While British scientists study the relative merits of bores in shale or granite, salt mines, vitrification, or implantation in the seabed as disposal methods suited to materials which must be isolated for periods significant even on geologic time scales, other British scientists ponder the fact that the human placenta has not proved a sufficient protection for the human fetus from plutonium ingested by the mother. Granite is inappropriate to contain plutonium because water can pass through it. The inappropriateness of the placenta for the same function apparently eludes scientific understanding. Unfortunately, while the deficiencies of granite, and doubts about other methods of long-term isolation, have delayed the development of these methods, the same prudential concern has not prevented the disposal practices which rely altogether on frail human flesh. What, after all, should be protected from a notorious mutagen if not a human fetus? This is clearly another instance where industrial practice has run ahead of scientific knowledge, if not in fact away from it. It may be germane here to point out again the great economic advantages entailed in flushing plutonium into the environment. If thrift is a factor, any other method will be hard pressed to compete, more especially now that the horse is out of the barn.
The British ponder costly strategies for disposing of nuclear waste, nuclear power being the only viable long-term energy source for a country that is closing down its coalfields and selling its oil abroad. Faint hearts are scolded for refusing to deal with this hard reality. No mention is made, of course, of the fact that Britain goes looking for trouble, first by soliciting foreign custom for their disposal industry, second by using reprocessing as a disposal method, when the solvents involved multiply the volume of toxic waste more than a hundred times, and third by failing to invest in new plants, which at one time could have set some bounds to the dreadfulness of the enterprise by limiting leaks and spills. The nuclear waste disposal industry, also known as the plutonium industry, slipstreams behind nuclear power as the price that must be paid for industrial vigor. No one seems to dwell upon the fact that the price is paid in Britain for industrial vigor in Germany and Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.
Of course they do not bear this cost alone. World commerce in toxins, like every kind of commerce, must suffer from accident and spillage. A traffic in waste destined to end up in the sea is not likely to be obsessively cautious. And then it does end up in the sea, just off the coast of Europe. While Europeans make protesting noises from time to time, their governments pay for these services. The egregiousness of Britain’s industrial offenses simply reflects the international role that has been delegated to it, that its peculiar notions of self-interest have caused it to seize upon. Meanwhile, Sweden, a Sellafield client, is constructing a state-of-the-art subsea depository that may be in fact more immune to accidents than most human contrivances. It sounds very impressive, and if it should fail, the wastes so cautiously isolated will at worst only mingle with the Swedish wastes that pass through the pipeline at Sellafield.
I do not know whether I am describing the kind of dissociated behavior that would come with genuine denial, or simply a public-relations stunt, which plays shrewdly on a sad tendency in the public to cling to any little sign of competence on the part of those entrusted with their well-being. On the face of it, all the shielding and tunneling and vitrifying are predicated upon calculations of the dangers of these substances which take them to be extraordinarily great and persistent. So the experience the Europeans have had living alongside seas contaminated with the entire range of radioactive substances produced in reactor cores has not led their specialists to take a more sanguine view of their impact on the environment. This seems to me a fact worthy of note, in light of continuous British assurances that no harm has been done.
Clearly major questions have never been resolved concerning the rights of a national government toward the people and the terrain entrusted to its care. To dispose of either, to sell the health and posterity of one, the habitability of the other, for money, is a perfection of high-handedness beside which all other examples pale. Even to the extent that the mass of people can be thought of as entering into this bargain freely and knowingly, they have sold — for employment, or for some notion of national interest — the well-being of their descendants, which was never theirs to sell, and in the short or medium term, the well-being of the descendants of every mote of life that stirs on the face of the earth. If this has happened in a society which can be called, in any degree, open, free, and democratic, then we had better look at it very seriously indeed. Our own open, free, and democratic country lives in an informational vacuum that makes us a danger to ourselves and a terror to everyone else. No one is any freer than he wishes to be. The apparatus of democracy becomes a sort of Soviet constitution in every instance where there is no will to animate it.
The British are amazingly docile. It is a trait they admire in themselves, and for which they are admired. They have been set apart, among all the developed nations, to endure the insupportable, and they have done it with the quietness and goodwill for which they are legendary. We have justified our reputation for impenetrable ignorance, meanwhile, winging in to drop a tear on the grave of Dorothy Wordsworth and snap a few photos of a gentler world. For forty years, since the end of the Second World War, people have asked how such vile things could have happened as those that deviled Europe in the thirties and forties. The answer is, because anything can happen.
American books on nuclear issues usually omit to mention Britain at all. Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth is a distinguished recent example of this tendency. This earnest call to repentance sees nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States as the one great peril to the world’s survival — implying one great solution, that we “put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.”55 It is as if history proceeded by referendum, and a grand exertion of collective goodness would put the planet out of harm’s way. I have the greatest respect for Schell’s religious and democratic zeal, but there is a tendency among committed democrats like us to believe all significant problems must be somehow suited to our solutions, as our pious elders thought their trials were always suited to their strengths. Cleansing the world of weapons is a relatively simple problem beside cleansing the sea of tons of radioactive sludge, and cleansing the air and the earth, and discovering and limiting the varieties of harm already done. Putting wastes into the sea has been the work of a few bureaucrats. Taking them back out again will be impossible, no matter how aroused and enlightened public opinion might someday become. The problem has been and is now outside democratic political control, first of all because books about nuclear issues do not tell the public the problem exists.