The Windscale Fire
Veronica McDermott
At the time it occurred, the Windscale Fire attracted no political attention in Ireland. Later it came to have a marked psychological impact on public attitudes to nuclear power and the British nuclear industry. The fire and assumptions about its radiological impact on Ireland were central to Ireland’s opposition to Sellafield. Particularly so following the suggestion in a 1983 paper in the British Medical Journal of a link between fallout from the 1957 fire and a subsequent Down’s syndrome cluster discovered among six former pupils of a convent school in Dundalk, Co. Louth.
Revelations in the mid-80s of the extent to which data on radiation releases from the Windscale Fire, especially of polonium 210, had been suppressed by the British government at the time also fuelled Irish suspicions and gave impetus to the growing demand, supported by all political parties in the Republic, for the immediate closure of Sellafield. The real story is that suppression of any bad news about WIndscale, even before the fire, was on the direct instructions of the British Prime Minister at the time, Harold Macmillan. Macmillan was afraid that if the full details of what had happened at Windscale were made public, British diplomatic attempts to secure an agreement with the United States on nuclear co-operation would be damaged. Further, the British authorities were not keen to let the Americans know about the extent to which they were manufacturing polionium 210, used as a trigger in atomic weapons, because the Americans would have been able to work out from such data that the British atomic programme was not as technically advanced as they had been led to believe. The long sought co-operation agreement with the US was finally signed just a few weeks after the WIndscale Fire.
In the decades that followed, the Windscale accident remained hugely embarrassing to the British authorities. While no clear explanation has ever been offered as to why information on the scale of the release of polonium 210 – 36% of all radiation released in the fire – continued to be suppressed for decades, it appears to be related to the British authorities and the nuclear industry’s preference to play down the significance of the accident. Acknowledging the true scale of the polonium 210 release would have forced an upward revision of the statistical estimates of the numbers of cancers and fatalities likely to have resulted from the Windscale Fire. As the anti-nuclear movement reached fever pitch in the late 1970s and ‘80s, there was little incentive for the British authorities and the UK Atomic Energy Authority to draw public attention to an accident they themselves would rather forget.
The expansion of Sellafield’s nuclear reprocessing operations in the mid-1980s and 90s compounded fears in Ireland about the possibility of a catastrophic accident that would have major consequences for Ireland, as well as the belief that Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea were responsible for increased cancer rates in Co.Louth and other deleterious health effects along the country’s East Coast.
Subsequent research by Dr. Geoffrey Dean, published in November 2000, on the Dundalk Down’s cluster showed the cluster could have had no connection with fallout from the Windscale accident. Dr Dean’s study proved that of the six pupils from the Dundalk school who later gave birth to children affected with Down’s syndrome, three were not at the school at the time of the fire. Recently published studies by a UCD team of scientists show no traces of radioactive fallout in Ireland from the Windscale Fire, complementing a recent British study that mapped the fallout from the fire and shows that radiation from the Windscale release is highly unlikely to have ever reached Ireland. For some, the mounting evidence that the Windscale Fire had no radiological impact in Ireland is simply not accepted.
“The problem is that so many people don’t want that answer,” Fine Gael Louth TD, Fergus O’Dowd, states in an interview in the book.
“People will always link cancer to Sellafield,” O Dowd says. “I’ve met many, many people who believe that they got cancer from Sellafield.”
Veronica McDermott, worked for ten years as a public affairs consultant in Ireland to British Nuclear Fuels plc. Going Nuclear: Ireland, Britain and the campaign to close Sellafield is her first book. Going Nuclear documents Britain’s and Ireland’s respective nuclear histories, the development of the Sellafield nuclear complex and the stories of the scientists, engineers and West Cumbrian workers at the heart of Britain’s military and civil nuclear programmes from the late 1940s to the present day. The book also tells the story of the thirty year diplomatic row between Britain and an Ireland politically united around a persistent demand for the closure of Sellafield and the failure of Ireland’s campaign. Drawing on a wide range of sources and original materials, Going Nuclear is published by Irish Academic Press on Wednesday next , 10 October.
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