Radiation Guinea Pigs

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Bernard Moffatt, Outside Left: Radiation guinea pigs

There are aspects of the British nuclear industry that are like a black comedy.

A few years ago I learned that a UK train-spotters’ magazine openly published details of transports of nuclear waste.

The guide called ‘Freightmaster’ provided information on rail-freight services. It included specific information on stations along the routes and the arrival and departure times from these stations. The ‘anoraks’ could pop down and log the nuclear train as it trundled by with its deadly cargo.

The material carried on the train was even helpfully identified by the guide revealing that the train carries ‘nuclear flasks’. Bizarrely, the railway enthusiasts who operated the website said they had received clearance to post the information. This was just three years after 9/11 and a few months before the attack by extremists on the London Underground.

Recently the BBC did a programme on Sellafield which, to be perfectly honest, was a bit of a whitewash.

The first giveaway that this was hardly going to be some sort of expose was that the team and presenter had carte blanche to film all over the site.

We saw the crumbling containment tanks which will pose a threat for decades and we heard for the umpteenth time about the ‘heroics’ at the time of the Windscale fire – although the reality was they did not have a clue at the time what they were doing and only good luck saved the northern part of the British Isles from armageddon.

But we did not hear a great deal about John Dunster!

Dunster was one of those around at the time of the Windscale fire and he went on to become assistant director at the National Radiological Protection Board.

On his death he was eulogised by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

However, Dunster and his Windscale contemporaries were responsible for one of the most infamous events that the UK government has ever undertaken and which arguably impacted on the health of many people in the Isle of Man, if not ultimately led to their deaths from cancer.

In 1958, almost as an aside, Dunster told a conference of nuclear scientists in Geneva: ‘Discharges [from Sellafield] have been deliberately maintained. . . high enough to obtain detectable levels in samples of fish, seaweed and shore sand, and the experiment is still proceeding. In 1956 the rate of discharge of radioactivity was deliberately increased, partly to dispose of unwanted wastes, but principally to yield better experimental data.’

Let’s be clear what was going on here.

The UK nuclear industry were deliberately polluting the Irish Sea with radiation to measure the impact on the environment.

The experiment, as he put it, was continuing and they were using the people who lived around the North Irish sea as ‘guinea pigs’ in this quest for ‘experimental data’.

According to Dunster the ‘experiment’ had ‘the support of the authorising government departments’ i.e. the UK government gave the green light for radiation to be released to see where in the food chain, animals and humans the radiation ended up.

Despite Dunster’s revelations (because in the 50s the musings of nuclear physicists at obscure conferences in Geneva were hardly headline-grabbing) nobody became generally aware of the UK nuclear industry’s wrongdoing until the late 1970s.

‘Criminality’ is what Charles Haughey TD (later Taoiseach) described it as.

In Mann, Sir Charles Kerruish also tried to raise the issue but, as in Ireland, the governments of the day were not interested so the British got away with murder!

Anyway, to end where we began, following my revelations, the UK nuclear industry stopped posting ‘train timetables on nuclear waste’ as a signpost to terrorists, so that at least had a happy ending!

IOMTODAY.CO.IM Column: http://bit.ly/1kAC4BN