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Friday, November 18, 2011

Marilynne Robinson: "The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century."


While on sabbatical in Canterbury in the 1980's, American novelist and essayist Marilynn Robinson was shocked to learn that, during that period, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was Great Britain. For decades, the UK has been discharging nuclear waste from Sellafield, a nuclear weapons and nuclear waste reprocessing complex, into the Irish Sea. The complex, located in a national park (which includes the Lake District) on the northwest coast of England, just south of Scotland, has been storing tons of nuclear waste in an open pit which Robinson calls "the world's nuclear dustbin."

The writer explored her findings in a long essay, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution. Robinson maps out historical threads between the abuse of state authority and power, predatory capitalism, and exploitative, throwaway attitudes that prioritize profit before human lives and the natural environment. Robinson specifically charts the movement from the pre-Elizabethan Poor Laws to state-sponsored industry in the UK.

This revelatory book, published in 1989, was essential reading before the Fukushima era: to enlighten us to the realization that many nations have been nuking themselves and the entire world via radioactive nuclear waste emissions on a daily basis for decades (as well as via the 2,083 "test explosions" conducted in their own backyards or "colonies").

Long before the the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq on the basis of nonexistent WMD and the preoccupation with possible issues with Iran and North Korea, Robinson questioned the rationality of fears over potential nuclear weapons capabilities and deployment, in light of widespread inattention regarding ongoing nuclear hazards, including the continuous dumping of radioactive nuclear wastes into the Irish Sea at Sellafield.

She concludes, "It is a very comfortable thing to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made—that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century."

Sellafield Nuclear Plant is visible from much of England''s Lake District National Park. 

In the first part of her prescient and essential book, Robinson describes the layers of history that resulted in the creation of the radioactive nightmare known as Sellafield, located in an otherwise idyllic backwater of England:
:...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...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...

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 into the Atlantic. In other words, Britian has not solved the problem of nuclear waste, but has in fact greatly compounded it, in the course of producing plutonium in undivulged quantities...

And then the British are not especially fortunate. Sellafield 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...
Robinson questions appearance and realities of "democracy" in the UK and other parts of the world in which a tiny minority makes decisions affecting entire populations, largely without their knowledge or input. These decisions made on the basis of exorbitant taxpayer-enabled profit; the nuclear industry would not survive without government subsidies and protections
For thirty years a pool of plutonium has been forming off the English coast. The tide is highly radioactive and will become more so. The government inspects and plant and approves the emissions from it. The government considers the plant poorly maintained and managed, and is bringing pressure to lower emissions. The government is expanding the plant and developing another one in Scotland. Foreign wastes enter the country at Dover and are transported by rail through London..Whose judgment and what reasoning lie behind these practices and arrangements? The question is never broached...

No hearing will ever convene to assess the wisdom of shipping radioactive wastes through a populous capital, or dumping them into the sea, or extracting weapons materials from them to be shipped by air into Europe, and through North America to Japan...

This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us...

I am so angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured...This book is written in a state of mind and spirit I could not have imagined before Sellafield presented itself to me, so grossly anomalous that I had to jettison almost every assumption I had before I could begin to make sense of it...I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind—Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world's natural environment, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world's political environment. For money.

...For decades, the British government has presided over the release of deadly toxins into its own environment, for money, using secrecy, scientism, and public trust or passivity to preclude resistance or criticism and to quiet fears...

If Americans have heard about Sellafield nuclear waste dump and plutonium factory, they have heard the name Windscale, which appears from time to time with little or no elaboration in lists of nuclear accidents. The Windscale fire of 1957, which for our purposes is the history of the public-relations strategies surrounding the event, bears an uncanny, not to say unnerving, similarity to the recent accident in the Ukraine. Windscale was the most serious accident in a nuclear reactor before Chernobyl. It occured in a graphite-moderated reactor with the sole function of producing plutonium for British bombs...

The clientele of Sellafield is a Who's Who of technologically advanced countries: Japan, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and Sweden. France has its own pipeline into the sea at Cap de la Hague on the English Channel...

According to the New Scientist, in 1986 the Central Policy Planning Unit of the Ministry of the Environment suggested that "it would be prudent to place restrictions on any development along and off the coast near Sellafield which could disturb the concentrations of radioactivity building up in mud and silts."
In her concluding words, Robinson links Sellafield with parallel nuclear history affecting other backwaters throughout the globe. It took more than Chernobyl, it has taken Fukushima, to awaken a majority of citizens in Japan to understanding and action. Fukushima families follow Cumbrian families who raised money to purchase their own Geiger counters because they cannot rely on the UK government's radiation monitoring. At intervals over thirty years, they protest and strike. Yet, most people worldwide know nothing about the suffering of the residents who live daily with plutonium and other nuclear radiation from a nuclear complex in one of England's tourist destinations.
Maybe the beaches at Sellafield had begun to glow in the dark. Islands in the Pacific that were used for atomic testing glowed for years, and contamination levels at Sellafield are like those at testing sites.

...the world's public arrives at this parlous moment with a grinding history behind it, badly educated, starved of information, full of sad old fears and desperate loyalties, injured in its self-regard, acculturated to docility and stoicism...There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry our policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient...

My greatest hope, which is a very slender one, is that we will at last find the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in the faith that life is good and to be preserved, to recognize the grosser forms of evil and name them and confront them...We have to...consult with our souls, and find the courage, in ourselves, to see, and perceive, and hear, and understand.
-JD

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