G133: What Have We Done (9 page)

The buried mud was seriously radioactive. ‘Livestock graze here,’ Forwood said. Fishermen dig for bait; people pick samphire, a local culinary delicacy; and a few metres away the Cumbria Coastal Way offers a shortcut through the mud at low tide. But there were no warning signs. ‘There could be particles of plutonium and americium on my boots,’ he said as we returned to the car. In theory, his boots should probably have gone for burial in the concrete-lined trenches for low-level radioactive waste at Sellafield’s dump at nearby Drigg. ‘But you get similar readings all along the coast here,’ Forwood said. ‘You can’t remove the whole of the Cumbrian shoreline.’

In 2005, Forwood’s CORE colleagues campaigning against Italian nuclear waste coming to Sellafield decided to bake a Cumbrian pizza topped with Esk mud and samphire. They handed it to the economic consul at the Italian embassy in London, with a warning note. He called in the Environment Agency, which took the radioactive pizza to the atomic labs at Harwell in Oxfordshire where it was quarantined for eight years before being interred at Drigg in 2013.

Most of the radioactive particles in the mud come, of course, from Sellafield. They had been discharged down the works’ two-kilometre pipeline into the Irish Sea. Marjorie Higham, a Sellafield scientist in the early days, told the oral-history project that her managers assured her that ‘the plutonium [would] adhere to the mud at the bottom of the sea in perpetuity. But of course it didn’t. It moves around.’ Some of it washes back on the tides that scour the coast. It turns up on beaches and gets trapped in the silt.

Routine discharges down the pipe are legal, but the oral history is full of stories about unwanted and highly radioactive liquids being secretly poured down the pipe. Occasionally the perpetrators get caught. Shortly after midnight in November 1983, half a tonne of
reprocessing solvent went into the Irish Sea. This illegal discharge created a radioactive slick that floated ashore. Some Greenpeace activists happened to be diving close to the outlet at the time, devising plans to block it, and they came to the surface with their Geiger counters in overdrive. The discharge, which might otherwise have gone unnoticed, became front-page news and the local beaches were closed for six months. BNFL ended up with a court conviction and a £10,000 fine.

The lower levels of radioactivity that Forwood’s Geiger counter finds in recently deposited surface mud show that the pipeline’s radioactive discharges are generally a lot less than they once were. But the higher levels below the surface reveal that past pollution hasn’t gone away.

How dangerous is this? A cluster of cases of leukaemia among children living around Sellafield in the 1970s and 80s raised alarms that have never subsided. First revealed by a Yorkshire TV documentary in 1983, the cluster was later confirmed by government epidemiologists, who found leukaemia rates fourteen times the national average. Alan Postlethwaite, a local vicar when the scare was at its height, told the Sellafield oral-history project that ‘within quite a short period of time, I conducted funerals of three children who died of leukaemia’. Statisticians had told him to ‘expect one in twenty years, and we’d had three in twelve months . . . That put the frighteners on us.’

BNFL blamed the cluster on outside workers bringing a mystery virus to a previously isolated community. That is plausible, though no virus has ever been identified. A major study funded by BNFL in 2002 found that the children of Sellafield workers who had been exposed to radiation in the plant’s early years were twice as likely as the national average to develop leukaemia.

The cluster seems to have disappeared more recently. But fears run deep. When one couple living in a house overlooking the Esk Estuary tested the contents of their vacuum cleaner, they found plutonium, americium and caesium levels thousands of times higher
than natural background levels. And a culture of cover-ups breeds fear and anger, which often gets directed against those who upset the status quo. When the couple brought a case against BNFL for damages, locals stopped visiting the village post office they ran, and someone superglued their front door shut. They sold up and left the area.

Forwood and I stopped at a guest house on a cliff outside Seascale. In the house next door, he told me, two sisters, Jane and Barrie Robinson, ran a bird sanctuary in the garden until a test in 1998 revealed that many of the birds were dangerously radioactive. It turned out the birds often roosted in contaminated buildings at Sellafield and may have fed on insects living around its open-air fuel storage ponds. Soon after, the authorities put 1,500 radioactive bird corpses into lead canisters for burial at Drigg, along with topsoil, garden plants and even the sisters’ garden gnomes.

S
ellafield has a history of showing a cavalier attitude to its neighbours. A scientist at the works, Frank Leslie, turned whistle-blower after the 1957 fire and told the
Manchester Guardian
about a reckless safety culture in which regular discharges of radioactivity into the air over Cumbria had been hushed up – something BNFL finally admitted in 1986. Similarly in the early days, highly radioactive junk was put into the Drigg trenches as casually as if it were household trash going into a municipal dump.

The safety culture was no better inside the plant. A few weeks after the 1983 beach contamination, it emerged that the plant laundry’s managers had adjusted alarms meant to alert staff to radioactivity on overalls to make sure they ‘did not go off too often’. And then a broken valve in the reprocessing works released a plutonium mist that exposed eleven workers to serious contamination. Around that time, says McManus, workers often accumulated so much radiation in their bodies that they were banned from working in contaminated areas for the rest of their days. He was among those who became, as he puts it, ‘radiation lepers’.

For many years, Sellafield ran a secret programme of autopsies on former workers to check for radioactivity. I stumbled on this one day in 1986, when I was leafing through the journal of the government’s National Radiological Protection Board. The board’s medical researcher Don Popplewell described how the plutonium in the lungs and lymph nodes of Cumbrian corpses were at much higher levels than those in corpses in the rest of the country. The findings were reported without discussing the means employed to get them which were, as Don Popplewell told me, technically illegal. Analysing corpses for ‘scientific’ reasons, rather than to ascertain the cause of death, was common practice at the time. In a handful of former Sellafield workers the plutonium levels were hundreds, and in one case thousands, of times higher than normal. When I called Popplewell he told me that Sellafield’s chief medical officer, Geoffrey Schofield, had analysed more than fifty corpses of former workers and found yet higher levels. All this was done even though, as I wrote in
New Scientist
, it was ‘strictly illegal to examine autopsy tissue except to ascertain the cause of death’.

My article sank without a trace until twenty years later when, after an unconnected scandal over illegal autopsies on children in Liverpool, lawyers turned it up. They raised a stink and an inquiry was held into the Sellafield autopsies. The government duly issued an apology in 2010, and Schofield was disgraced (they even took his name off the front of a building on a Cumbrian science park), but strangely the staggering contamination of Sellafield workers found by Schofield and Popplewell has been quietly forgotten.

M
ost people I spoke to during my journeys around Sellafield told me that whatever the worries about historical environmental contamination, the real hazards from the works lie inside the fences, and they are not going away. So I arranged a tour.

The most important buildings on the site are the two vast reprocessing complexes. Reprocessing spent fuel from reactors, mostly from external sources but also its own, has been Sellafield’s
raison d’être
since it opened. In the old days, it was done to extract the plutonium necessary to make bombs, and more recently the output has been earmarked for the manufacture of new fuel to be put back into reactors. This idea of recycling nuclear fuel, thus optimising energy production, has always been the dream of nuclear engineers.

The spent fuel comes to Sellafield from distant nuclear power stations by train in crash-proof flasks, which are placed into cooling ponds drenched in millions of litres of water taken each day from a lake inside the Lake District National Park. The fuel is then dissolved in nitric acid to separate out the potentially reusable elements. Finally, these valuable products are put into store, while the hot, acidic and extremely radioactive ‘high-level liquid waste’ is collected in giant stainless-steel tanks, each twice the size of a large shipping container, ready to be concentrated in evaporators and then sealed in glass for eventual burial, a process called vitrification.

Two plants do all this. Both have been hit by repeated shutdowns and backlogs. The Magnox Reprocessing Plant takes spent fuel from the country’s ageing Magnox reactors, which are now mostly closed, and spent Magnox fuel needs to be reprocessed within a year. If it is left too long in cooling ponds, the fuel rods corrode, releasing radioactive material into the water. This has happened in the past, most dramatically during the coal miners’ strikes of the early 1970s, when nuclear power stations were run as hard as possible to keep the lights on, and Sellafield was overwhelmed with spent fuel. It happened again during a six-week strike at Sellafield itself in 1977, which shut down all reprocessing. The resulting mess of unprocessed spent fuel is a continuing problem that will require a multi-billion-dollar clean-up operation to solve.

A second plant, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP), handles so-called oxide fuels from Britain’s later generation of advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) and the pressurised water reactors more common worldwide. THORP was Sellafield’s great hope in the days of BNFL, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The company wanted Sellafield to become the world centre
for reprocessing. It would take spent fuel from around the world and convert it into new fuel, generating huge revenues for the government.

But from the day it opened in 1994, THORP’s commercial rationale has evaporated. Enthusiasm for nuclear power has waned and with it demand for the new fuel. What’s more, unlike spent Magnox fuel, the modern feedstock for THORP can be stored for decades without deteriorating, so the plant’s value as a waste-disposal facility has been minimal. Since it opened for business in 1994, the intended big moneymaker has become what Harold Bolter, BNFL’s PR man during the inquiry and company secretary when it was being built, later called ‘a huge financial drain on the nation’.

The plant has continued to work, though never reliably. Constant stops and starts have created backlogs of spent fuel in the cooling ponds, while delays in investing in the evaporation and vitrification plant have led to a build-up of high-level liquid waste. According to Gordon Thompson of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in the US, the tanks of waste contain many times more radioactive caesium than was released across Europe during the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986. A worst-case accident at Sellafield could release 90 per cent of it, he says.

The prospects of such a disaster may be remote, but it could happen swiftly if the tanks were breached by an act of terrorism or an earthquake, or if the cooling coils failed. According to a Royal Commission report on Britain’s nuclear industry as long ago as 1976, a cooling failure would ‘cause the solution to boil dry and the heat generated would then disseminate volatile materials to the atmosphere and cause widespread contamination’. If that happened, says Thompson, ‘a large area of land could be rendered unusable for a period of decades. Neighbouring countries could be significantly affected.’ He estimates there would be three thousand cancer deaths.

Such an event has long been of concern to nuclear regulators. In 2001, the Health and Safety Executive ordered Sellafield to cut stocks of the liquid waste from 1,575 cubic metres to no more than 200 cubic metres by 2015, either by speeding up evaporation and
vitrification or by halting reprocessing. But in January of this year, as the target date arrived and the last-reported stockpile still stood at 900 cubic metres, the HSE’s successor, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, abandoned the target.

It is hard to see a case for such lenience. Post-9/11, the possibility of a terrorist attack on Sellafield must have increased, and a reassessment of seismic risks, made after the earthquake that wrecked Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulted in the government extending the zone around Sellafield covered by evacuation plans from two to six kilometres earlier this year.

But the new regulator has decided that operational convenience takes priority. The target became a problem for Sellafield’s managers because of continuing gridlock in handling the liquid waste: a new £640 million evaporator promised for completion in 2010 is still more than a year off, and the plant that encapsulates the liquid into glass has suffered a series of shutdowns. Rather than halting reprocessing, the regulator has decided to let the radioactive build-up continue.

T
his is typical. Sellafield has a lamentable history of management failures that create backlogs of waste and allows them to accumulate in unsafe conditions. The ‘legacy problem’, as managers call it, became so great that in 2005 the government replaced the bankrupt ‘commercial’ BNFL with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), whose top priority is to work out how to shut Sellafield down and make the site safe for future generations – something even optimists believe will take upwards of a century.

On my tour of the works, my NDA hosts were keen to show me their highest-profile decommission to date. I watched as robots scooped up the last remains from the floor of the prototype Windscale AGR reactor, leaving behind its iconic golf-ball exterior. Much of the waste has gone into 120 concrete boxes, each two metres high, stacked in a store close by. The boxes are so safe that I took up their offer to go and touch them. This technical success has proved
expensive, however. The dismantling of the Windscale AGR reactor, which was intended to take six years, ended up taking twenty years and costing £111 million.