| 1 | 1 | | If nuclear waste coloured sea and sand and anything it touched an indelible, |
| 2 | | luminous purple, it must be doubted whether the Sellafield reprocessing plant would ever |
| 3 | | have been built. If radioactive fall-out stained for ever the land on which it fell and the |
| 4 | | skin through which it was absorbed, public opinion would not allow any nuclear power |
| 5 | | station in any democratic country to remain open. The invisibility of radiation accounts |
| 6 | | in major part for the near invisibility of the issue in British polities, But the catastrophe in |
| 7 | | the Ukraine1) has changed all that. |
| 2 | 8 | | The civil nuclear programme has profited hugely from its non-political status. |
| 9 | | Although progress has been slow - nuclear power still supplies less than four per cent of |
| 10 | | Britain's energy demands - it has been remorseless. Green politics has never taken root |
| 11 | | here, and the Labour Party, having commissioned its own nuclear stations, has been |
| 12 | | deterred for this and other reasons from becoming a Green and anti-nuclear alternative. |
| 13 | | The country in fact has not seemed to want one. |
| 3 | 14 | | You could see the fear that this might be changing writ heavily on television on |
| 15 | | Monday night. Lord Marshall, chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, |
| 16 | | paraded across every news programme he could lay hands on. Lord Marshall is the |
| 17 | | leading proponent of nuclear power, and especially of the pressurized water reactor that |
| 18 | | the government wants to build at Sizewell. He was put in the job by Mrs Thatcher to |
| 19 | | further a cause she unreservedly believes in too. Although unengaging to the naked eye, |
| 20 | | Lord Marshall is a formidable operator. Two things struck one, however, about his |
| 21 | | efforts at damage limitation after the Chernobyl melt-down. |
| 4 | 22 | | The first was that he was doing the job at all. Where were the politicians? No |
| 23 | | minister was put up to reassure a worried populace. Mr Peter Walker was the obvious |
| 24 | | candidate. The Energy Secretary, after all, had given it as his opinion in a departmental |
| 25 | | press release as recently as March 17 that 'nuclear power is the safest form of energy yet |
| 26 | | known to man'. Was this not the moment for a reaffirmation? |
| 5 | 27 | | Students of Mr Walker's style should have known better than to expect it. He is a |
| 28 | | man who thinks long and hard before assuming a high profile on the unpopular side of a |
| 29 | | controversial issue. He has already kept as far away from Sellafield as is consonant with |
| 30 | | his departmental duties. A clear signal that Chernobyl presents a very awkward political |
| 31 | | problem, is Mr Walker's caution in speaking about it. |
| 6 | 32 | | But the second message from Lord Marshall's various appearances derived from |
| 33 | | the lameness of what he had to say. Suddenly one noticed the qualifications in his words, |
| 34 | | and felt obliged not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Could a similar melt-down |
| 35 | | happen here? He did not think there was 'any reasonable chance' of it: that is, yes, there |
| 36 | | was a chance, even though only in unreasonable circumstances. Later he declared that |
| 37 | | 'almost any reactor' could be made safe by spending money. What was that about |
| 38 | | 'almost'? |
| 7 | 39 | | What Chernobyl has done, I believe, is to render irrelevant in many people's minds |
| 40 | | the conventional arguments about nuclear safety. I say this from personal, untutored |
| 41 | | experience. Mrs Thatcher says our safety record is unparalleled. Lord Marshall says the |
| 42 | | Soviet reactor is of a kind no western country would build. And all this may be true. But it |
| 43 | | misses the point of public apprehension that Chernobyl has horrifyingly awakened. |
| 8 | 44 | | The case it exposes is not that a nuclear accident is more likely, but that, in the |
| 45 | | improbable event of a major accident occurring, the scale of the consequences is almost |
| 46 | | unimaginable. Uncontrollable events outside these shores have alerted a population to |
| 47 | | what might happen within them, in such a way that politicians, and especially governing |
| 48 | | politicians, may find it impossible to use the methods they have been accustomed to use. |
| | | |
| | | Hugo Young in The Guardian, May 1, 1986 |
noot 1: 'the catastrophe in the Ukraine': the accident in a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986
