Atom Bomb Angel

  ‘Now, uranium, which is a metal mined from the earth, is made up of three different atoms; one of these is called U 235, and in U 235 the neutron particles are very active and a few are constantly flying out.’ A diagram illustrating what he said was projected onto a large screen behind him. ‘If one of these particles, which fly out at about twenty-five thousand miles per second, hits another U 235 atom, that atom will split into two, and sometimes three, separate atoms. It is that collision and that splitting of the atom that generates heat, just the way the banging of my fists does.’ He banged his fists again, more gently this time.

  ‘At the same time as splitting into two or three, more neutron particles fly out; if these particles can also be made to hit atoms, then we have what is known as a chain reaction.

  ‘Now the way we make this work for us is, in outline, very simple. Uranium is processed and refined and then put into metal tubes, which are called fuel rods. Several hundred rods are then inserted into what we call the core – you can think of it as being like the barrel of a revolver, the rods being the bullets. The rods are insulated from each other by what are called control rods, through which neutron particles cannot pass. As the control rods start to be withdrawn, the neutron particles start flying out and splitting the atoms in the other rods, and the fuel rods start to get very, very hot. The control rods are not withdrawn completely, but adjusted to maintain the temperature required.

  ‘The entire core is immersed in water; the water is kept under very high pressure to prevent it from boiling so that it will act as a coolant for the core – like a car’s radiator system. After the water leaves the core, heated to a temperature many times higher than boiling point, it is then converted into steam, which is then pushed through the turbines.

  ‘If anything goes wrong, the control rods are dropped straight back into the core and the reaction stops. The core, which you’ll see when we make our tour, is suspended above the ground, in its tank, with the control rods directly above it. The reason it is suspended above the ground is for ease of access to all parts of it. Almost all maintenance is done by remote control from outside the containment – that’s the name of the building in which the core is housed.’

  Yeodall paused for some moments. He’d got through the toughest bit for his audience, but the easiest bit for him; he bit his lip, took a deep breath, and ploughed on.

  ‘Unfortunately, this process of nuclear fission produces a lot of by-products which are known collectively by a name which has a sinister connotation these days: radioactivity. Certainly, radioactivity has a lot of nasty things in it that have got to be controlled and kept well away from human beings, except in areas of medicine, which I’ll come on to later. You’ve got neutron particles, which aren’t going to do you a whole lot of good coming through you at twenty-five thousand miles a second; there’s Cobalt 60 and Iodine 131, Krypton 85, Strontium 90, Plutonium 239, with alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays – none of which are going to do you any good. Alpha rays are damaging if breathed in, gamma rays and beta rays do damage if they hit human tissue.

  ‘A lot of them have a short life-span – we measure their life-spans in what we call half-life. That means the length of time it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its strength. Some have a very short half-life – a matter of seconds only – but others, such as Krypton, have long half-lives – Krypton’s is nine and a half years, Strontium 90 is twenty-eight years, and Plutonium 239 is twenty-four thousand three hundred years – so we have to take a great many precautions to make sure mankind is shielded from this radioactivity, and is going to remain shielded for ever.

  ‘The first stage is the reactor core itself. The containment wall around that is two-metre-thick reinforced concrete; it is dome-shaped for maximum structural strength, and it will withstand very great stress. In tests on this type of dome, a simulation of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into it at six hundred miles an hour was done – and the aircraft lost the fight. It didn’t even make a noticeable dent.

  ‘But even in the event of the containment dome being fractured, we have a fall-back here at Huntspill Head. The containment is connected to a second building, with the same internal capacity, which is kept permanently as a vacuum. If there were any crack in the core containment, a series of valves between the two buildings would automatically open, and all the steam would be sucked straight through.’ His eyes were running from the glare of the lights, his throat was parched, and he badly wanted to scratch his balls.

  ‘Apart from all the security which all of you have witnessed on coming to this station, there is a great deal more hidden security here as well. The entire station is monitored by no less than three completely separate computers. If at any stage the three do not tally, they are all programmed to automatically start shut-down procedures until the reason for the difference is known and corrected.’

  Yeodall talked at great length on the subject of safety, and in particular the safety of the population of Huntspill, the local town. He talked as if Huntspill were the hub of the universe, and should the rest of the world fall apart, the fact that Huntspill would not be eradicated by its power plant – from which, incidentally, it received no power – would make it all better again.

  ‘When we talk about dangers to the public of radiation, we define the individual member of public as a “fence-post man” – that is to say, an individual who spends all the years of his life, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on the station boundary, eating fish reared in the station effluent and drinking the effluent water. This person would in one year be subject to about the same amount of radiation as someone who lives on the fortieth floor of a high-rise building, or who once flies in an aeroplane from London to New York. In more technical terms, he will receive a dose of radiation that is less than one per cent of what is considered to be a safe annual dosage.’

  Yeodall beamed out at his audience. They still weren’t impressed. Many of them had flown a good deal further than from London to New York to get here, and they weren’t happy to hear they had received any dosages of radiation at all, however slight. If he’d gained a point earlier, he’d just lost it now. He launched a volley of statistics about the cost-effectiveness of nuclear-generated electricity. His audience had been blinded by statistics before; they all knew that any competent statistician could make his figures prove anything he wanted them to prove. They were getting bored; they were getting fed up with sitting on the hard plastic seats, watching large and dreary slides appear behind Douglas Yeodall’s head, and trying to translate the language as this well-meaning fellow droned on. They wanted to get to the meat, to the bit where they could ask questions, where they could do some ripping apart; and then bugger off and have lunch.

  ‘One hundred and fifty million diagnostic procedures a year are conducted with radioactive isotopes produced in power stations such as this,’ he said. He was into the benefits of medicine now, and the audience began to take more notice; they were interested in survival, as everyone is interested in survival.

  ‘Cobalt-radiation treatment units have extended the useful lives of people throughout the world by an estimated eleven million years; over the next twenty years, this could jump to over fifty million years. Without nuclear power stations providing cobalt as a waste by-product most of this cobalt treatment would not be possible, as the cost of producing cobalt would be out of reach of even the richest hospitals.’

  Seven hundred journalists scribbled onto their note pads. Yeodall had scored his second point.

  ‘Radiation is also playing an important new role in sterilization. Peaches on the food shelves of South African supermarkets are being given small doses of gamma rays. These kill the bacteria and increase the shelf-life of the peaches by ten times. The World Health Organization estimates that thirty per cent of all the food in the world is not eaten because it has gone off before it ever reaches a table. The life of milk can be prolonged by doses of radiation; salmonella in chickens can be killed off without affe
cting the flavour; and these rays leave no toxic residue whatsoever.’

  The thought of eating gamma-ray blasted chickens, and of South Africans not having to hurry over their purchase of peaches did not leave any visible marks of excitement on the faces of the seven hundred.

  Yeodall announced that the lecture was over, and that question time had now begun. As an insurance policy against the length of his grilling, he informed his audience that the commencement of lunch awaited the conclusion of the questions.

  From the battery of hands that shot into the air, lunch looked in distinct danger of becoming supper. A woman with a strong Australian accent spoke. ‘Sir, what in your opinion is the worst kind of an accident that could happen in a nuclear power station?’

  ‘There is very little room for accidents in the operation here; as I told you, we have three automatic shut-down systems, all independent of one another. We’ve fed every kind of accident possible, and every kind of sabotage possible, into the simulators, and we are totally confident in the safety systems here. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t work here; I’m sure I wouldn’t. We have over one thousand people working here, and I don’t think any of them would be here if they were worried. In dangerous jobs, people get paid danger money. Nobody gets paid danger money here. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘No, sir, it doesn’t; my concern is not whether an accident could happen – it is what sort of accident could happen. What is the worst sort of accident that could happen?’

  ‘The worst accident that could happen here is if one of the steam pipes were to fracture; but in the event of that happening, the valves to the vacuum building would open and the steam would be sucked straight in there.’

  The science editor of The Times stood up. ‘You say that an accident could not happen, and yet in 1979 there was a very serious accident in a power station at Three Mile Island in the United States, with the same type of reactor as this. Why could this not happen again, over here?’

  ‘The result of a number of malfunctions and human errors at Three Mile Island was that a large bubble of hydrogen gas built up inside the containment and they had no way of getting rid of it – they had no vacuum chamber into which they could syphon it. We have such a chamber, so even if we had a similar set of initial problems as Three Mile Island, which is unlikely, there would be no danger.’

  A tall black reporter stood up. ‘What would be the result of a terrorist organization either blowing up this power station, or getting their hands on the uranium that is used here and using it themselves to make nuclear bombs?’

  ‘To answer the first part of your question: there are an enormous number of buildings that make up this complex. It would take a mammoth amount of explosive just to blow up the containment, let alone the entire complex. In any event, the terrorists wouldn’t be achieving much: if they wanted to knock out the supply of electricity, it would be much more sensible merely to blow up the power cables.

  ‘To answer the second part: the uranium that is used here would not be of much use to terrorists in the making of nuclear explosives. The level of enrichment is very low, so if they did succeed in stealing some, it would have to go through an enrichment process – for which they would need access to an enrichment plant. There are very few of these in the world, and they are very strictly controlled. But in any case, if terrorists wanted to get their hands on uranium, they wouldn’t bother trying to steal it from here – the place is much too well guarded – it would be far easier to steal it while it was in transit.’

  An English reporter stood up and spoke with a high-pitched, snide North Country accent. ‘What I would like to know is what would happen if, just supposing, somehow, radioactive steam did escape out of the containment – you know, let’s say the valves to the vacuum building jammed and the steam got out into the air. What would happen?’

  Douglas Yeodall looked twitchy. ‘Well – er – well, if that happened, you’d surely get a lot of nasty stuff in the air – precisely what would happen would depend upon which way the wind was blowing. If the wind was blowing northwesterly at the time, well, that stuff is going to head straight towards Huntspill, and there would be a major emergency. We’d either have to evacuate the town – there is an evacuation plan which the townspeople know about – or if it wasn’t too serious, we’d make them all stay indoors and keep their windows shut. But this couldn’t happen.’

  The English reporter spoke again. ‘What if the wind were blowing in a different direction?’

  ‘Well, then the people of Huntspill would be fine, there’d be no real problem then.’

  The Englishman wasn’t going to let that one go quite so easily. ‘The people of Huntspill might be all right – but what about other places downwind? What about Bristol? Bath? Reading? Basingstoke? Oxford? And what about London?’

  ‘Well – the steam should have dispersed into the atmosphere by the time it reached any of those cities; but depending on the strength of the wind, people close to the station could be in some danger, that’s true.’

  Yeodall looked anxiously about the sea of faces, searching for a fresh hand so he could move away from this Englishman, but he could only see the Englishman’s hand. ‘The steam might disperse into the atmosphere, but there is no reason why the radioactive particles should stay in the steam. They would drop out of it, into the wind, and eventually down to earth. It could take hours before they all come down to ground. There was a volcanic eruption in Washington in 1980 that showered ash onto countries up to five thousand miles away. And you have just told us that some of these particles will live for decades and some for tens of thousands of years, so wherever this stuff lands will be contaminated for a very long time.’

  ‘We think that there would be such small radioactive particles ending up inside human beings that they would do absolutely no harm at all.’

  ‘You might think that, Mr Yeodall, but do you know that for sure? Or are you going to wait until it happens and use the whole world as your guinea pig?’

  ‘No, it is not our intention to use the world as our testing ground. Radiation is only harmful in large and prolonged quantities. There is a great deal of radiation in natural life – from the sun, from the burning of fires, from minerals. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and humans ingest it daily. You, walking down a street, will ingest in one day more radiation than a worker in this station is permitted to receive, working indoors, in that same period. The worst possible disaster in a nuclear power station would put the most insignificant amount of radiation into the atmosphere.’

  Ron Tenney, the station’s general manager, poured a hefty measure of Scotch over the ice cubes, and handed me the glass. He turned down the volume control on the video monitor and grinned at me. He was a jovial man in his early forties, with the same sort of rugged good looks as the successful businessmen-hero characters that are portrayed in television soap operas – dark hair, slightly rugged features, and skin pockmarked from childhood acne – and he spoke with a smooth confident voice that was given an added warmth by the faintest drawl of an Irish brogue.

  ‘Well, he’s holding up – I think he’ll stay the course! Jesus! I wouldn’t want to be out there with that pack of dogs. He’s doing a fine job. I hate the press. Bad news sells newspapers; that’s all those bastards are out there for, selling their newspapers. The more they can twist Doug’s words into prophesies of doom, the more copies they’ll sell. Bad news is the only thing that sells newspapers – when do you remember reading a newspaper article in support of nuclear power stations?’ He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘Never, that’s when you last read one. Never!’ He pulled hard on his drink.

  It was two weeks since my meeting with Ahmed in the men’s room at the Royal Lancaster, and I was now ten days into my new job: hatchet man for the Secretary of State for Energy. With a faked background of ten years’ training with the consultancy arm of Peat, Marwick and Mitchell, I had been given an office and carte blanche at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
to go anywhere, anytime, and look at anything, in order to produce a report on productivity and cost-efficiency within the British nuclear energy industry. The industry was so vast, and spread out, both geographically and in terms of different companies and organizations, that it was an impossible task for one person. The person responsible for putting me in this job knew that too; it was the Director General of MI5, Fifeshire. He didn’t care a damn about their cost-efficiency: he just cared about keeping them intact.

  This was the third power station I had visited in a week, and I would be visiting the remaining thirteen within the next few weeks.

  ‘What’s your view on the safety of these things?’ I asked Tenney.

  ‘They’re fine – but they’re not infallible. Nothing is. It’s possible for things to go wrong. It would be possible for terrorists to sabotage this place – not easy, but possible. God knows what damage would be done if anything did happen.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘I’m here because I don’t believe it will happen; the odds are small enough to make it an acceptable risk. Any place has hazards, and any job has hazards. I don’t feel I’m any more at risk working here than doing anything else – just as long as no bunch of crazed loonies anywhere out beyond that perimeter fencing is plotting to blow us up!’

  ‘Do you believe what Doug Yeodall was saying about an escape of steam?’

  He paused for some moments. ‘No. That’s crap. Well, I say that’s crap, but I don’t know for sure. No one does. But what we generally think would happen is that that steam would stay together in a concentrated mass, and spread out a few hundred yards in every mile on either side, so it gets wider and wider. There would be so much radioactivity in it, it would be a killer at a hundred miles long and thirty wide. It wouldn’t disperse for weeks, not unless there was a hurricane. But we’re not going to tell the press that! No way! Why worry them? It’s never going to happen.’ He grinned, and chinked the ice cubes in his glass.