G133: What Have We Done (8 page)

N
ot many people visit the Grey Croft stone circle in western Cumbria. The ten chest-high stones between the mountains of the Lake District and the waters of the Irish Sea have been there for five thousand years. And down the hill, across a field and over a small stream, lies Britain’s largest industrial site, the Sellafield nuclear complex.

Sellafield is Britain’s nuclear nightmare. It harbours the lethal remains of bomb-making, the accumulated radioactive waste from sixty years of nuclear electricity generation and the world’s largest stockpile of plutonium. There is no other place on earth containing so much radioactive material in so confined an area.

I visited the stones first, before walking the double line of high razor-wire fences that surround the works. I was soon stopped by a squad car of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, a dedicated armed force protecting nuclear installations. Nobody is taking any chances. The nuclear waste of Sellafield will remain dangerous for far longer than the Grey Croft stones have been here. The open-air ponds of radioactive sludge and corroded nuclear fuel, the tanks of hot liquid waste from nuclear reprocessing, the potentially explosive remains inside the sealed sarcophagus from a fire in 1957: all have radioactive half-lives measured in tens of thousands of years. A terrorist attack,
earthquake or cataclysmic accident at Sellafield could make a large area of northern England uninhabitable.

Having satisfied the nuclear police that I posed no threat, I walked down a quiet country lane to Ponsonby Church, part of an estate that William the Conqueror gave to the Ponsonby family over nine hundred years ago. Lambs cavorted round the churchyard in the bright sun, as they must have done every spring, for centuries. But the new landlord here is the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and the manor house nearby is occupied by nuclear-waste engineers. Inside the church, a notice warns that if the Sellafield siren blows, nobody should leave. The doors should be shut and news sought by tuning into a radio.

I had travelled here to reacquaint myself with the radiology and psychogeography of Sellafield and its western Cumbrian hinterland. Sellafield and I go back a long way. When I worked as an editor at
New Scientist
in the early 1980s, it was still known as Windscale, and its leaks, accidents and scandals made regular copy. Since then, the headlines have dried up. You may think that this is because the nuclear beast has been tamed – that new management methods and health and safety rules, brought in to replace Cold War paranoia and hastily invented engineering, might have made Cumbria safe – but Sellafield harbours a toxic legacy of waste that is more dangerous than ever, as many of the buildings, once shiny and new, are now fractured and leaking. Weeds grow from the cracks. Inside, I found that the engineers, in their macho way, are proud that they superintend the two most hazardous industrial buildings in Western Europe; that making the place safe will cost over 70 billion pounds; that it will take a century or more to do. My journey outside the fences, however, revealed a second, equally corrosive legacy – of duplicity, secrecy and plain lies. That legacy may be just as hard to clean.

F
rom its first days, Windscale was steeped in the subterfuge arising from a secret project to rescue Britain from humiliation in the days after the Second World War. British scientists had worked
with their American counterparts at Los Alamos in New Mexico to develop the atomic bomb. Then in 1946, wishing to keep the bomb to themselves as the Cold War developed, the US Congress banned American scientists from sharing nuclear secrets with their British colleagues. Outraged, Prime Minister Clement Attlee ordered the banished scientists – headed by Britain’s ‘man behind the mushroom cloud’, the diffident, state-educated mathematics prodigy William Penney – to start from scratch and build a British bomb.

Bankrupt Britain put vast resources into the project. The weapons were assembled at Aldermaston in Berkshire, while a site on the remote Cumbrian coastline was chosen to manufacture the plutonium. Two primitive nuclear reactors, known as the Windscale Piles, were built by the River Calder. Their thick concrete walls contained thousands of tonnes of graphite, honeycombed with horizontal channels to house slugs of uranium metal sheathed in aluminium cans.

Packed together, the uranium emitted sufficient neutrons to start a nuclear chain reaction, turning some of it into plutonium. Meanwhile, the graphite prevented the reactions from running out of control. The uranium slugs were then pushed out of the back of the pile into a giant, open-air pond to cool, before going to the reprocessing plant, where the fuel was dissolved in nitric acid to release the plutonium. The reactions inside the piles created huge amounts of waste heat, which future reactor designs would use to generate electricity. But these piles were intended only to manufacture plutonium. Air pumped through the graphite core took the heat up the two 120-metre chimneys, where filters captured any radioactive particles.

So far so good. Using what they remembered from Los Alamos, Penney’s scientists delivered the first plutonium to Aldermaston in early 1952. Two months later, the first British atomic bomb was detonated on a ship near the Montebello Islands off Western Australia. By then, however, the US had detonated a much bigger and more sophisticated weapon, the hydrogen bomb, whose design employed secrets no British scientists knew.

Penney’s team were given a new job: to make an H-bomb. That
proved much harder. But in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the new prime minister, Harold Macmillan, believed such a bomb was essential to rebuilding Britain’s global clout and bolstering relations with the US, especially atomic cooperation. Without such a device, a Cabinet paper in June 1957 argued, Britain would be ‘virtually knocked out as a nuclear power’.

When an H-bomb proved beyond Britain’s best atomic scientists, Macmillan led them to indulge in what Norman Dombey, the researcher who exposed the lie in 1992, would call a ‘thermonuclear bluff’. They hatched a secret plan to test a giant A-bomb, masquerading as an H-bomb. But that required much more plutonium. Windscale went flat out. Corners were cut. Safety was sacrificed. Remembering events much later for a BBC programme, John Dunworth of the nuclear research laboratory at Harwell, one of those who had warned of the dangers at the time, said: ‘They were running much too close to the precipice.’ The scene was set for the world’s first major nuclear accident.

I
n the summer of 1957, under intense pressure to manufacture more plutonium, operators kept postponing downtime needed to cleanse the piles of Wigner energy in the core. This energy built up as the bombardment of neutrons displaced atoms in the graphite. It could cause a fire unless it was released by operators shutting down the nuclear reactions and then gradually heating the reactor core.

The long-postponed Wigner release finally began on 9 October. Jittery operators, working without a manual and anxious to get the reactor back into production, added too much heat too quickly. One of the fuel cans burst and the uranium inside it released even more heat, igniting a fire that spread through the pile. The uranium was ablaze and before long radioactive smoke had overwhelmed the filter and began pouring out of the chimney.

There was panic. Managers press-ganged off-duty workers who were watching a film at the works cinema in nearby Seascale and gave them scaffolding poles to push jammed fuel cans out of their channels
and away from the burning pile. One young scientist, Morlais Harris, told me that he was sent to monitor equipment on top of the reactor, where managers trying to control the fire forgot about him for sixteen hours before bringing him down after the fire was put out. Workers in the know – there was no official information, and many had no idea of the risks – called their families living nearby and told them to flee.

With the fire still spreading, the pile’s managers decided to douse the fire with water. This was do or die. They knew that spraying water onto the burning, molten core risked causing an explosion. ‘Cumberland would have been finished. It would have been like Chernobyl,’ site foreman Cyril McManus told interviewers recently for an oral history of Sellafield. But the water worked. After three days, the fire was out.

The government asked Penney to report on how the fire had happened, but his findings of the chaotic management at Windscale were so damning that Macmillan recalled every copy. The report was only released to the public under the thirty-year rule in January 1988. Instead, Macmillan issued a statement that blamed the fire on an ‘error of judgement’ over the Wigner energy release by an unnamed rogue worker. No mention was made of the underlying cause – government demands for ever more plutonium. ‘He covered it up, plain and simple,’ Macmillan’s grandson and biographer, Lord Stockton, later told the BBC.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, radiologists monitoring what went up the pile chimney said the main risk to the public was radioactive iodine falling on Cumbrian pastures and getting into milk. Over a couple of weeks, two million litres of milk were collected from farms and poured down drains into the Irish Sea. Managers said this was ‘erring wildly on the cautious side’ against a ‘theoretical’ risk, but they were clearly worried. Secretly, in the weeks afterwards, they sent McManus and others as far away as Devon, collecting samples of soil and vegetation to check the spread of the fallout.

Decades later, it emerged that iodine was not the most dangerous component of the cloud. It also contained polonium, an element so
radioactive it glows blue in the dark, and though a handful of scientists were aware of this, it was hushed up. A few specks are enough to kill, as former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko discovered when someone dropped polonium in his tea in a London hotel in 2006.

Polonium was the essential trigger at the heart of the British bomb, and it was being produced in the Windscale Piles by irradiating bismuth. But this was top secret. The Americans no longer used polonium in their bombs, and revealing that Britain still did would have shown how backward British bomb-makers were. Because of this, its lethal presence in the cloud was never mentioned in any assessments of the radiological hazard from the fire at the time. A few British atomic scientists knew enough of polonium’s presence to mention it fleetingly in a paper presented to a UN technical conference the year after the fire, but the implications were apparently not understood by those conducting risk assessments, and the presence of polonium in the cloud was forgotten for thirty-five years.

Only in 1983 did environmental activist and Newcastle University librarian John Urquhart stumble on the long-forgotten reference and bring his findings to
New Scientist
. Our scoop was subsequently confirmed by government radiologists, who said they too had been kept in the dark. They calculated the likely death toll from the polonium at about seventy, making it probably the main cause of deaths from the cloud. Nobody has ever assessed the additional risk to workers trying to contain the fire.

Some may argue that the fire was a price worth paying. It forced the closure of the Windscale Piles, but they had by then produced enough plutonium for the successful test of a giant A-bomb masquerading as an H-bomb, which persuaded Congress to rescind the ban on cooperative nuclear research and to allow Eisenhower and Macmillan, by now close friends, to resume what is still known today as the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. Ever since the signing of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, British scientists have been able to access US bomb-making expertise and buy American bombs. ‘Our armed forces have never used entirely
British-designed weapons,’ Dombey told me. ‘In 1958, we built and tested H-bombs, but they were never put into service. They were too big.’ In truth, the purpose of the bluff was always more diplomatic than technical – to secure Britain’s place on the UN Security Council and in Washington as a nuclear power.

But the fire has scarred Windscale’s reputation ever since. The cover-up – and Macmillan’s decision to blame it on young operators who had risked their lives to prevent much worse – undermined faith in the project and in its management. The narrative of Windscale, and subsequently of Sellafield, as an alien, dangerous and duplicitous presence on the Cumbrian coast was set.

D
espite the fire, Windscale remained in business. In 1956, the Queen had opened new, more sophisticated reactors just metres from the piles. The Calder Hall reactors also initially manufactured plutonium for bombs, but their primary purpose was to generate electricity. The cooling gas – now carbon dioxide rather than air – was captured, and its heat was used to drive conventional power-station turbines. The reactors became the prototypes for a fleet of Magnox reactors across Britain. Nuclear energy, Britons were told in the 1960s, would be ‘too cheap to meter’. In 1971, the old quasimilitary UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was replaced at Windscale by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), whose task was to commercialise nuclear power.

It was a brave new world, but the culture of secrecy and cover-ups persisted. It created not just a climate of fear, but also a landscape of secrets. To chart its contours, I recently met Martin Forwood, who runs Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE). Soft-spoken and bearded, Forwood is a former soldier, policeman and government scientist. He took me on his ‘alternative tour’ of Sellafield’s hinterland.

We started on the banks of the River Esk near the hamlet of Newbiggin, about ten kilometres from Sellafield. Forwood got a Geiger counter out of the car and headed for the tidal salt marshes.
The counter began to click. There were radioactive particles beneath our feet. The surface mud showed three or four times the natural background level. Then, as he pointed his counter at mud a few inches down on the exposed riverbank, the clicking accelerated to a mad chatter at around thirty times the natural level.