By Professor John Robertson
I hadn’t heard of an equivalent nuclear-reprocessing plant to Sellafield – ‘the most toxic site in Europe’ – only a few miles from the Scottish border and with regular leaks of radioactive material into the air and water flows heading north, constantly.
According to US writer Shannon Cram, author of the just published Unmaking the Bomb, above, most Americans are unaware that a site, like Sellafield, had produced weapons-grade plutonium and now houses the majority of the nations’ high-level nuclear waste.
Hanford Nuclear Reservation is eerily placed, like Sellafield, about as far away from the Capital as you could get, in Washington State 2 700 miles and upwind from Washington DC:
The Canadians must be pleased.
Sellafield was placed using similar thinking by Capital city elites, 300 miles from and upwind of London:
UK Government researchers and Government grant-funded university researchers always find no statistically significant evidence that nuclear sites causes excess cancers.
You can read probing questions about that research in several National articles (links below).
Cram writes:
I stumbled into this project in 2004, while working as a campaign field manager for a Washington State ballot initiative about nuclear cleanup. I had recently finished college and I had never heard of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation before joining the campaign. I didn’t know that Washington had produced weapons-grade plutonium for more than four decades or that it now housed the majority of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste. I was surprised to learn that my grandfather had worked at Hanford during the Cold War and that my mother grew up less than forty miles from the site.
I have grown up with Hanford in ways that I could not have imagined when I started this project. Since that time, every member of my immediate family has gotten cancer, and both of my parents have died of it. My father was diagnosed at age fifty-five (and died the same year), soon after I began canvassing door to door about Hanford in 2004. My mother was diagnosed at sixty, while I was completing dissertation fieldwork about cleanup in 2012. I was diagnosed at thirty-three in 2014, just weeks after my mother passed away. I spent my final year of graduate school writing my dissertation and applying for professorships, in addition to completing five months of chemotherapy and two major surgeries that removed my breasts, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and a handful of lymph nodes. My sister was diagnosed at age thirty-one, a few weeks before I finished my PhD.
For although most environmental quality standards are based on statistical models of carcinogenic hazard, it is nearly impossible to identify when an individual instance of cancer results from daily life in a contaminated environment.
Cancer remains the primary risk factor driving environmental legislation in the United States—it is used to establish baselines for acceptable toxicity concentrations in air, water, soil, vegetation, and bodies and to determine if those contaminants have exceeded permissible limits. More than any other, this disease has informed the categories we use to define and regulate environmental health, from air pollution in Los Angeles to nuclear waste at Hanford.
Instead, individuals living with cancer are left to wonder how they could possibly have gotten it. Causation is often framed as a personal failure: the unfortunate and even embarrassing result of poor diet, not enough exercise, too much stress, and so on. I remember feeling this acutely one day when a friend who had learned about my family’s history said to me, “Jeez, what have you guys been doing wrong?”
How often have cancer victims in Scotland, some living downstream of Sellafield or around a nuclear power station, been subject to the same life of doubt and even self-loathing? The onus is not upon us to prove that these sites are dangerous; it is upon the industry, central government and the funded researchers to prove they are safe.
Further reading:
http://www.thenational.scot/news/24091797.sellafield-nuclear-plant-cancer-fears-raised-scottish-mp/
http://www.thenational.scot/politics/24175238.can-labour-prove-safety-nuclear-energy-support/
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Maybe slightly OT, but related.
I’ve just had an interesting geography lesson while reading an article from the Metro. It was on the silly opening page from Microsoft that I’ve no idea how to disable.
I know, I know. I should know better. But the title was Maps reveal the devastation a nuclear strike would cause across the UK. So I was intrigued to see how Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast would fare.
It had maps of London, Birmingham and Manchester, of course. But also maps of New York and Washington DC. I had no idea the UK extended so far to the West. *Gobsmacked emoji*
There were 153 comments, which I read out of curiosity. TBF, the fact that NY and Washington aren’t in the UK was mentioned. But it wasn’t till Comment 39 that somebody (I’m guessing from NE England) wrote
“Once again one of the prime targets is ignored by a poorly written article, the North East with both Hartlepool Nuclear Power Station and the masses of Chemical Plants (Wilton and Billingham) and Chemical Storage Facilities at Seal Sands, Teesport and other smaller locations…” (which I must assume includes Scotland, Wales and NI)
And the next one said “There are so many sites dotted around the UK which either build weapons, have ‘weaponary’ (sic) R&D, or contain surveillance, that are also at immense risk of being targeted. The one near us is on the highest security/threat alert, according to the signage at its gates. Putting London at the centre of any potential nuclear attack is over simplifying the dangers to us all.“ Don’t know where “near us” is, but it’s definitely not London – and I’m betting it’s not near us!
And – at last! – coming in at 140 “If this article is about the UK why are maps of Washington DC & New York included? You should be showing Glasgow / Edinburgh / Leeds / Newcastle etc.“
It raises 2 questions for me:
1 – Why wasn’t I taught this in school?
2 – What’s all the fuss re independence from the UK about anyway? It would seem none of the devolved nations are in it anyway? With the corollary, does this mean they don’t love us and won’t miss us when we’re gone…? 😦
I can only apologise for the population of the land of my birth. But, in their defence, they probably didn’t get taught these facts either and it’s easier to see a situation clearly when you’re not living in it.
I’m aware that some people will say they should find out and that this applies to Onionists too. But I know from experience that first of all you’ve got to know that you don’t know. There’s a difference between ignoring and ignorance.
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The Sellafield signature isotopes are worrying, they worry me and should be a worry for Westminster, but are they. Sellafield’s Caesium137 (137Cs), some 137Cs were emitted from Chernobyl, but most 137Cs found around our shores and on land has come from Sellafield.
Chernobyl’s main signature was 134Cs, but did also give out some 137Cs. Caesium134, Chernobyl’s main tracer/signature, with a half life of just over 2 years is less dangerous than 137Cs, from my reading.
However, 137Cs has a half life of 29/30 years at which point it starts emitting gamma rays. 137Cs contamination can then lead to internal soft tissue cancers and cancer of the blood, leukaemia.
Since early 1990s leukaemia cases in the UK have increased by 20% (Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) statistics | Cancer Research UK)
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