Secret Dumping
Britain’s hidden nuclear crisis is beginning to resemble Russia’s
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, some time in 1997
Thirty-five years is a long lead time, even by the standards of Britain’s publishing industry. But the 1961 government report into the nuclear accident at Newbury, leaked by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament over the weekend, is no less explosive for the delay. In 1958, the report reveals, a US bomber armed with nuclear warheads burst into flames at the Greenham Common airbase, scattering uranium and plutonium over the homes of 150,000 people.
Just as alarming as the incident itself is the way the government has handled it. Having told parliament that no such accident has ever taken place in the United Kingdom, it continues to maintain that no nuclear weapons were involved in the fire. Our culture of official secrecy is never more dangerous than when applied to nuclear accidents.
Scientists around Newbury had long been puzzled by the unusual levels of plutonium in the area’s vegetables, but, thanks to the cover-up, their findings were ignored and nothing was done. As leukaemia clusters around the town come to light, no one can tell how many of us may have been exposed to the most poisonous chemical on earth, by eating crops grown nearby. The little Scottish island of Benbecula provides a chilling warning of the possible implications. Contaminated by the fires at Chernobyl, 10 years and 1700 miles away, food grown on the island now appears to present a serious risk to human health. Cancers there have risen by three times over the last 18 months.
We tend to think of nuclear accidents and subsequent cover-ups as an Eastern European problem. We’ve all heard about fuel rods dumped at the bottom of people’s gardens, leaking barrels discovered in the woods, the nuclear submarines rusting away at Murmansk and Vladivostok and, of course, the cranky, faltering power stations. The region’s nuclear crisis can scarcely be exaggerated. When Chernobyl blew up, some experts in the industry said the accident would cause just five deaths. We now know that the toll can be measured in tens of thousands. A senior Russian scientist has estimated that sixteen per cent of the children born in Russia in the last 4 years have mental or physical abnormalities caused by radiation.
But it is rapidly becoming obvious that Russia’s nuclear nightmare differs from ours only in scale. The suppressed and unpalatable truth is that the incident at Newbury is just one of a string of leaks and disasters in Britain over the last 40 years. As shares in British Energy, the newly- privatized nuclear generating company, go on sale today, the time to come clean about Britain’s nuclear record is long overdue.
In 1988, for example, we heard for the first time about a serious fire at Windscale, 31 years earlier. No one knows how many people were killed by escaping radiation. Last year we heard that a chemical explosion in a storage shaft at Dounreay in 1977 scattered nuclear waste over the nearby beaches. When the news leaked out, men in space suits were sent to pick up pebbles over which children had been playing for eighteen years. The incident was kept secret even from government investigators.
In October, 17,000 tonnes of nuclear waste stored in rudimentary concrete containers were found in the shallow waters just two miles west of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. They had been there for more than 30 years, having been secretly dumped by the Ministry of Defence. And in January, a stack of drums filled with uranium waste were discovered accidentally on a farm in the Midlands. Some of them were rusted through. No one admits to knowing how they got there.
In truth, like the Russians, we simply don’t know how to deal with the nuclear warheads and nuclear waste we’ve accumulated. While no end of enterprise and brainpower has gone into commissioning nuclear facilities, the technology required to decommission them safely has not yet arrived. When pressed, officials deliver only blandishments, explaining that “science will find an answer in the fullness of time.”
The fullness of time may not be ours to bargain with. The safe storage and decommissioning of our nuclear components requires economic and political stability for at least one thousand years. As no politician can promise stability for the next five, the follies of accumulating waste become monstrously apparent.
If we are to sleep a little more soundly in the first few decades of this coming millenium, the government must start to guard our lives as zealously as it has so far guarded the facts. This means, as a first step, a re-appraisal of our decommissioning plans, many of which, like the proposed Nirex repository beside Sellafield, are deeply flawed. We must also stop commissioning. If we don’t know what to do with the waste, it surely cannot be right to keep producing it.
But most importantly, we need an honest and open discussion of our problems and the means of sorting them out. It is time, in other words, for the leaks of radiation to end and the leaks of information to begin.