Monbiot.com

Britain’s nuclear industry keeps lying

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th December 1997.

Lake Karachay in the Urals is so radioactive that you can contract acute radiation sickness merely by strolling around it. The nuclear waste dumped there by a nearby weapons complex is now spreading through the groundwater: it will poison tens of thousands of people before leaching into the Arctic Ocean. This, of course, is just the latest of a string of nuclear horrors unspooling in the former Soviet Union. A senior Russian scientist has estimated that 16 per cent of the children born in his country in the last four years have mental or physical abnormalities caused by radiation.

When we hear stories like this, we thank God that we live in the land of accountable government and traceable waste chains. But the horrible truth is slowly creeping up on us: our own nuclear catastrophe differs from Russia’s only in scale. The lies are the same, the cover-ups are the same, the staggering disregard for human safety is the same. We are fortunate merely in that our nuclear programme is smaller than the former Soviet Union’s: there is less with which to poison us.

Last week the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) finally agreed to remove the lethal stew of plutonium, enriched uranium and explosive coolants which workers at its Dounreay nuclear plant had thrown down a hole behind the crumbling coastal cliffs. The dump has exploded once already: in 1977 radioactive particles were scattered over the surrounding beaches. UKAEA lied for years about the incident. Then, two years ago, men in space suits were sent to pick up the pebbles over which children had been playing for eighteen years.

While radiation has been leaking steadily from many of our nuclear dumps and installations, information has been leaking rather more sporadically. This summer the government admitted that nuclear waste has been secretly discarded in eight places in coastal waters and around 500 landfill sites, some of which are now believed to be leaking. Last year, a stack of drums of uranium waste, some rusted through, was discovered on a farm in the Midlands. No one could explain how it got there.

All this, as UKAEA is anxious to make clear, is the result of delinquency way back in the industry’s youth. Since then, according to the director of Dounreay, “The whole culture has changed quite radically. We want to be completely open and honest now.”

It’s hard to see why we should trust him. Last month, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency asked the courts to charge Dounreay with importing volatile radioactive waste without a proper licence. It is also being prosecuted for contaminating some of its workers. This summer, UKAEA’s claims that thousands of drums dumped off the Channel Islands contained no plutonium were exposed as shameless lies.

We have yet to see a radical change in the culture of any part of the industry, or, for that matter, in that of the government departments and the deeply compromised National Radiological Protection Board which shield it. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd has made much of its visitor centre and lavish website, but its public education programme could scarcely be better designed to reduce, rather than enhance, public understanding. Its disinclination to tell the whole story is hardly surprising. Sellafield’s radioactive discharges have been turning up as far away as Canada. Shellfish in the Irish Sea are 14 times more radioactive than the European Union’s consumption limits permit, and you can tell how close to Sellafield children live by the amount of plutonium in their teeth. When reports commissioned by the waste disposal company Nirex showed that its plans to bury waste at Sellafield were flawed and extremely dangerous, rather than abandon the plans, it chose to suppress the reports.

The nuclear industry has also lied to us about its costs. Last month, a team of economists revealed that the companies’ provisions for decommissioning their plants fall short by £30 billion. The missing money will have to be found by the taxpayer. If the industry guarded our lives as zealously as it guards the facts, we would have nothing to fear.

UKAEA’s advertised change of heart merits as much suspicion as any of its other public pronouncements. This incubus has parasitised us long enough. It is not just the dump at Dounreay which needs to be disposed of, but the entire poisoned industry.