G133: What Have We Done (10 page)

Altogether, Sellafield has 240 radioactive buildings awaiting decommissioning. The most obvious is the pile that caught fire almost sixty years ago. Every day, Sellafield’s 10,000 workers still pass the remains – nobody has yet dared breach the seal. Inside, the graphite core still contains the Wigner energy that operators were trying to remove on the fateful day of the fire. Disturbing the remains could cause the core and the estimated fifteen tonnes of buckled uranium fuel to catch fire again, or even explode.

The pile will wait its turn. There are four other buildings that the NDA says have higher priority. Each will take billions of pounds to make safe. They contain fuel and waste that should have been made safe decades ago, but were instead abandoned. They are the dark hearts of Sellafield, the radioactive reminders of past follies.

The structure known as B29 was one of Windscale’s first. The hundred-metre-long open-air pond sits like an outsize swimming pool between the remains of the two Windscale piles. It received the cans of spent fuel as they were pushed from the backs of the piles, prior to reprocessing. After the 1957 fire, it was retired, but it was resurrected as an emergency store for spent fuel during the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s, when Sellafield’s reprocessing line couldn’t keep up. Stuck there too long, the skips of fuel began to corrode and the pond and its contents were abandoned again. The fuel remains and the corrosion has created 300 cubic metres of radioactive sludge that coats the bottom of the pond.

Close by is B41. This giant silo, constructed in 1950, houses six hoppers, each twenty-one metres high, which received the aluminium cans cut from pile fuel after it left B29. Later, it took cladding that sheathed spent Magnox fuel. Once full, it was closed in 1965. Plans for emptying it in the 1990s came to nothing. As the cans and cladding corrode, they generate hydrogen that could catch fire; argon gas is constantly pumped in to stifle any conflagration.

B30 opened in 1959. It is another giant pond, 150 metres long, and like its older brother B29 it is open to the elements. Until 1985, it received spent Magnox fuel awaiting reprocessing. As with B29, it still contains fuel that stayed too long and has corroded. The 1,500 cubic metres of sludge and corroded fuel in the pond contain up to 1.3 tonnes of plutonium. Sellafield managers don’t show B30 to visitors, but pictures leaked in 2014 revealed weeds growing round the tank and radioactive algae on the water. B30 is known to workers as ‘dirty 30’, because since the 1980s it has been Sellafield’s biggest source of contamination. They can only work in some areas for two or three minutes at a time. Safety experts call it Western Europe’s most hazardous industrial building.

The second most dangerous industrial building in Western Europe is B38, just next door. After B41 was filled, its four concrete silos took cladding from Magnox reactors. Some of the waste has since liquefied and sludge has seeped through cracks in the floor, forming a radioactive plume spreading through the soil beneath. As with B41, there is a risk of explosion from the hydrogen being generated in the silos, which are constantly ventilated.

The first steps towards emptying these monstrous ponds and silos have finally been taken, though all is not going well. This spring, the NDA postponed the expected completion dates for emptying B29 and B41 by five years, to 2030 and 2029 respectively, and the schedules may well slip further. ‘We have to do a lot of Research and Development just to characterise the inventory before we can work out how to retrieve the materials,’ Paul Howarth, the managing director of the UK National Nuclear Laboratory told me as we toured the site.

Sellafield’s baleful inventory also includes the world’s largest stockpile of non-military plutonium – over 120 tonnes of the stuff, with around four tonnes added from reprocessing each year. That is more than the US and Russian civilian stockpiles put together, and enough to make 20,000 Nagasaki-size bombs. A quarter of it is owned by foreign countries, mostly Japan and Germany, that sent
spent fuel to the UK for reprocessing, but few are interested in taking it back.

The original purpose of separating the plutonium was to make fuel for a future generation of reactors, and many believe that project should be revived. The government’s chief scientist for energy David MacKay says that it contains enough energy to run the country’s electricity grid for five hundred years, but efforts to build two plutoniumburning plants – a fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay in Scotland and a mixed-oxide fuel plant at Sellafield – were both abandoned after the expenditure of more than a billion pounds. The asset has become a liability.

It is safe, if kept secure. But managers at Sellafield are reluctant even to identify the building containing the stuff, which costs around £100 million a year to protect. Most of the plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder that could be made into a crude nuclear bomb. In 2007, the Royal Society said the stockpile ‘poses a severe security risk’, and ‘undermines the UK’s credibility in non-proliferation debates’.

Whatever happens to the plutonium, the rest of Sellafield’s lethal legacy has to be kept safe. Terrorism is one threat, but so are the societies of the future – people whose cultures and technical skills could be as far removed from ours as the Neolithic people who built the Grey Croft stone circle. And safety, almost everyone agrees, ultimately means burial deep underground.

A couple of kilometres from Sellafield’s back fence, within metres of the Lake District National Park, lies the burial site the authorities keep coming back to. In the 1990s, Longlands Farm was proposed as the entry point for a test repository that might one day extend underground for up to twenty square kilometres. After a damning planning inspectors’ report warned that the rocks could transmit radioactive leaks into water supplies, however, the government threw the plan out. But a decade on, new ministers revived it, only for the Cumbrian County Council to vote against it four years ago.

Eddie Martin, county leader at the time of the vote, thinks the government could be about to resurrect it once more. He now runs the Cumbria Trust, which is dedicated to preventing that from happening. When I met him at his home outside Maryport, he said: ‘They want the disposal facility here not because the geology is favourable – it isn’t, as the old miners know, it is riddled with faults and fissures that make it unsuitable – but because they think we won’t object.’

Maybe policymakers in faraway London are right to think that. Western Cumbria is trapped by Sellafield. The complex provides most of the area’s jobs, spends most of the money, and has its tentacles in all kinds of local activities. Even the current local MP Jamie Reed – who was returned in May with a 2,564 vote majority – is a former PR man at Sellafield. He is supported by GMB, the largest blue-collar union at the site. Sellafield’s relatively high wages and environmental stigma repel other potential industrial employers, and school-leavers can either work at Sellafield or take low-paid work in tourism or farming. This summer, locals were being asked to comment on plans for a giant conventional nuclear power plant right over the fence from Sellafield. With many jobs on offer, they may be tempted. Construction could be under way by 2018.

Back in 1946, the government stipulated that, for safety reasons, Sellafield’s plutonium factory should be at least fifty miles from any large town. ‘Sellafield has stored the country’s nuclear waste and operated some of its most dangerous plants for almost seventy years,’ Eddie Martin tells me. ‘For what we have done for the country, the streets should be paved with gold. Instead, we have been largely ignored. Our infrastructure is poor. Too many children live in poverty. And in the back of our mind, we know that if there is an accident the whole area could become uninhabitable.’

Continued political chaos doesn’t help. In 2008, most of Sellafield’s activities were privatised. The aim, said then energy minister Mike O’Brien, was to ‘get to grips with the legacy after decades of inaction’. But as costs ballooned, O’Brien’s successors decided to renationalise
it in early 2015. Whoever is in charge, the bills keep going up, from half a billion pounds in 1980 to 79 billion pounds today. Unlike other nations that rely on nuclear power, Britain never established a special fund to pay for eventual decommissioning. As former energy minister Chris Huhne put it four years ago: ‘When waste started piling up, we effectively crossed our fingers and hoped that it would all go away.’

Quinhagak is a Yup’ik village on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska. There, where the Bering Sea is rapidly eroding the coast, a remarkable archaeological dig is under way. Called ‘Nunalleq’, the site is an abandoned Yup’ik village dating from pre-contact times, five hundred years ago. It is yielding an astonishingly rich array of artefacts, and reawakening cultural awareness and confidence among the Yup’ik people. The site is being excavated by a team from Aberdeen University, with help and support from the Quinhagak community. Last year, thanks to funding from the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to join the archaeologists for the short digging season.

O
ne Sunday, after we had been in Quinhagak about three weeks, Warren finally found the time to take us on our promised trip upriver. It’s not that folk here don’t love river trips – especially in August when the salmon are running, for the Kanektok is a famous salmon river – it’s just that Warren was always busy. You want something done, we’d been told, you ask Warren Jones.

In his forties, burly by Yup’ik standards and rarely off his cell phone, Warren was president of the Quinhagak village corporation. Every day a succession of people traipse up the village hall stairs, looking to get things done. One morning I traipsed up there myself
and found Warren sitting at a desk covered in forms and documents to do with grants and projects. With due deference, I told him I was a writer and, if possible, I’d like to discover something about Yup’ik life.

For a moment he lifted his gaze from the paper-strewn desk to look through the window at the miles of tundra in its summer greens. Then he said, ‘Just tell ’em we don’t live in igloos!’

Sunday was everyone’s day off, so the trip became a family affair. Along with three of us from the dig came Warren, his son Patrick, his wife Jeanette and Teddi, Jeanette’s sister. Both these women were petite, dark-haired and quietly competent. They tied their black hair back and, like the men, wore combat trousers, hoodies and ball caps. Teddi admitted she was very glad to be going outdoors. She was the manager of Quinhagak’s substantial supermarket, which meant she spent her working days in a huge metal-clad shed without windows. As manager, she was responsible for ordering all the goods, and there wasn’t much you couldn’t buy in the store, all airfreighted in. Except alcohol, because Quinhagak is a dry village. Instead of booze, the small planes carry pallet-loads of sugary drinks. One day half a dozen coconuts appeared, which made me laugh. But then, I suppose a coconut in Quinhagak is no more odd than a coconut in Aberdeen.

To reach the boats we all piled into one of the town’s few cars – a beat-up yellow station wagon – and drove about a mile and a half from the township to where the road ended at a series of gravel pits. Because the river had recently swept away a sizeable stretch of the road, we had to edge the car carefully around the margin which remained. The town’s airstrip used to lie beside the river too, but that also had been swept away. Such are Warren’s headaches. Another airstrip was soon built a mile farther inland, land being freely available. The delta’s waterways have always been dynamic; its hundreds of square miles are riddled with melt pools, oxbows and creeks. The very name Quinhagak – or Kwinarraq – means ‘new river channel’. What’s alarming, the people say, is the scale and speed of recent changes. The Bering Sea is rising, the permafrost melting. When the permafrost melts, the earth falls apart and structures built
on it collapse. High tides bring floods to the coastal villages and sweep away what little infrastructure they have.

The boats were grey, flat-bottomed metal skiffs with a ramped front and a square stern. There were many such boats around the village, tied up on muddy creeks; every family seemed to possess at least one. Because we were a party of seven, we split ourselves between two. Warren manned the first himself, standing next to the hefty outboard engine. Young Patrick drove the other. Of course, they took fishing rods. Of course, they took a powerful rifle, tucked away in the stern.

We hoped to reach the mountains forty miles upstream, so set off at high speed. Out on the quick river, Warren and Patrick’s skill lay in putting their boats into the right channel, the best braid, in judging speed and cornering against the onrush as the river widened and narrowed. Hazards included half-submerged logs that had been swept down from forests in the distant interior, and the way the river looped right, then left. Every fleet-flowing bend was paired with a reef of grey shingle. Gulls flew up from these reefs as we neared. The riverbanks proper were at times dense with willow scrub, at times soft and peaty, and easily claimed by the scouring water. I sat in the front, trying to be vigilant, looking out for bears or moose or birds on the riverbanks, but the engines scared them away. Warren wore shades and ear protectors; it was too loud to speak.

Because it was salmon season we passed many fishermen standing on the gravel banks. These were big bearded men from the southern States, the Lower 48. The rivers they fished were on Yup’ik land, managed by Native community-owned corporations. They provided the services, stores, boats and camps, and took the fees. That was the deal. Solemnly, the fishermen waved as we zipped by. They were surprised, I think, not at the dark-haired Yup’ik women in the boats – they scoot upriver all the time, berry-picking or hunting – but at the three white women in their company. The fishing trips looked to be all male.

After some miles of headwind and river spray, Warren and Patrick slowed the boats and nudged them against one of the shingle beaches.
They could resist no longer: they had to catch fish. Teddi and Jeanette secured the boats with ropes and they wasted no time in assembling the fishing rods. I wandered off a few yards, stepping over a bear pat, brown and crusty. It was the diameter of a saucer and decorated with undigested red berries. A paw print with claws, not much smaller, was pressed into the silt nearby.

‘Did you smell that bear back there?’ asked Warren.

I’d seen him wrinkle his nose and point to the bushes of the riverbank, but hadn’t understood.

Thinking the fishing would take ages, I hunkered on a washed-up log to wait. I looked at the grey shingle at my feet and a spray of yellow poppies in bloom among the stones. I kept an eye out for bears among the willow scrub on the bank opposite, and watched Teddi casting her line out into the river. The August air was not quite warm, not quite cold. Dark clouds were gathering and a breeze rising, the kind of breeze that precedes rain. I prepared myself to be bored, but within ten minutes Teddi and Warren had each landed a silvery coho salmon the length of my arm. The fish were smacked hard on the head with a stick and gutted at once with a deft movement of a knife, then stowed in a polythene bag. Out in the water further salmon twisted, trout too, all pushing and nudging up to their spawning grounds.

With the fish in the bag we made to leave, but first Jeanette shyly produced lollipops – a flat boiled-sweet kind I hadn’t seen in years. The women sucked the lollies, the men smoked cigarettes, and then we pushed the boats out. The riverbanks began to swell higher, and in a mile or two more trees appeared, cottonwoods, releasing a dreamy autumnal smell. From time to time we passed beaver lodges. We turned a leftward bend and slowed because there was a bald eagle nest nearby, and sure enough, from one of the tall trees, an eagle took off at our approach. In a shallow we idled, watching as the bird made a wide loop overhead.

We listened for Patrick’s boat. It didn’t come. We waited some minutes more. Jeanette told us the Yup’ik name for the eagle, several equally stressed syllables I instantly forgot. Warren told us that
cottonwood is favoured for making harpoons to hunt seals. We turned back downstream to see what was up, and found the second boat pulled up on a shingle bank strewn with bleached driftwood. Engine trouble. This was the reason Warren had wanted to take two boats: just in case. The river feels like a highway, but like a highway, as soon as you stop and silence falls, you feel the scale of the vast land around, its pressing strangeness, your exposure. At least I did. We hadn’t seen any other boats or fishermen for a while.

Washed up on this bank were plenty of sticks, so as Warren and Patrick concentrated on the engine, Teddi and Jeanette set about making a windbreak. As with the fishing, they were quick of hand. First they gathered a few branches. They rammed these into the silt, wove more branches between and draped the frame with a blue plastic sheet. This we huddled under, because it was starting to rain. As they built a fire, I watched carefully. The sisters worked as a team, bent over with heads together, barely speaking because they didn’t have to. They scooped out some gravel to make a shallow pit about a foot long. They filled the pit with dry grasses they’d gathered at the shore, then laid thin twigs over in a lattice. On top of that came bigger sticks. One lick of flame from Teddi’s Zippo lighter and the fire caught.

Within fifteen minutes the sisters had provided shelter and heat. Now, they went scouting for fresh willow wands among the thickets behind the beach. These thickets were a haunt of bears; one didn’t go alone. Even if we wanted to pee, we went in company. As the fire gained heat they whittled the willow wands with knives until they were sharp-pointed. Then, they took not the salmon but hot-dog sausages, and rammed them onto the sticks. Everyone hunkered cooking hot dogs over the fire. I didn’t want to ask about the salmon, maybe they were saving it, but Teddi read my mind and smiled her calm smile. ‘Hot dogs cook quickest!’ she said.

Jeanette was listening to her iPod. I don’t know what she was listening to, but I liked the way she travelled: with her iPod in one pocket, her traditional Yup’ik woman’s knife, or
ulu
, in the other.

Something vital had broken in the engine. We were too many, strictly speaking, for one boat, so it was decided that Patrick would wait alone on this bank, with the defunct boat, the fire and the gun.

The rest of us would continue upriver for a while. We wouldn’t reach the mountains, but we’d go see what we could see.

As we left Patrick sitting cross-legged by the fire, I asked him, ‘Are you not scared?’

‘Scared o’ what?’ he replied. He spoke with the modesty or reticence I’d come to admire in the people here, especially the young.

I shrugged. The size of the place. Loneliness. The cold, black clouds. Hungry bears.

‘Done it before,’ he said. ‘All night.’

‘Scared of what?’ said his father. ‘This is our backyard.’

I
don’t know how many miles we travelled, because the river looped so much. In time, however, the riverbanks grew into soft hillocks, and thicker bushes crowded the banks. Then, at a place where the river split in two channels, Warren nudged the boat ashore at the north bank and anchored it with a metal plate thrust into the earth. We left the boat and scrambled up a steep bluff covered in low vegetation, leaves already crisped with autumn hints. When we’d climbed about two hundred feet above the water we reached a rounded summit where bedrock was breaking through, and what I saw from there astonished me. I saw land. Every way one turned, the tundra was laid out like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt pools and waterways. It was land relishing its brief summer, open and free to breathe. To west, south and north the land seemed unbounded, but eastward, inland, there rose range after range of low, grey-blue mountains, the source of the river, with shadows in their glens and corries. Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. The shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.

W
e sat on the ground in the light breeze. Warren lit a Marlboro, Jeanette offered more lollipops. I sucked a red one, and could have looked out over that land forever. In a sense, Warren and Teddi and Jeanette have been. I was aware of them beside me, and I wondered how their thoughts ran when they got out here, away from the village and the corporation and the US government and all the social problems and well-intentioned schemes, and just looked at their land, land they had managed to retain. I wanted to say, ‘Please, enough of the Smith and Jones. Please tell me your Yup’ik names. Tell me what you’re thinking, what you’re looking at, when you get out here.’ But I didn’t. There was their reticence to consider, and I didn’t want to annoy them with questions. On the other hand, I’d pass this way but once.

Warren was squatting a few feet away, his camouflage jacket hunched over his shoulders. After a few minutes I plucked up courage and said, ‘Warren, this is some backyard.’

He smoked on silently, but then he seemed to relent. With his cigarette between his fingers he pointed southward over the intricate, mazy land, all sage green and emerald green and russet. He said, ‘That’s where I go wolf-hunting.’

Then he pointed east, over the plain spread before the mountains, and said, ‘One time, ’bout five years ago, I came up here and all that place was covered in caribou . . .’

‘How long have you people been here?’

‘About ten thousand years. In winter we come up here on snow machines. Go over to Eek.’

Winter was when the river froze and snow fell and the difference between land and river and marsh was abolished. A time to socialise – if it snows. Last year, unusually, there had been none.

The others reappeared over the brow of the hill. They’d been off scouting for bears but had had no luck. Jenny wanted to see a bear because she was going home to Scotland soon, and there hasn’t been a wild bear in Scotland for a thousand years. But there were no bears nearby, Teddi said, because there had been no snow last winter.
Apparently, no snow means few berries the following summer, and if there are no berries to eat, the bears won’t stick around. ‘They’ll be at the salmon-spawning grounds on the side creeks,’ she said.