A Very British Coup (25 page)

The mill, which could not be seen from the road and was approached by a winding drive of grey stone chippings, was on the floor of a valley and overlooked on three sides by sloping bare hills which were green, grey or purple depending on the time of year or the disposition of the sun. The highest of the plateaux, Kinder Scout, was a favourite place in the summer for parties of campers and ramblers.

Despite its isolation the mill was never a silent place, what with the sheep on the hillside and the running water from the nearby stream. Only when the wind howled too loudly or the rain beat too hard upon the windows could the water not be heard. And every hour or so there was the rattle of a one-coach diesel railcar that ran along the floor of the valley. It was one of those lines that British Rail was always threatening to close, but never did.

Molly's husband, Michael Jarvis, was fifteen years older. Even by Molly's standards that was pushing it a bit. She had thought hard before accepting his persistent offers of marriage. He had two children by his first wife and she did not get on with them. He drove a Jensen, though that was neither here nor there. He was powerful and, if Molly was honest with herself, she did have a soft spot for powerful men. In the end she said “Yes” because it seemed less trouble than saying “No”. Off and on she had been going with Michael Jarvis for four years. Everyone in British Insulated knew. She did not want to devote the best years of her life to being someone's
mistress and then end up being dumped in favour of a woman younger and prettier.

She had not told Michael about the affair with Harry Perkins. It had only been possible because he had based himself in London to negotiate the reactor deal. Although she had told Perkins that she shared a flat in Kensington with another girl, she in fact lived with Jarvis in an apartment owned by British Insulated. On Thursday nights Jarvis usually returned to Manchester to deal with business at head office. He would stay the weekend in Manchester and always spent Sunday with his children. It was these weekly visits to Manchester that made Molly available for Harry Perkins at weekends.

She had never loved Harry Perkins though she was as fond of him as she had been of anyone. She had liked him for being different. She liked his sense of humour. She liked him because he was famous. She liked him because he was interesting. But she always knew there was no future in the affair. Every Sunday when she caught the tube to the Oval she wondered whether to tell him it was the end. As the tube sped under the river, and through Kennington, she would sit composing her opening lines. But when she arrived, she could not bring herself to do it. There was Harry as warm and witty and optimistic as ever. There was the Handel organ concerto on the stereo. The bottle of Côte du Rhône on the table. She knew that deep down Harry Perkins was a lonely man. She knew that behind his façade of self-assurance, behind his steely willpower and his crammed appointments diary, there was an area of emptiness which she filled. She could tell by the way he clung to her. By the way he closed his eyes so tightly when they made love. By the way he lay with his head on her breasts.

So when the time came she had not the heart to tell him. She had carried on seeing him right up to the end. Right up to the Saturday before the wedding. The nearer the day came, the harder it got to tell him. In the end she had written him a long letter explaining about Michael and going into all sorts of unnecessary detail about her feelings. Then she had torn up
the letter and substituted a simple statement of fact:
On Saturday I'm getting married so we'll have to call it a day. Please understand. Good luck. Molly
. She told herself that this was the sort of memorandum Cabinet ministers liked. Short and to the point.

Even so, she had not forgotten Harry Perkins. How could she? There he was in the newspapers every day. There he was every time she turned on the television. Not the Harry Perkins she knew. This was a much harder man, tough talking and belligerent. All the same, she felt a pang of guilt every time she saw him. She thought how much older he looked and wondered if the daily barrage of vilification was getting him down. She noticed too that the optimistic twinkle had disappeared from his eyes.

Molly kept her souvenirs of Perkins in a blue vanity case amid a pile of old boxes in the attic. They included that first note on official paper.
Lunch Sunday? Ring me at midnight
. And then the telephone number. Not even signed.

There was
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
with the message inscribed on the inside cover:
To a slightly Tory lady in the hope that she will see the light. Love, Harry
and then the date. There were several other notes, mainly re-arranging the time of their weekly rendezvous, one on ministry notepaper, a couple on House of Commons paper and the rest on blank scraps. There was also a cheque for £5.20 drawn on the account of Harold A. Perkins at the Co-operative Bank, Leman Street, London, E.1, in payment for shopping. Because he was famous she had decided the cheque was worth more to her uncashed. And that was it. Not a lot to show for a love affair that lasted more than a year. She kept her souvenirs hidden because she did not want Michael to know. He would have seen the dates and worked out for himself that she had two-timed him almost to the day of their marriage.

Perkins would have been pleased to know that she voted Labour in the election. Actually it was no big deal. Michael and most of the top management of British Insulated had probably voted Labour, if the truth were known. After all they owed their jobs to Perkins. Had he not fought so hard for
their reactor, British Insulated would have gone to the wall. Instead it had landed contracts to build four nuclear reactors in Britain with an option on two more. That in turn had led to orders from Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Thanks to Harry Perkins British Insulated had gone from strength to strength. And, who knows, they might one day have led the world, but for the disaster at Windermere.

The Windermere reactor was not simply a triumph of technology. It was also a triumph of politics. The splitting of the atom was as nothing compared with the five-year battle that raged between the Central Electricity Generating Board and the Save Windermere Society. There were public inquiries, High Court injunctions, parliamentary select committees and, when all else failed, sabotage.

The scientists argued that their nuclear power station was clean, safe and aesthetic. The Save Windermere Society said it was dirty, poisonous and ugly. The society argued that the Windermere reactor would drive away tourists, destroy wild life and one day perhaps incinerate Lancashire. The society had mobilised the National Trust, the Countryside Commission, Cumbria County Council and the Lake District National Park Authority, to say nothing of the Kendal Conservative Association and the Newby Bridge Amenity Society. Between them these organisations could count on more colonels, brigadiers and generals than the Duke of Wellington took to Waterloo. Yet in the end they met defeat. Whitehall decreed that the Windermere reactor should be built. Parliament and the judges endorsed it. And up it went.

But slowly. The building of it took four years longer than scheduled. Sugar was poured into the fuel tanks of the bulldozers that came to clear the site. There was an inter-union dispute over the lagging of pipes which led to a six-month shutdown. When the pipes were finally fitted many were found to have faulty welds. Then the boilers leaked. And then there was the little matter of the uranium that came off the rails somewhere between Liverpool docks and Preston.

There were times when British Insulated teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. There were times when the board seriously considered pulling out of reactors. There were times when Michael Jarvis wished he had been a schoolteacher, a postman or anything but the managing director of British Insulated. Yet in the end the Windermere reactor was built.

It occupied a shelf of land blasted out of the hills that run along the west shore of the lake. By no stretch of the imagination was it a thing of beauty except perhaps to nuclear engineers and architects. But neither was it dirty or poisonous. Not to begin with anyway.

The reactor dwelled in a huge windowless temple of sheer white concrete inlaid with aluminium. Inside the temple was crisscrossed by steel pipes and walkways all as spick and span as a hospital operating theatre. Down the centre a towering structure of yellow steel, not unlike a lighthouse, ran back and forth on rails feeding the god on enriched uranium. In all of this the intervention of human beings seemed irrelevant.

The god itself was encased in a concrete holy of holies seventy feet high and twelve feet thick and lined with steel, capable, or so it was said, of enduring heat at temperatures of up to seven hundred degrees centigrade and pressure of six hundred pounds per square inch.

The uranium pellets on which the god was fed were passed to it through the roof of the concrete chamber. The great heat given off by the uranium was blasted by carbon dioxide into water boilers which produced steam, which drove turbines which in turn produced electricity. That at least was the theory. And so it was in practice, until that fateful day in May when the Windermere reactor went out of control and almost took out Liverpool.

Jerry Turnbull was in charge of the control room when the temperature gauges started to rise. “Bloody gauge is playing up again,” he muttered, hammering the glass panel with his fist. The needle on the gauge did not move.

Phil Prescott, control assistant, came and stood behind Turnbull. He was yawning. It was the first hour of the night
shift. “No sign of the red light.” He gestured towards the panel of lights which came on automatically in the event of an equipment failure. “Must be the gauge.”

Turnbull hammered on the gauge again. Still it didn't move. He was not unduly worried. There had been two false alarms in the ten days since Windermere had been operating at full capacity and both had been traced to faulty wiring in the instrument panel. “Marvellous, isn't it?” said Prescott. “We can split the atom, but we can't wire a bloody circuit.”

Turnbull picked up a phone and dialled the instrument maintenance engineers. There was no answer. “Another fucking tea break,” he said loudly and slammed the phone down. Opening the log book he wrote the following entry: “2130, reactor coolant temperature gauge reading too high. Rang instrument maintenance. No reply.” At least my arse is covered, he thought as he closed the log.

Jerry Turnbull had risen about as far as he was going to get in the hierarchy of the power industry. Even now he was working above his grade. The regular nightshift controller had taken sick two days ago and Turnbull was filling in. He was forty-nine years old and bitter. He worked nightshifts because his wife had left him and because nights were quieter. “Mr Turnbull likes a quiet life,” his annual report had said. And it was true.

Unfortunately for Mr Turnbull, however, tonight was not going to be quiet.

He was dozing lightly when somehow his eye came to rest on the meter that measured radiation in the reactor hall. It was reading two hundred and fifty millirems per hour. He came to with a jolt. Carbon dioxide was leaking.

Turnbull looked at his watch; it was 0215. The reactor temperature gauge was still creeping up although there was no sign of a red light. He looked around for Prescott, but Prescott had gone for an early breakfast.

Trembling slightly Turnbull switched on the video scanner that monitored the pipes carrying the carbon dioxide into the reactor. The camera ran along the length of the pipes, hovering over the welds. There was no sight of a leak. He looked
again at the radiation meter. It had gone up another twenty millirems.

Next, he turned on the scanner that monitored the pipes taking the steam out of the reactor to the generator. He scanned them once, twice. Turnbull was panicking now. He had worked seventeen years in nuclear power stations without once being near the scene of an accident. Now for the first time he found himself in sole charge.

He rang the canteen. Where the hell was Prescott? Gone down to the lakeside for a smoke. He rang instrument maintenance. The bastards still were not answering.

Even at this point, so the manuals assure us, there is no cause for alarm. All the reactor components essential to its safe functioning are duplicated. If the pumps which bring the coolant gas into the reactor fail, there are duplicates waiting to take over. If one of the pipes bringing the coolant into the reactors or taking the steam away should leak, there are others which will take the strain.

If all else fails, so the text book says, the reactor will automatically shut itself down. But none of this happened at Windermere that night.

By the time a nearly hysterical Turnbull got the general manager out of bed the meter reading for radiation in the reactor hall had risen to four hundred millirems an hour, ten times the permitted level.

Engineers in protective clothing were inside the hall searching for the source of the leak. The temperature gauge had reached seven hundred degrees but there was no sight of an automatic shutdown. When the general manager appeared on the scene around 0545 he found Prescott and Turnbull arguing furiously. Prescott wanted the reactor shut down. Turnbull was shouting that he was not going to be the man who shut down the Windermere reactor.

By the time the dayshift came on duty the radiation level in the reactor hall was over six hundred millirems. Medical checks on the engineers who had been inside the hall showed they were seriously contaminated. The general manager immediately
ordered a shutdown of the reactor but some of the control rods appeared to have warped, making a complete shutdown impossible. Inside the reactor the uranium was melting. In the reactor hall automatic sprays had been activated, but they were insufficient to cope with the huge quantities of radioactive carbon dioxide now leaking from the reactor.

Tests in the atmosphere outside the reactor building showed no significant radiation leakage, but it was clearly only a question of time. The police were asked to stand by to evacuate everyone within a five mile radius. At 0800 Downing Street came on the line. The Prime Minister wished to be kept informed.