of radioactivity were neither sought out nor taken into account where they made themselves manifest. I lay myself open to the charge of cynicism by suggesting that this particular emission was granted its special importance because it occurred under the old management, before BNF took control of the plant. The imputation of carelessness, of bad record keeping, is cast back on the UKAEA, and the present management is unsmirched.
Oddly enough, only days after Dr. Black’s results had been, in essential ways, shored up by the discovery of an emission of uranium sufficient to account, by his system of reckoning, for the leukemia deaths of the children of Seascale — a release of uranium from the plant occurred twenty-two times greater than that to which these deaths of children had been more or less attributed. How did the management respond? With public assurances — the Irish were making a fuss — that the release had been approved by the government, was wholly intentional, and presented no threat to anyone. After all, according to former BNF chairman Con Allday, uranium is the most common element in the earth’s crust.53 He informed the public that the Irish Sea is full of many thousands of tons of naturally occurring uranium. Therefore, another half ton of Sellafield uranium could hardly matter. The (unnamed) chemical plant up the coast releases as much every day — a fact never taken into account in calculating radiation doses, so far as I can discover. In conclusion he laid anxiety about Sellafield to “fear born of ignorance.” He does not say whose ignorance inspires this fear.
Other aspects of the nuclear issue are as thoroughly nonsensical. It is said that refusal by the Seamen’s Union to man dump ships has ended nuclear waste disposal by Britain into the open sea in the last few years. Since international agreements to stop such dumping have been ignored routinely, there is no great reason to imagine that the action of a labor union will have had a restraining influence, especially on Mrs. Thatcher. The advantage to the government of this action is that it creates obscurity around the situation without the government’s having to disavow its policy, should it resume dumping or be found never to have stopped.
In any case, the merits and demerits of ocean dumping from ships — the kind that has supposedly been desisted from — are mulled over in the press as gravely as anyone could wish, though not altogether usefully. The complexities of underground storage are explained with reference to the fact that high-level wastes must be isolated for thousands of years. This information comes as a little shock to one aware of disposal practices at Sellafield, as do the qualms about dumping in the open sea. Jim Slater, former head of the Seamen’s Union, spoke of organizing industrial action against Sellafield, and Miss Jean Emery, a leader of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, has pointed out the absurdity of fretting over the malign consequences of ocean dumping when the quantity that has been put in the Irish Sea from Sellafield is twice as great as that dumped over the sides of ships.54 But in general the press seems content to leave all this unreconciled. Despite the supposed halt to the practice, press reports of “stolen minutes” from a meeting of the ministry whose function is to approve dumping at sea record anxiety that the loading of an oversized container, one of special thickness, would tip off the press that plutonium was being dumped, and that this would in turn shake public confidence in ocean dumping.† This is very odd, this glimpse of a government bundling plutonium up in an especially heavy containment and then still chary of being seen to put it in the sea at all. This same ministry has approved all the uncontained disposal that occurs from Sellafield. A cynic might wonder again if this image of a cautious and stalemated government has been planted to create characterizing detail at odds with the plain, brute persistence of actual policy.