Childhood Leukemia Near Nuclear Plants

Abstract

In 1983 a television crew was making a documentary film about the health of the employees of a nuclear fuels reprocessing plant in England on the coast of the Irish Sea. This plant had previously been the site of a facility for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons until it was converted to fuels processing after a fire in the reactor in 1957, during which there had been some release of radioactive material to the environment. The crew, filming in a town called Seascale 3 kilometers from the plant, where a number of the employees lived, was shocked to learn from the townspeople that there had been a surprising number of cases of leukemia among their children. Childhood leukemia is a rare disease, but in this small town there had been five cases in the preceding few years, ten times the number of cases that would have been expected from the average rate elsewhere in Great Britain. The focus of the film was changed from the health of the staff of the nuclear facility to the childhood leukemia in Seascale. Shown on television later that year, it aroused national attention and concern, making its points forcefully with shots of rapidly clicking Geiger counters in the neighborhood of the plant, claims that the coastline there is “the most radioactive environment on earth,” interviews with the anguished parents of sick or deceased children, reports of cows on neighboring farms born with malformations, and scenes of children playing on the beach with the smokestacks of the plant in the immediate background. It also reported that there had been some 300 other accidents at the plant in which radiation had been released, though the amounts were all of lesser magnitude than in the 1957 fire. The process for recovering plutonium from spent fuel from power plants does not recover all the plutonium, and some has to be disposed of as waste, along with other radioactive elements. Those responsible for the design of the plant had made the decision, based on both economic considerations and what was then known about the health hazards of radiation, to discharge much of this radioactive waste into the Irish Sea.