Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  ALSO BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

  Selected Bibliography

  Nuclear Bibliography

  Social Bibliography

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  For Fred, James, and Joseph With thanks to Melissa Gordon

  While nations consent to put into any hands an uncontrollable power of mischief, they may expect to be thus served.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Introduction

  Perhaps the real subject of this book is the fact that the largest commercial producer of plutonium in the world, and the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world’s environment, is Great Britain—and that Americans know virtually nothing about a phenomenon that occurs, culturally speaking, so very close at hand. The primary producer of plutonium and pollution is a complex called Sellafield, on the Irish Sea in Cumbria, not far from William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. The variety of sheep raised in that picturesque region still reflects the preference of Beatrix Potter, miniaturist of a sweetly domesticated rural landscape. The lambs born in Cumbria are radioactive. This fact is ascribed to the effects of the Russian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, but Sellafield is so productive of contamination that there is no reason to look elsewhere for a source. Testing of lamb and mutton was only undertaken some months after Chernobyl, though the plant at Sellafield routinely releases plutonium, ruthenium, americium, cesium 137, radioactive iodine, and other toxins into the environment as part of its daily functioning. The fact that food had not been tested systematically in an area whose economy is based on the production of food as well as the production of plutonium is characteristic of British policy, wherever there is a potential impact of industrial practice on public health.

  It should be noted that the plant at Sellafield was built by the British government. It was developed and operated by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, and then given over to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a company wholly owned by the British government. It should be borne in mind that the plant receives waste and reprocesses plutonium for profit, to earn foreign money. Sellafield is at the center of an economic configuration of a kind as yet unfamiliar to Americans. It is a part of the electrical-generating industry because it absorbs the wastes produced in British reactors, transforming them, in part, into salable materials through reprocessing. It expedites the sale of British nuclear technology abroad by accepting wastes generated in other countries, the costs of engineering services and waste disposal lowered by the value of these reprocessed materials. It is a closed cycle (putting aside the fact that the public subsidizes it once in the price they pay for electricity and again because of its military role as supplier of plutonium for British bombs) in which each stage stimulates profitability in the others. To call a government-run industry highly profitable, when on the one hand it is the monopoly supplier of a very costly product, as electricity is in Britain, and on the other hand it is incalculably destructive of the public health, seems to cause no embarrassment to the plant’s defenders. The British nuclear industry creates leukemia in the young and hypothermia in the old, and yet it is profitable. Clearly bookkeeping is as expressive of cultural values as any other science.

  Sellafield has flourished in the care of Labour and Conservative governments alike for thirty-five years, during which time it has poured radioactive wastes into the sea through a pipeline specially constructed for that purpose, creating an underwater “lake” of wastes, including, according to the British government, one quarter ton of plutonium, which returns to shore in windborne spray and spume, and in the tides, and in fish and seaweed and flotsam, and which concentrates in inlets and estuaries.

  The plant is expanding. Wastes from European countries, notably West Germany, and from Japan, are accumulating there, while the British develop means of accommodating the pressing world need for nuclear waste disposal. Their solution to the problem amounts to extracting as much usable plutonium and uranium from the waste as they find practicable and flushing the rest into the sea or venting it through smokestacks into the air. There are waste silos, some of which leak uncontrollably. In an area called Driggs, near Sellafield, wastes are buried in shallow earth trenches. Until the practice was supposedly ended in 1983 by the refusal of the National Union of Seamen to man the ships, barrels of nuclear waste were dropped routinely into the Atlantic. In other words, Britain has not solved the problem of nuclear waste, has in fact greatly compounded it, in the course of producing plutonium in undivulged quantities.

  What happens to this plutonium once it is extracted no one says. We must depend on the wisdom and restraint of the British government to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Yet one arrives fairly promptly at the realization that the only prospect as alarming as that all this plutonium should fall into the hands of irresponsible or malicious people is that it should remain in British hands. The essential act of irresponsibility is, after all, to have produced it in the first place. And then the British are not especially fortunate. Sellafield itself has had about three hundred accidents, including a core fire in 1957 which was, before Chernobyl, the most serious accident to occur in a nuclear reactor. Sellafield was called Windscale originally, until so much notoriety attached itself to that name that it had to be jettisoned. That an accident-prone complex like this one should be the storage site for plutonium in quantity is blankly alarming.

  There are many useful lessons to be learned about the nature of contemporary history from the study of Sellafield. Most informed Americans believe that the release of plutonium on an important scale into the environment would entail disaster of world historical proportions. Yet every account of our present situation sees grand-scale plutonium contamination as a threatened consequence of the competition of the so-called superpowers. In other words, the account we make of present history is radically in error, not least in the matter of the importance of the United States and the Soviet Union in determining the fate of the earth. If plutonium deserves its reputation, then a nuclear war will simply accelerate the inevitable. Statesmanship in Moscow and Washington will merely postpone the inevitable. This is to say that decisions of the greatest consequence have been taken, while our savants and moralists looked resolutely in the wrong direction. We have pondered the Russian soul, and our own, and we have seen the darkness in them both as deviation from the human norm. Western Europe and especially Britain we have assumed to be mild with age, peripheralized by the drift of history. Yet any final reckoning would probably find Britain’s impact on the postwar world greatest of all nations. Fleets sail away, ideologies talk themselves to death, empires yield to cultural tectonics. But plutonium is everlasting, for human purposes, and it is irretrievably a part of the world environment, because the British have made a business of pumping it into a shallow sea through a pipeline a mile and a half long, and have prevented no one from fishing in the area, though the fish are radioactive, five thousand times more so than fish caught in the North Sea, though that is also contaminated. They have prevented no one from living or vacationing there, or growing and marketing food in a countryside affected by radioactive wind and rain. Plutonium from the plant carried by the sea has already been found in Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium.

  I am aware that the situation at Sellafield raises a great many questions as to how and why such a thing should have come about. But the fact of the plant’s existence and operation is not disputed—it
can be confirmed by anyone in America who cares to spend a few hours in a fairly good library looking at British publications. The mystery is not how a phenomenon of this importance can be concealed but how, being, as it were, a city on a hill, it has remained unknown to us for so many years.

  There are certain questions I have not attempted to answer. The first of these concerns the role of the American government in this enterprise. If it has no role, then it is virtually alone among the major Western governments, most of whom use the plant’s services. There is mention in some British sources of a barter arrangement in which between 1964 and 1971 the United States received Sellafield plutonium in exchange for nuclear materials produced in America. This in itself means little. The fact that Britain produces plutonium as part of its role as a nuclear weapons state is no secret, nor is it ever surprising to find ourselves and the British tinkering at these projects together. The question is whether the American government has encouraged the operation of Sellafield, an unaccountably foul enterprise, even by the debased standards by which such things are judged. I am troubled by the thought that the United States must have a satellite or two sensitive to concentrations of radioactivity, and that the contamination of the world’s hottest sea cannot have gone unremarked. The Soviet Union must also have means to detect radioactivity in significant quantity. And presumably it would be to their advantage in the battle for hearts and minds to point out to the people of Europe how they are being poisoned, especially if there is a significant American involvement. The silence in which Sellafield prospers is a little uncanny. It suggests interests are being served that are neither ideological nor national.

  The most plausible hypothesis, I suppose, is that individuals who do not feel any kind of loyalty to the future have been corrupted by the quantities of money involved. This is only speculation. But the currency that passes in nuclear transactions tends to be denominated in millions and billions, and the industry worldwide is protected by secrecy and by its significance in maintaining the prestige of governments and by its military significance, whether as licit or illicit supplier of fissile materials or as potential target. Only assume the usual human slovenliness and venality and an important degree of corruption will seem quite probable.

  The nuclear industry enjoys the respect generally accorded to science, because its workings are abstruse. Everyone knows that it is impossible to predict or to describe the impact of this industry on the planet, that it is persisted in despite its demonstrated potential for disaster, and that, if it were closed down tomorrow, even assuming everything goes well for the next score thousand years in controlling the virulent materials it will leave behind, its economic cost to future generations will utterly dwarf whatever value it has had for our own. Yet despite all this the nuclear enterprise is accorded sufficient respect to make the suggestion that its development might to some degree reflect ordinary corruption seem a little impolite. It is as if money and secrecy brought out the best in human nature, changing politicians and technicians into Carmelites.

  But Sellafield, if it existed in isolation, would be sufficient proof that the world’s interests have not been properly respected. As evidence of culpability, it is not a smoking gun so much as a hail of bullets.

  Objections are made to Sellafield’s operation by governments within Europe. Denmark and Ireland, whose small terrains are increasingly affected, protest vehemently in the European Parliament. Other countries join with them. But this is disingenuous, since these other countries—unlike Ireland and Denmark, who have no nuclear power plants—patronize Sellafield. They pay Britain to take on their waste disposal problems. Their indignation tends to obscure the simple fact that European wastes are poured into the European environment, day after day, as the result of those same methods they deplore, and that the operation of the plant is profitable because they pay Britain to transform wastes from these countries into reprocessed plutonium, and uranium, and all the varieties of contamination for which Sellafield is renowned. And they pay Britain to store wastes while new reprocessing facilities are built at the site, or until sea dumping, if it has been stopped, is resumed. Circumstances demonstrate that it is politically possible in Britain to do these things, flagrantly damaging as they are to the national and the world environment. Circumstances prove also that the superior environmental standards of other countries are shadow play, since toxins are turned over to Britain to be dispensed with by methods these same countries deplore so loudly, the consequences of which are already being felt by their own populations. The efficacy of respective European environmental movements can be established from the fact that Sellafield is in Britain, and that German, Italian, and Scandinavian wastes are at Sellafield and in the waters off the European coast.

  There is an analogue for Sellafield in the disposal industry that has developed in Britain for non-nuclear toxic wastes, which are shipped into the country and then disposed of in the variety of ways the laxity of law makes possible—left in municipal dumps or poured into the North Sea or buried on derelict land in poverty-stricken northern regions—40,000 tons of lethal waste being imported in 1986.1 What little fastidiousness is reflected in other countries’ hiring these services merely makes it profitable to the British government to leave its environment undefended. The arrangement creates an incentive for employing the crudest means of disposal—for which Europe and the world will suffer in due course.

  All this raises the question of the role of environmental groups. People in this country have felt for some time that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, as well as scientists’ organizations, were keeping watch over the greater environmental issues, at least to the extent of making them known to us. Sellafield is the world’s largest source of radioactive contamination. It is also the greatest commercial producer of plutonium in the world—a role disturbingly at odds with any notion of non-proliferation. It is the center of a worldwide traffic in toxic and explosive materials. And it is the site of the largest construction project in Europe, because it is expanding. The release of radiation from Three Mile Island is usually estimated at between fifteen and twenty-five curies of radioactive iodine. Many hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactivity have entered the environment each year through Sellafield’s pipeline and its stacks, in the course of the plant’s routine functioning. In other words, Three Mile Island was a modest event by the standards of Sellafield and, even if disaster had not been averted, would have made no comparable impact on the earth’s habitability.

  Yet, though Greenpeace is deeply involved with Sellafield in Britain, even to the extent of having supposedly placed a mole inside the plant, information about it in the United States is extremely limited and of poor quality. The plant is located in England’s largest national park, which includes the Lake District. Tourism is an enormous industry there. It seems to me indecent that people are not warned away from this uniquely contaminated environment.

  The British government cannot be expected to show foreigners a solicitude it does not show its own people. But the American government cannot be excused for allowing its nationals to be unknowingly exposed to pervasive contamination—for example, to breathe air in which concentrations of plutonium are sometimes higher than they are within this old, disreputable plutonium factory itself.

  Greenpeace, since it enjoys the goodwill and the financial support of a great many people in this country, surely owes them a reasonably accurate description of the state of the world, as well as information which could directly affect their own and their families’ well-being. If Greenpeace takes exception to the usual accounts of the lethal properties of plutonium—for example, that a particle invisible to the naked eye, if inhaled into the lung, will ultimately cause a cancer—then they should tell us so. If they adhere to the common view, then they should explain why they allow tourists to wander into an area where this misfortune is so liable to befall them.

  It seems to be the policy of Greenpeace to compartmentalize its activities, at least
to the extent of keeping Americans preoccupied with issues that arise within our borders—and with aquatic fauna, whose trials and troubles seem never to include ingestion of radioactive fish in the Irish Sea or the North Sea.

  If the decision to publicize environmental problems selectively is tactical, then it is past time for Greenpeace to admit that the approach has failed. The greatest source of radioactive pollution in the world is growing exuberantly, fed by an influx of yen that makes it Britain’s greatest earner of that potent currency.

  It is in fact difficult to imagine any strategy that could have produced a less desirable result. While the effect of relatively stringent environmental laws in Europe has been to siphon waste into Britain, Greenpeace chalks up triumphs of environmental consciousness without reference to the fact that the scene of contamination has merely shifted, not very far, and that a powerful economic reward has been provided for the recalcitrance of the British government in environmental matters. These tactics make it difficult for Sellafield’s foreign clients to use crude disposal methods at home, but do not put pressure on them to develop responsible methods, or indeed to accept responsibility for the environmental consequences of their own industries. Britain can bear the opprobrium of Europe and Europe can endure the malfeasances of Britain. The nuclear industry can enjoy the cheapest possible solution to the problems of waste—the costs of dumping are, you will recall, indemnified by the production of uranium and plutonium, the latter a valuable commodity for reasons that are never quite made clear.

  If information published by Greenpeace in Britain were published by Greenpeace in America, the system might not work so smoothly. It would be highly sensitive to reaction in this country manifested in reduced investment and tourism, a reduced enthusiasm for European products, an increased skepticism as to the disinterested wisdom of European governments, and perhaps a less reflexive confidence in the community of values which is always adduced to persuade us that in defending Europe—and especially Britain—we are only defending ourselves.