GOING FROM RAD TO WORSE

This autumn, legal history will be made when two Cumbrian hill

farmers sue British Nuclear Fuels for damages. Alexandra Artley

reports on the gathering Green storm in Lakeland

FROM the affected 18th-century traveller looking at 'imperfect' Nature through an anther-tinted Claude glass, to the modern fell-walker who can usually rely on a rescue helicopter when the Sublime gets out of hand, people who take pleasure in looking at landscape like the fact that in Britain the sea is never very far away. Delight in the Conjunction of countryside and coast in Cumberland naturally leaps from The Pre- lude:

The sea was laughing at a distance; all The solid mountains were as bright as clouds.

Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn.

Wordsworth (born at Cockermouth) saw his county whole — coast and rural hinterland were one. Later, when steel-making arrived on the coast, local people Still found in the Irish Sea a compensatory beauty.

In recent years, however, Cumbrians have begun to look at their county in a new, disturbing way. The coast is becoming a stigmatised region, an uneasy grey place perhaps to be avoided, Whereas inland, the fells and lakes are supposed 'safe'. After nearly 40 years of Silent and invisible radioactive emissions from the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Britain is witnessing for the first time the birth of what is now called in the United States 'a contaminated commun- ity'.

Sellafield (also known as Windscale) began reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from both military and civil nuclear reactors at the start of Britain's nuclear weapons Programme in the early 1950s. Discharges of radioactive waste into the environment (both sea and air) have been usually deliberate but, in the case of the uranium fire on 10 October 1957, massively accidental. Even though radioactive dis- charges into the sea were reduced in 1976. Britain still has the distinction of operating one of the world's largest nuclear polluters and the Irish Sea is widely regarded as the most radioactively contaminated sea on earth.

So far, the authorities at Sellafield (first the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Au- thority and now British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) have never accepted any legal claim from members of the public who had no direct connection with the plant. But in July 1984, the Black Report confirmed York- shire Television's allegations that child- hood leukaemia rates in the Cumbrian village of Seascale were more than ten times the national average. It concluded, 'Radiation is the only environmental cause of leukaemia in children within the limits of present knowledge' (para 2.46). In July 1988 the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (Comare) also said there is a link of some kind between nuclear reprocessing plants at Sellafield and Dounreay and the high

levels of childhood leukaemia in those areas. Very recently, three or four cases of childhood leukaemia have appeared close together inland, in what is now known unofficially as the 'Ambleside cluster'.

THE hired car suddenly seemed to tilt at an angle of 45 degrees as we drove up Hardknott Pass to visit the Merlins, whose farmhouse commands one of the most spectacular views in England. My driver was a young Green man from Ulverston and, unable to resist the landscape, we stopped and scrambled to the top of a ridge to look ('the sky seemed not a sky of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds!').

A forceful mountain stream (or ghyll) flows across the path to the farm. In a small field full of ewes, lambs and clumps of daffodils we found Mrs Merlin hanging out washing. Beyond the flapping clothes Bow Fell rose like a wall.

In the Seventies the Merlins had run the post office in Ravenglass and occupied a large gabled Victorian house whose ter- raced front garden steps down directly to the shingled beach of the Ravenglass estu- ary. In 1977 the National Radological Protection Board asked if it could put an air-sampling machine in the Merlins' gar- den. 'Our eldest son was crawling then and I thought, if this is going on outdoors, what's coming in?' Mrs Merlin decided to have the contents of her hoover bag tested and, passing through intermediaries, it eventually reached Professor Edward Rad- ford in Pittsburgh, a US government advis- er on radiation. Some years later, the Merlins got word from Professor Radford that parents in Ravenglass had cause for concern because the house dust contained plutonium. 'How many housewives can readily explain what plutonium is? But we now had a second child, I had been pregnant in the house and the situation wasn't very good.'

Christopher and Christine Merlin knew nothing about the nuclear industry but they began to educate themselves. 'The more we read, the more we became aware of the horror of the situation for the children. I felt even hoovering the house was a dilem- ma because it sucks in big particles of dust but throws out fine ones.' She felt it was merely keeping contamination on the move. In what is now a recognised pattern in the United States, they began to feel uneasy with their neighbours because 'a lot of people who worked at the plant lived in the village. The mothers didn't know what to do. Their children were at risk but they were worried about their husbands' jobs.'

When trying to sell the house, the Merlins were advised by their solicitors that unless potential buyers were told of the contamination, they would be liable for 'latent defects'. Unfortunately, they only owed 0,000 on the mortgage. 'If we had then had a massive mortgage, we would just have thrown the keys at the building society.' Desperate to get `to the top of a mountain' the Merlins took out a bridging loan. In 1984 when the bank was about to foreclose, they auctioned the Ravenglass house for anything they could get. It was bought by a BNFL worker for half the estate agent's valuation and he and his family stayed in it for six months. After taking on sheep-farming (while sup- plementing their income with a small light- engineering business) the Merlins were hit by fall-out from the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986 and movement of their stock is still restricted by the Ministry of Agricul- ture. Whether it operates in East or West, they have not a good word to say for the nuclear industry.

The plight of Cumbrians is not, unfortu- nately, unique. In Contaminated Corn- munities (Westview Press, Boulder, Col- orado, and London, 1988) a leading Amer- ican environmentalist, Michael Edelstein, has produced the-first important study of what is becoming a commonplace of Amer- ican daily life — the subversion of entire neighbourhoods by 'gradual and in- cremental' toxic or radioactive pollution, via water and air. The unsettling thing about such man-made disasters is that the affected community can never see or sense the gradual build-up of the threat. It becomes apparent to ordinary people only when the deteriorating local ecology erupts in a human health crisis. Michael Edelstein points out that in Western post-war demo- cracies people have hitherto expected to have complete control over their persons, property and environment. Loss of such control represents a new technological tyranny and is opening a moral debate unique to our age as to why some neigh- bourhoods should be expected to bear disproportionate health hazards on behalf of society as a whole.

Kendal mint cake, fell-walking equip- ment, chunky knitwear, family hotels, literary tourism and big helpings of good plain food are the traditional strengths of the Lakeland tourist industry. To people who earn their living in this way, the fells seemed to cut off the nuclear industrial blight of the coast from the altar of English Romanticism. But the subversion of com- munities by hazardous industries now appears to be financial too. Recently, I spoke to a professional man in his thirties who is at the hub of traditional Lakelands tourism. He has noted among traders in the region a growing unease at what is called the 'seigneurial' impact of Sellafield outside its industrial and agricultural land holdings (BNFL owns 1,000 acres of agri- cultural land immediately around the Sella- field plant). He feels that as Sellafield's poor environmental and managerial record since the 1950s emerges in greater detail to public view, BNFL has begun in the Eighties to put vast sums of public money into 'respectable' local institutions which may improve its corporate image but which taint traditional Lakeland activities by association.

According to figures from its own media information department, BNFL seems to have given away extraordinary sums of money in recent years. In 1985, for exam- ple, BNFL gave L31/2 million to enable English Heritage and Copeland Borough Council to restore a group of Georgian houses in Whitehaven; million towards a running track and sports pitch at Hens- ingham, Whitehaven and has agreed joint- ly with the Cumbrian Tourist Board (of which Lord Whitelaw, who lives at Millom, is chairman) to provide £250,000 over five years towards tourist facilities at Birdos- wald (a fort on Hadrian's Wall). On a much smaller scale, but noted with misgiv- ings in the area, is the fact that BNFL persuaded Mountain Goat, a tourist mini- bus service in the Lake District to modify its route over Hardknott Pass (which runs down to the Eskdale light railway at Ravenglass, known as 'The Ratty') to take in Sellafield Visitors Centre. This alone was built at a cost of £.5.7 million and a million has been spent on national adver- tising since 1988.

The man I spoke to does not claim to represent traders in the Lake District, but he feels that in the past 'we tried to provide a good product based on tradition and with some integrity behind it'. Following the Black Report, the recent suggestions of mismanagement of the construction of Thorp (a new reprocessing plant at Sella- field which is already £1.2 billion over budget and five years late) and the new proposal to build an international nuclear waste dump either under Sellafield or the Irish Sea, he is filled with disgust 'that theY are now part of the happy fold of tourist attractions'. Corporate philanthropy on a scale to make Joseph Rowntree blink would be laudable if past and present management boards at Sellafield had been equally open-handed with their own ern- ployees maimed in the course of their work. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true.

The most dramatic case is that of Arthur Wilson, an instrument technician who, aged 32, looked through a gag-port into Plutonium Pile No 1 and witnessed the flames which signalled the beginning of the Windscale Disaster. After the accident he began to get tingling sensations in his legs and found difficulty in walking. The 1957 owners of the plant, (the United Kingdom Energy Authority) refused to recognise that his illness, which local doctors could not diagnose, had anything to do with the plant. Unable to work, he was 'retired early' at the age of 38 with a £400 superannuation cheque and not even a commendation for his efforts on that night. Arthur Wilson is now 64 and recently had to spend the last of his savings on an electric wheelchair, having never received any help from the trade unions at Sellafield nor the Sellafield Charity Fund. It was only When a local environmental group, Cum- brians Opposed to a Radioactive Environ- ment (Core) founded a Radiation- Compensation Support Fund in 1987 (on the 30th anniversary of the Windscale Disaster) that Arthur Wilson's case was taken up for the first time. Chaired by Jean McSorley, Core is now becoming national- ly recognised as the best-informed lay body on the effects of radioactivity on the environment. Its evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on the En- vironment 1984-85 was warmly com- mended.

The TUC line that nuclear trade union- ists 'have an independent voice' and 're- main vigilant' is rather belied by the Progress that has been made at Sellafield in recognising the claims of injured em- Ployees. Recently I spoke to Nick Johnson, Secretary of the NCNI (a group of unions called the National Campaign for the Nuclear Industry). He is a nice man with a Warm lilting voice, but he did not find it Odd that the NCNI took until 1986 to agree With management a 'mortality scheme' in Which 'you had to be dead first' and until 1988 'a morbidity scheme if the worker got something. They don't say you have been damaged by radiation — there's only a Possibility you have been.' Sellafield was Clearly developed as a site because of high unemployment in the region. 'Recently there were 30 vacancies at Sellafield. We had 3-4,000 people applying for the jobs and 300-400 of them were interviewed.' Having to choose between earning a living and the health of yourself and your chil- dren is becoming a matter of civil rights. The Labour Party itself now seems content that there should exist in the north-west a nuclear-industry race of Nibelungen. Sellafield Visitors Centre is a large, light Post-modern building set high on a mound, With the nuclear works themselves tactfully tucked away. Inside it is an adman's Crystal Palace. About six other visitors were there on the morning I went round and we were wafted along by smiling nuclear-industry hostesses dressed in British-Airways style navy-blue suits, white blouses and red silk jabots. Informa- tion men in grey suits constantly thank you for no particular reason. Across acres of carpet lies a large dark room rather like a cinema, except there arc no seats and you stand divided into rows by tubular metal supports. To sudden bursts Of richly powerful quadrophonic music a vast screen opens and the word 'Electricity' aPpears in yellow. Wagnerian explosions then accompany pictures of the seething sun (a bit primitive), the wind (brrr), the bniling core of the earth (messy) and coal Mining (apparently a Sixties occupation). Anxious tingling electronic music then introduces nuclear power — the great Miracle which keeps Manhattan twinkling

and families in Croydon joyously boiling kettles. It is very alarming when two more large screens unexpectedly open contain- ing illusory 'live' heads of a man and a woman. Jill looks across the room at Jack

and asks sweetly, 'What exactly is a nuclear

reactor?' Jack, who looks very like John Moore, fixes you firmly with his eyes and goes on to explain. The trouble with nuclear physics is that, unlike steam pow- er, it is actually very boring. Even when I was standing inside a large-scale model of a nuclear reactor full of orange lights and moving grey rods, Jack and Jill had their work cut out. After looking at pots of Sellafield marmalade and gooseberry jam done up with red gingham mob caps, I left.

One striking feature of the Sellafield Visitors' Centre is the misleading nature of the display. The emphasis is almost totally on energy as if military uses were entirely unconnected. On a huge wall chart divided into perhaps 30 different panels full of medical staff, one tiny mushroom cloud falls under the general heading, 'Miscel- laneous Other Uses'. A fully rounded museum devoted to the nuclear industry, might be no bad thing, but it would deal candidly with questions of pollution, waste disposal and the injuries and genetic dis- orders of people and animals exposed to various levels of radiation during peace and war.

Despite the expensive efforts of PR men, the nuclear industry is, in fact, visually stuck firmly in the Fifties. As at the Brussels Atomium, the very image of an atomic cluster symbolises the Festival of Britain and spindly furniture with coloured plastic balls for feet. Historians of the nuclear industry can also see the same Modernist urge towards mass experimenta- tion in postwar physics that has been rejected in postwar town-planning and architectural design. Here, for example, is the biologist C.D. Darlington addressing a conference on the biological hazards of atomic energy at Oxford in 1950:

'It's all over, Harold. Emotional blackmail will not rekindle the spent flame of my passion.' Summing up, a uniform irradiation of the whole human species, sufficient to reduce the actual rate of reproduction. might now be regarded, if it were practicable. as not by any means disadvantageous.

When the first head of Health and Physics Operations at Windscale, John Dunster, began to discharge radioactive material into the Irish Sea it was as part of a scientific experiment. Today, decades later, Mr Dunster continues his involve- ment, sitting on the International Commis- sion on Radiological Protection. Only re- cently he retired from the National Radiological Protection Board.

Seascale is a small grey village with a shingle beach whose shells, sand, coloured stones and rock pools were once nature's gift to the bright intent eye of childhood. Before the Black Report in 1984 this beach was a natural playground after school. But now, as the local GP, Barry Walker remarked, 'Even my neighbours who are nuclear industry managers, won't let their children play there.'

In most coastal regions a stranger look- ing at the sea is commonplace, but here it creates anxiety and curiosity. Old people in the area, knowing that much is wrong, come up to strangers to reassure them that because they themselves are long-lived, everything will be all right. When I told a timorous old man who approached me that he looked well and young, he embraced me on the shore like a daughter. I could not explain to him that from my reading it seems that radioactivity principally affects those in the womb, people in their forma- tive years and future generations ('cross- generational effects'). He had begun his life beside the Irish Sea as a child in poverty, but in the first half of the century at least the air and sea were pure.

Anxiety about childhood leukaemia is now affecting people inland in Cumberland as well as those on the coast. Recently. I spoke to a man high in the Lake District whose young child died of leukaemia last September. Set apart by the suffering he had witnessed in a Manchester hospital, he noticed that friends of the family seemed to sense relief on their own account. They felt, he thought, that because such a rare disease 'has happened to someone we know, it will not happen to us'. His child was once like that described in the poem, 'Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old':

Loving she is, and tractable, though wild: And Innocence hath privilege in her To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes.

(Shortly before her fourth birthday, Catherine Wordsworth died too.) This man is sceptical of legal claims against the nuclear industry because 'in a democracy, no government could admit that its energy policy gives people cancer'. In two years' time, 30 families who believe their chil- dren's leukaemia was caused by British Nuclear Fuels, will be travelling 300 miles to London to put energy and democracy to the test.