One of the children, Dorothy Reay, died from leukaemia in 1962, when
she was 10 months old. The other, Vivien Hope, who is now 28 years old,
has been treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Their fathers had worked at
the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria.

Central to the families’ action against the plant’s operator, British
Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), was the work of the epidemiologist Martin Gardner,
who died in January. In 1990, he concluded that children of workers at Sellafield
were more likely than normal to develop leukaemia if their fathers had received
cumulative radiation doses of more than 100 millisieverts (This Week, 24
February 1990). Gardner suggested that radiation could damage DNA in a man’s
sperm and predispose his children to leukaemia. Japanese research on mice
has shown that this is biologically plausible.

In court, BNFL argued that the Gardner study was flawed because it focused
on a small number of cases. The company produced a stream of expert witnesses
who testified that no other reliable scientific studies support Gardner’s
theory. In particular, BNFL pointed out that Gardner’s findings were inconsistent
with the largest study of human exposure to radiation, the follow-up of
the survivors from atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which includes
studies on their children.

The company’s witnesses repeatedly claimed that the cluster of childhood
cancers that has been found around Sellafield could be a chance finding
or the result of an as yet unidentified virus. Leo Kinlen, now with the
Cancer Research Campaign’s epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford,
has argued since 1988 that workers moving to a remote area may carry viruses
that trigger leukaemia, to which local people have no resistance.

The eminent epidemiologist Richard Doll of the Imperial Cancer Research
Fund’s Cancer Studies Unit in Oxford told the judge that the concentration
of cancers around Sellafield was not caused by the fathers’ exposure to
radiation. He said the excess could ‘most reasonably be explained by a combination
of chance and the effect of the sort of socio-demographic factors described
by Kinlen’.

This week civil servants led by a team from the Department of the Environment
have been finalising Britain’s list of proposed exemptions. According to
officials at the department, there are three strong candidates. The first
is the use of CFCs in certain types of inhalers for the treatment of asthma.
The CFC is the propellant that pushes the drug out of the inhaler.

Two other cases for special dispensation are chemicals used in standard
analytical tests. Carbon tetrachloride is widely used in laboratory analyses,
such as tests for hydrocarbon contamination of drinking water. And methyl
chloroform (1,1,1-trichloroethane) is required for a test stipulated under
a European directive on toy safety. It is used in a test of how dangerous
a toy might be if a child sucks it.

Officials in Brussels are to draw up a joint list for the European Community
after examining all the bids from individual countries. British officials
claim that France is likely to put in a bid to have refrigeration classified
as an essential use.

UNEP seems likely to take a tough line, however. Its Technology and
Economic Assessment Panel, which will be the final arbiter, has already
refused to allow any exceptions to the ban on halons despite pleas to be
allowed to use them in certain types of fire extinguishers used on planes
and trains.

France, Britain and Belgium all argued that they should be allowed to
continue to make some halons, claiming they are needed for the new generation
of trains designed to run through the Channel Tunnel.

As the deadlines for ending the manufacture of halons and CFCs nears,
users are being forced to introduce alternatives or depend on recycled stocks
from hastily set up ‘banks’. Even if a specific use is classed ‘essential’,
this will not guarantee continued production if demand is too low for chemicals
companies to bother with.

According to the unit’s postmortem on the spill, the national contingency
plan for cleaning up spills would not have coped if large quantities of the
tanker’s cargo of crude oil had come ashore. In the event, although this was
the world’s eleventh largest spill, less than 1 per cent of the oil reached
shore. The extreme weather and rough seas helped to disperse most of it.

The report from the MPCU, part of the Department of Transport, highlights
other shortcomings in dealing with spills. Computer models that predict and
monitor the fate of oil proved inadequate; so did sensing equipment designed
for aerial surveillance. The unit, which was responsible for managing the
government’s response to the accident, also admits that the attempt to break
up the escaping oil with chemical dispersants was a waste of time and money.

The report reveals that the unit had considered setting the stricken tanker
alight in an attempt to burn off its cargo of 84 700 tonnes of Norwegian
crude oil. It rejected this option almost immediately because the tanker was
too close to houses and to the airport at Sumburgh. A large oil fire so
close to shore would have been ‘unpleasant, if not dangerous and harmful to
health’, says the report.

The unit makes it clear that the national contingency plan will have to be
overhauled to prevent future accidents becoming disasters. ‘If the Braer’s
cargo had been a heavier crude, the cleanup operation would have taken
several months and involved several thousand people. The whole response
operation would have been on a much larger scale . . . the national
contingency plan does not contain any provision for this, nor does it
address the other problems that would arise during a massive, long-term
response operation.’

During the emergency, 120 tonnes of chemical dispersants were sprayed on the
oil from light planes. The use of chemicals is always controversial, but in
this case it was unnecessary said critics. The report remarks that ‘in
hindsight this is probably true; but actions cannot be guided by hindsight’.
The dispersants dealt with around 2000 tonnes of the cargo, but the unit now
agrees that the light oil would probably have dispersed naturally.

The computer models that predict the movement of slicks and the eventual
fate of the oil also come in for severe criticism. The models were not
sophisticated enough to cope with the combination of ‘relatively coarse
tidal and current data’ and a general inability to predict the movement of
oil on the surface in a complex inshore location.

It also points out that the sensing equipment used for aerial surveillance
had its limitations. The surveillance and tracking systems, which made use
of Sideways-Looking Airborne Radar and infra-red and ultraviolet sensors,
could only detect oil on the surface. As yet, there are no commercially
available airborne sensors that can detect oil dispersed in the water
column.

Although the oil was dispersed in the water very rapidly, much of it has
ended up in the soft bottom sediments to the southeast of the Shetland
Islands (This Week, last issue). Another unexpected feature was the
pollution of farmland and inhabited areas near the coast by wind-blown oil
spray.

A team of scientists from China, Britain and the Netherlands paints a gloomy picture of China in the year 2050 in a report published this week by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The report draws on climate data made available for the first time to Western researchers by the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences.

The team assessed the impact of climate change on China according to one of the ‘business as usual’ scenarios from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This assumes that by the end of the next century there will be a doubling of the world’s population, an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide by 180 per cent and a global temperature rise of 2.5 °C.

In this scenario, China would become much warmer and drier. Large areas of steppe would turn to desert and the biodiversity of the Tibetan alpine ecosystems would dwindle.

The accompanying half-metre rise in sea level would flood hundreds of thousands of hectares of the fertile alluvial soils of the east China plains, placing major coastal cities at risk.

Climate change on this scale would significantly reduce rice yields and wheat production, and soya bean and sorghum production cut by nearly half.

‘The spectre of famine may once again haunt China and could destabilise future world food security,’ says Adam Markham, head of pollution at WWF-International.

While temperate forests account for about half of the Earth’s forest
cover, their disappearance has not brought the same protests as the destruction
of tropical rainforests. Yet some temperate forests are as rich in species
as tropical rainforests. They may have fewer species of trees but they often
support a huge diversity of other organisms. The leaf litter of the forests
of the Pacific northwest is particularly rich in arthropods, for example,
and a single Douglas fir has been found to support more than 150 species
of mycorrhizal fungi.

The WWF’s report*, published last week, is a grim catalogue of disappearing
forests. Pollution, forest fires and cutting for firewood all contribute
to the loss. But by far the greatest threat is the upsurge in logging for
the pulp industry.

Most governments are reluctant to acknowledge the problem, says the
report. They point to the fact that the area of temperate forests has remained
stable – or even increased – over the past 50 years. ‘This statistic masks
regional losses and a worldwide loss of quality of forests,’ says Nigel
Dudley, the author of the report. ‘Primary forests have been cleared and
replaced with plantations which do not support the same range of species
or ecological functions.’

Temperate forest includes familiar deciduous woodlands such as those
dominated by oak or beech as well as the great coniferous forests of Russia
and Canada and corresponding southern latitudes. The definition also includes
the montane forests of the Andes, Southeast Asia and Africa and the pine
forests of India, Pakistan and China.

The narrow zones of montane forests are particularly vulnerable. Those
in the Colombian and Ecuadorean Andes, for example, are some of the most
endangered tracts in the world. In such regions forest is often lost through
population pressure, with the poor forced to farm in more marginal lands
higher up the mountains.

But the biggest threat to temperate forests is logging. Chile provides
a classic example. Between 1973 and 1990, Chile’s forest exports increased
from $39.1 million to $855 million. The result has been widespread devastation.
‘Chile’s forestry policy has often been considered a model of economic success,’
says Antonio Lara, a Chilean forestry expert from the Council for the Defence
of Flora and Fauna (CODEF). ‘But it has promoted the conversion of native
forests to plantations and has been ineffective in developing sustainable
management for natural forests.’

Almost all Chile’s 50 species of trees grow nowhere else. Since the
1970s many biologically rich areas, some with as many as 20 tree species
and 120 flowering plants, have been replaced with plantations.

Nearly 20 per cent of Chile’s forest is now under plantation, mostly
with the introduced Monterey pine, Pinus radiata. Although this now provides
most of the logs for export, the loss of native forest continues. According
to Lara, native species provided 52 per cent of wood chips exported in 1990.
Twenty per cent of this came from native old-growth forest. Production of
wood chips has increased fivefold since 1986; 90 per cent of the chips go
to Japan.

The logging companies have now set their sights on Russia, which contains
95 per cent of the timber reserves of the former Soviet Union and 42 per
cent of the world’s tem-perate forests – mostly pine, fir, spruce and larch.
The forest is home to many important species of animals, including bears
and many rare birds.

Several multinational timber companies, including Mitsubishi of Japan
and Hyundai of South Korea, are already active in Russia. A Japanese joint
venture sawmill has opened in Lidoga in the Russian far east. In 1991, a
group of 10 Japanese trading firms signed a five-year agreement with Russia
to harvest Siberian timber in a deal worth $1.4 billion.

The American timber giant Weyerhauser is also negotiating a joint venture
with Russia along the coast of the Khabarovsk Krai in the Russian far east.
This region contains extensive tracts of old-growth forest which, as well
as being important ecologically, is the home of the indigenous Orochi people,
who fish along the coast.

Western Europe has almost no original forest. Only 8 per cent of Britain
is forested, one of the lowest figures in Europe. Native woodlands in Scotland
and Sweden have been reduced to about 1 per cent. Around 12 000 hectares
of the ancient Caledonian pine forest remains in Scotland and even this
is threatened. According to Martin Mathers of WWF Scotland, much of what
was once Caledonian pine forest is now planted with sitka spruce or lodgepole
pine. Planting these rather than native Scots pine is ‘illogical’, he says.
‘They have not adapted to the ecology of Scotland.’

*Forests in Trouble, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland.

Occupational health experts need such information to know how effective
protective clothing is and whether working practices are providing sufficient
levels of safety. This is important for farmworkers exposed to powerful
and potentially hazardous agro-chemicals, such as those involved in dipping
sheep.

The system, which is undergoing field trials at present, was demonstrated
this week when the executive’s new Occupational Medicine and Hygiene Laboratory
in Sheffield was formally opened by the Duke of Edinburgh.

First, fluorescent markers are added to the chemical being used. After
using the material, the farmworker sits in a rig fitted with fluorescent
strip lighting housed in the back of a van. A video camera records an image
of the worker which is then analysed by an image-processing computer.

The glow created by the fluorescent marker indicates where the chemical
has come into contact with the skin and clothes of the subject. The intensity
of the glow indicates how much exposure has taken place. The strip lights
are arranged in the shape of a dodecahedron because this was the closest
to a spherically symmetric source which is equally distant from the subject
all around.

‘We can solve problems by ourselves,’ said Arman Abagyan, chief scientist
at the Vniiaes Institute in Moscow. ‘We read about Western help in the newspapers
but unfortunately we do not feel that help.’ He listed his priorities as
computers, diagnostic systems for testing the state of metals exposed to
radiation and automated electronic instrumentation. ‘After three years
of discussions maybe some help will come soon,’ he said.

Most Western concern has centred on the 15 RBMK reactors in Russia and
Lithuania, which are of the same design as the one that exploded at Chernobyl
in 1986, and the 24 VVER pressurised water reactors, which are spread right
across the old Eastern bloc.

‘Upgrading our stations to Western safety standards is very expensive.
So far we have been using our own national resources. If the Western governments
stop just talking and give real assistance, we won’t reject that help. It
would enable us to solve matters more quickly,’ said Eric Pozdyshev, president
of the Nuclear Utility of the Russian Federation.

Nuclear companies in the West have been queueing up for contracts to
assess and upgrade reactors in Eastern Europe. Hundreds of millions of pounds
were promised by the G7 group of industrialised nations at the Munich summit
(This Week, 18 July), but very little has so far materialised. This week,
the European Commission is hosting a meeting in Brussels to help coordinate
the rash of bids now on offer.

The Commission is poised to sign a contract for 4 million Ecus ( Pounds
sterling 2.8 million) to fund a safety audit of RBMK reactors, an initiative
led by Britain’s AEA Technology and involving a consortium of nuclear regulators,
organisations and companies drawn from four European Community countries
as well as Sweden, Finland and Canada.

This project, which is expected to last between 12 and 18 months, has
been waiting for the Commission to approve funding for more than a year.
A senior Brussels official confirmed that agreement in principle on the
funding had been made in July. All that remained was the relevant signature
from the right directorate on the contract. ‘It will be done very soon,
there’s no doubt of that,’ he said.

The software has allowed engineers to locate and remotely inspect welds
on the two steel pressure vessels at the heart of the Bradwell power station
on the southeast coast of England. Bradwell, operated by Nuclear Electric,
is the longest serving of Britain’s twin-reactor Magnox stations and reached
the end of its design life (30 years) in April.

It has been closed down while Nuclear Electric carries out safety checks
required by Britain’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. Nuclear Electric
want to run the station for a further five years.

In the past, the NII has accepted a combination of theoretical calculations
and accurate visual inspections to show the pressure vessels are safe.
This time, it demanded a more exhaustive check, so Nuclear Electric’s engineers
are using ultrasound to inspect the internal welds of the pressure vessels.
Nothing comparable has ever been attempted on such an old nuclear power
plant.

Gaining access to the highly radioactive interior of the pressure vessel
is only possible using a remote-controlled manipulator – the Snake. It enters
the vessel through one of the standpipes through which fuel is loaded and
removed from the reactor core. The end of the hydraulic Snake carries a
camera and can be fitted with other equipment such as Carborundum brushes
to clean the weld surfaces and ultrasound probes to monitor weld condition.

Engineers sit with their computer control system 10 metres above the
top of the pressure vessel, watching on their screens a computer simulation
of what is happening inside the pressure vessel. The software, initially
developed for moon landings, helps them position the Snake and its probes
with pinpoint accuracy.

Work on one of the vessels is already complete and the NII this week
gave clearance for the restart of reactor number two. Work on reactor number
one is under way and should be completed next month.

The European fast reactor programme – led by Britain, France and Germany
– had hoped to carry out important research at the fast reactor research
centre at Dounreay in Scotland, which is operated by AEA Technology. This
would have covered the instrumentation, core layout, fuel design and reliability
of equipment for a future generation of fast breeders. The research would
culminate in the commissioning of the first European fast reactor (EFR)
early next century.

But Tim Eggar, the energy minister, is sticking to the government’s
original decision to end public funding of the PFR in 1994. Britain’s state-owned
nuclear industry had asked the government if it could pay to keep the reactor
operating for a further three years out of its own budget. But constraints
on public spending ruled this out, the minister said. The PFR costs about
£60 million a year to run and generates around £12 million in
sales of electricity. Britain’s fast reactor programme has been running
for nearly 40 years at a total cost of over £4 billion.

Colin Gregory, director of the fast reactor research programme at Dounreay,
says that the EFR will inevitably take longer to construct and cost more
without more time for research at Dounreay. ‘We will have to build in more
conservatism to the design, it will be harder to make the safety arguments
and we won’t be so certain on reliability.’

Reprocessing will continue to deal with the spent fuel taken out of
the reactor. Government funding for this runs out in 1997, but AEA Technology
has commercial contracts, chiefly from overseas research reactors, that
will keep reprocessing going after that.

The closure of the PFR also causes problems for Germany’s nuclear industry.
AEA Technology recently signed a deal to store 200 fuel assemblies from
Germany at Dounreay for three or four years, then convert them for use in
the PFR. The assemblies were built for Germany’s SNR 300 fast reactor at
Kalkar, which was built but never licensed to operate. Now Germany will
have to decide what to do with the fissile material.

The end of the fast reactor programme will also leave the British government
and the nuclear industry with the problem of how to deal with its plutonium
stockpile. The nuclear industry routinely reprocesses spent fuel to recover
plutonium. This was destined for future fast reactors.

By 2000, this stockpile is expected to be 62 tonnes. Some could be reused
in conventional reactors, but most is surplus to requirements. The government’s
review of the nuclear power industry, scheduled for 1994, will have to consider
what to do with Britain’s unwanted plutonium mountain.