The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

I

n the early 1950s, village schools on

the west Cumbrian coast grappled

with an unusual problem. They

struggled to recruit physics teach-

ers. It wasn’t the children putting

off the candidates, though, it was

their parents. Britain’s first indus-

trial nuclear complex had been

founded in 1950 at Windscale —

now known as Sellafield — a remote

spot about ten miles south of White-

haven. Hundreds of Britain’s brightest

university graduates — physicists, chem-

ists and engineers — were brought in from

around the country to run the new reac-

tors.

Teachers, used to children of farmers,

suddenly found the homework they set

was rejected as too basic. Parents were

giving children their own assignments.

This was a brave new world. In the

wake of the Second World War, with its

economy in tatters and its empire slip-

ping out of its grasp, Britain was in need

of a boost. Nuclear science was seen as

essential to restoring its place in the

world order. The first two reactors at

Windscale were built to provide fuel for

atomic weapons. But in 1956 a new reac-

tor, called Calder Hall, was constructed

there. It was the world’s first nuclear

plant to generate electricity.

Nearly 70 years later Britain is again in

need of a boost and once again, the gov-

ernment has turned to nuclear power.

“Nuclear is coming home,” Boris John-

son said on Thursday, announcing that

up to eight nuclear power stations would

be approved this decade: the central

tenet of his new energy security strategy.

“In the country that was the first to split

the atom, the first truly to harness its

power to light our homes and drive our

factories, we will once again lead the

way,” he said.

But if Johnson is going to use nuclear

history to justify his strategy, perhaps he

needs to look a little deeper, because

Windscale was also the site of one of the

world’s first serious nuclear accidents.

In October 1957, a fire raged for three

days in one of the reactors after changes

to increase production. Through the

heroism of staff, and a significant degree

of luck, the catastrophe was contained.

But significant radiation was released.

Milk from cows within 200 square miles

was contaminated. In 1982 officials esti-

mated 260 people developed cancer and

32 people died as a result.

The two first reactors at Windscale

were closed, but the clean-up is still

continuing today. Last November the top

of the chimney in which the fire blazed

was removed as part of the demolition.

The renowned nuclear historian Serhii

Plokhy describes the episode in a forth-

coming book and points out: “The exist-

ing nuclear industry is an open-ended

liability.” No nuclear power station has

ever been fully decommissioned.

In Atoms and Ashes, Plokhy, 64, a

Ukrainian historian at Harvard, explores

the causes and consequences of Wind-

scale and five other nuclear accidents: at

Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954, Kyshtym

in Russia in 1957, Three Mile Island in the

US in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986

and Fukushima in Japan in 2011.

While most of these accidents took

place in the formative years of nuclear

science, Plokhy argues they could easily

happen again. “Technology was

BRITAIN’S NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS

Oldbury

Sizewell

Hartlepool

Torne s s

Trawsfynydd

Wylfa

Heysham I, II

Berkeley

BC

Closed

Operational Proposed

In construction

Hinkley PointA

Calder Hall,

Sellafield

Chapelcross

Hunterston A, B

Dungeness

Bradwell, B

ABC

Source: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial StrategyAB

E

xhausted after three

sleepless days in labour,

Jane O’Hara, then 34,

screamed and burst into

tears when midwives

and doctors at Harrogate

District Hospital told her the

natural birth she wanted was

not going to happen.

She had begged doctors

who suggested a caesarean

section to let her keep trying

for longer than they were

comfortable with. But four

hours on, she was making no

progress and the machines

monitoring baby Ivy’s heart

showed she was struggling.

O’Hara remembers the

midwife’s desperate plea: “At

this point, Jane, we just need

a healthy baby. All you need

to be thinking about is your

baby.” She ended up needing

life-saving surgery and 11

pints of blood after a severe

haemorrhage. Mercifully, Ivy

was fine and is now a healthy

12-year-old. Jane spent a week

recovering in intensive care.

In recent weeks, the NHS

In 2007, the NCT signed a

consensus statement with the

Royal College of Midwives

and Royal College of

Obstetricians and

Gynaecologists that called on

hospitals actively to pursue

more normal births — its goal

was for 60 per cent to be

vaginal. Both colleges have

said they regret the impact

this may have had on the care

of women and babies.

The NCT claims it has

moved on, pointing to an

overhaul of its curriculum for

class leaders as evidence that

it is focusing more on safety.

But it is still facing

questions over how some of

those leading its classes have

been promoting normal birth

for years, leaving some

women feeling like failures

when things don’t go to plan.

According to Katie Kelly, a

former NCT teacher from

Guildford, Surrey, the

organisation has the best

interests of parents and

babies at its core, but there a

minority of class teachers

working under the umbrella

of the NCT continue to

promote the ideology. “There

is a group of teachers, and I

think it is getting smaller, who

have their beliefs and think

that is what women should

have,” says Kelly. “Women

are in a very vulnerable place

The National Childbirth Trust says

it no longer promotes ‘natural’ birth.

But that’s not the message all mothers

are getting, says Shaun Lintern

... and some of the teachers
are charismatic.”
Becoming an NCT teacher
involves studying for a one-
year diploma in adult
education on a scheme run in
partnership with Worcester
University, costing £9,250.
Once qualified, course
teachers are paid as much as
£39 an hour in London and
between £18.60 and £30.20
outside the capital. In some
areas, courses cost parents-
to-be more than £300.
According to Kelly, at no
point during her training did
the NCT emphasise natural
births over other modes of
delivery. “The NCT ... has
something good and
important at its heart, it
wants to improve things for
parents and babies. There is a
problem but I don’t know...
how you can micromanage
each group to see what the
teachers are saying,” she says.
Rebecca Matthews, 36, a
lecturer from Oxfordshire,
paid £190 to attend NCT
classes while pregnant with
her first child in 2015. She
says there was a “heavy
emphasis” on natural
childbirth.
“Pain relief was discussed
as something to avoid, as it
would lead to a ‘cascade of
interventions’ — a concept
I’ve since learnt has no

evidence base,” she says.

Caesareans were presented

as something “we should do

all we could to avoid”.

Matthews later developed

pre-eclampsia, a serious

blood-pressure condition,

and had to have an

emergency C-section. She felt

she had failed. Later she

complained to the NCT and

was refunded half of her fees.

She believes women are

being “set up with unrealistic

birth expectations”, which

increases the risk of poor

mental health, and is writing

to the Charity Commission

with her concerns after

collating experiences from

women online.

In response to the

Shrewsbury report, the NCT

has removed documents

promoting normal birth from

its website. McConville says

the framework governing its

antenatal classes was

refreshed in 2019 and expects

course leaders to cover all

ways of giving birth and

outcomes women might

experience.

O’Hara still worries women

can receive inadequate

preparation for birth. “As a

middle-class perfectionist, I

was taught how to give birth.

But then the rubber meets

the road and it’s not like

that at all.”

I believed I

had more

control over

my birth than

I actually did

services that we expect, and

we take this very seriously.”

Yet the NCT is having to

outrun a long history of

pushing the natural birth

agenda as part of a movement

against increasing rates of

caesareans in developed

countries. Founded in 1956 as

the Natural Childbirth

Association, its first president

was the controversial

obstetrician Grantly Dick-

Read, who claimed fear was a

cause of problems giving

birth and that any pain could

be controlled by the women

themselves.

I was brainwashed by the NCT — and nearly died

has been rocked by the

conclusions of an inquiry into

the worst maternity disaster

in its history: 201 babies and

nine mothers died and

another 94 babies suffered

brain damage as a result of

avoidable poor care at

Shrewsbury and Telford

Hospital NHS Trust. This has

been linked to a culture of

promoting natural — that is,

vaginal — birth and avoiding

caesarean sections. In the

early 2000s, Shrewsbury was

fêted for having England’s

lowest C-section rates.

Blame thus far has been

aimed largely at the NHS —

but parents have started

speaking out online about

what they believe has been

the role of the National

Childbirth Trust (NCT), a

leading provider of antenatal

classes in Britain, in

promoting vaginal births.

“I can absolutely point to

key decisions that I made that

were influenced by the NCT’s

mantra. I was led into a

position where I believed I

had more control over my

birth than I actually did,” says

O’Hara, who is now a

professor of healthcare

quality and safety at the

University of Leeds. She

believes she was a victim of a

“normal birth” ideology that

was heavily promoted at the

NCT classes she attended.

“The NCT made me believe

that I can control things that

aren’t controllable, and that

affected the decisions I made.

I have nothing but love for the

people at the hospital. Their

only fault was trying to give

me what I wanted.”

The NCT’s remains the

class of choice for parents —

in 2020-21 it taught about

70,000 — and it has tried to

distance itself from the

“normal birth” ideology.

“The NCT exists to support

parents to have the best

possible experience of

pregnancy, birth and early

parenthood,” says Angela

McConville, its chief

executive. “We are not here

to promote one way over

another, but to ensure

parents have access to

evidence-based information

and a network of peer and

specialist support. It saddens

us greatly if we hear that

someone hasn’t had the

positive experience of our Jane O’Hara was in intensive care after Ivy’s birth

The Fukushima disaster in Japan forced 155,000 people to leave their homes

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/REUTERS

22 The Sunday Times April 10, 2022

NEWS REVIEW

The warnings

from history

raised its reliance on its highly polluting

“dirty” coal and Russian gas. “Today’s

war in Ukraine is at least partially funded

by the money that Germany continues to

pay Russia for natural gas,” he says.

Once nuclear stations are built, they

should be operated for their full lifetime,

and then safely decommissioned, he

says. As he writes in Atoms and Ashes:

“We cannot afford to lose the more than

10 per cent of world electricity produced

with little or no carbon emission and fill

the gap with fossil fuels. Nor can we aban-

don the industry to its current state of

economic hardship, because that would

only mean inviting the next accident.”

This is a key point. In Britain, the seven

reactors in operation are between 27 and

46 years old and many have had their

retirement postponed. All but one, Size-

well B in Suffolk, are due for decommis-

sioning by the end of the decade. Hinkley

Point B, in Somerset, which was sched-

uled for closure in 2016, is still running.

But it will be closed by July after cracks

were discovered in the graphite core.

“This is one of the most dangerous peri-

ods, given how little money there is in the

nuclear industry and the old reactors,”

says Plokhy. Instead of spending on new

reactors, he says, funding should go on

making sure plants see out the rest of

their life safely, while the world invests in

renewable energy to replace them.

Then there is the nuclear waste. At the

moment, nearly all the country’s radio-

active waste is stored at Sellafield, at huge

cost. The government has been consult-

ing for 15 years on plans to create a

“geological disposal facility”, a £12 billion

bunker 1,000m below ground to store

radioactive waste for eternity. Discus-

sions are under way with Copeland bor-

ough council, the authority where Sella-

field is sited, to build the bunker.

Previous discussions fell apart in 2013.

Johnson wants to approve the new

power stations by the end of the decade,

but they are unlikely to be built within the

next 20 years. By the time they are ready,

the problem may have disappeared.

As Plokhy puts it: “In terms of the new

reactors, in terms of the future, my argu-

ment is that we have to look in a different

direction.”

Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to

Fukushima, by Serhii Plokhy, is published

by Allen Lane on May 17

The PM wants to keep the lights on with eight

new atomic plants. He’s in denial if he thinks the

catastrophes of the past won’t happen again, the

nuclear historian Serhii Plokhy tells Ben Spencer

improved as a result, and every accident

contributed to the shaping of subsequent

safety procedures and culture,” he

writes. “And yet nuclear accidents occur

again and again. Many of the political,

economic, social, and cultural factors

that led to the accidents of the past are

still with us today, making the nuclear

industry vulnerable to repeating old mis-

takes in new and unexpected ways.”

Some 440 nuclear reactors are in oper-

ation, providing about a tenth of the

world’s electricity, but the phasing out of

fossil fuels is exerting pressure for a new

wave of nuclear. This, Plokhy argues,

would be a mistake. Nuclear energy, he

states, remains “inherently unsafe”.

After Chernobyl — which is estimated

to have killed anywhere between 4,000

and 50,000 people — safety was signifi-

cantly tightened. “The nuclear industry

persuaded the rest of the world that the

lessons of Chernobyl had been learnt,

and nothing of the kind could happen

again,” Plokhy writes. “It was wishful

thinking at best.” In 2011 the Fukushima

nuclear accident forced 155,000 people

to leave their homes, 37,000 of whom

remain displaced.

Where does this leave the UK? Johnson

is trying to boost energy independence

because of the Ukraine war. But, speak-

ing from Boston, Massachusetts, Plokhy

insists Johnson is making a mistake. He

points to the recent experience of his

own country, where Russian troops have

occupied the defunct Chernobyl works

and the facility at Zaporizhzhya,

Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant.

Neither occupation has led to disaster,

but it could have been different. “The

news coming from Ukraine suggests that

any one of them could be turned into a

sitting dirty bomb,” he says.

What about the claims of the nuclear

industry that equipment is safer than

ever? James Murphy, the chief strategy

officer at the National Nuclear Labora-

tory, says: “Nuclear energy is the safest

form of energy in the world, based on the

number of people who have been injured

or killed as a consequence of generating

or constructing that energy.”

A

ccording to 2012 analysis by Sta-

tista, only 90 people had been

killed per thousand terawatt-hours

of energy produced from nuclear,

compared with 150 per thousand

TWh for wind, if construction accidents

are included. (For coal the rate stretches

to 100,000.) This, though, uses official

figures, which put the death toll from

Fukushima at one and Chernobyl at 31.

Plokhy said this type of argument

echoed the one made by scientists down

the generations, pointing to Soviet claims

in the 1980s that an explosion in an RBMK

reactor — the type used in Chernobyl —

would be impossible.

“History doesn’t end just because you

don’t want it to continue,” he says. Even-

tually mistakes will be made, he believes,

with huge consequences. And the more

plants in operation, the higher the proba-

bility of accidents. He pointed to research

by Trevor Sweeting and Thomas Rose,

scientists at University College London,

which estimates a core meltdown acci-

dent will take place every 37,000 reactor-

years. If they are right, we will see a seri-

ous accident in the next 15 years.

New technology — the low-cost modu-

lar reactors that will form the next gener-

ation of plants — is potentially safer. But it

comes with new risks. “There is no such

thing as new technology starting its

career without major screw-ups,”

Plokhy says.

That does not mean, however, the

world should pull out of nuclear power.

Plokhy is critical of Germany’s decision

to rapidly close its nuclear plants in the

aftermath of Fukushima, a move that

Bikini Atoll, March 1, 1954

The US test of a hydrogen bomb in

the Marshall Islands was an

environmental disaster.

Kyshtym, September 29, 1957

A tank of liquid nuclear waste

exploded at the Mayak nuclear

weapons plant in Russia.

Windscale, October 10, 1957

Radiation spread across Cumbria

and beyond, linked to at least 260

cases of cancer.

Three Mile Island, March 28, 1979

A partial meltdown in Pennsylvania,

led to 150,000 people voluntarily

leaving the area.

Chernobyl, April 26, 1986

The world’s worst nuclear disaster

forced the resettlement of about

400,000 people.

Fukushima, March 11, 2011

A huge tsunami flooded the plant in

Japan, leading to three meltdowns

and three hydrogen explosions.

FALLOUT AND

MELTDOWNS