Britain has left Australia with a million-year nuclear legacy

Press, 30 December 1985, Page 17

Britain has left Australia with a million-year nuclear legacy

The report by the Australian Royal Commission into the British nuclear tests in the 1950 s rightly condemns the firing of three of the bombs in unfavourable conditions and also sets the cat among the pigeons on the question of the future clean-up of the range and who should pay for it. However, there are several unexpected facts:

® The Royal Commission found that radiation protection and decontamination procedures were well carried out;

@ British and Australian servicemen were not subject to large radiation doses;

• Australia received more fallout from the French nuclear tests in the Pacific than from the 12 British tests combined;

• Britain offered to clean up the range so that it would be suitable for permanent habitation back in the sixties, but the Australian Safety Committee declined the offer.

• Despite its occasional error and omissions, the records of radiation exposure for Australian and British servicemen do not indicate that they were the victims of cynical disregard by slap-happy British boffins.

All of the higher dose rates went to Aldermaston scientists and the Canberra air crews who flew through the mushroom cloud minutes after detonation. The highest dose of all went to a scientist who returned to the forward area the evening of a blast at Maralinga, to kill the many tethered goats and sheep that were suffering from hideous burns. The reporting of the Royal Commission’s findings has failed to mention the radiological safety procedures and decontamination Eiractices implemented at each of he five series of tests.

The commission concluded that with one exception, these were all carried out at a high level of competence. It states that for the first test at Monte Bello Islands in 1952 “after a person had entered an active area decontamination procedures were tediously and thoroughly carried out.” It was the same for the two Totem Tests at Emu Field in 1953.

Standards were not universally excellent for the second tests at the Monte Bellos in 1956 but they were found to be “generally adequate.”

The Buffalo and Antler series at Maralinga itself were found to be “well planned and sound” and “the best planned and organised of all the atomic tests conducted in Australia.”

Admittedly, this all makes dull reading compared with the more

spectacular conclusions: the shoddy treatment meted out to the Aborigines, the fact that three of the explosions should not have been fired when they were; and, most importantly, the future clean-up of the plutonium contamination on the range.

Several lurid stories contributed to the creation of the Royal Commission last year. The most dramatic was a bedside confession from a British veteran in Adelaide. Literally in his last remaining hours of existence before dying of stomach cancer, he claimed on TV that he had seen the bodies of four dead Aborigines in a crater at Maralinga.

A blind Aboriginal had also given various accounts of a strange phenomenon called “Black Mist” which at one point he claimed led to the death of several of his relatives. Even “The Times” got in

on the act last year, running a series of three articles which left one with the impression that Britain may have used mentally ill patients as radiation guinea pigs at Maralinga.

There were other accounts of craters and even eyes that were so heavily irradiated that they “glowed in the dark.” Not one of these stories stood up after investigation, with the exception of the existence of the Black Mist fallout cloud. The commission concluded that it was impossible to say if anybody suffered because of it.

This is not to deny that serious mistakes and negligent behaviour occurred during the tests — such events have been fully reported by the press — it simply was not as clear-cut as many people would like to believe.

Take, for example, the conclu-

sion of the Royal Commission regarding cancers caused by fallout from the tests. It confirmed that the fallout probably caused an increase in cancers but pointedly declined to specify how many cases were involved. This could leave people with the conclusion that hundreds of cases of cancer stemmed from the tests.

However, a study commissioned by the Government-funded Australian Radiation Laboratory concluded that the number of individuals who contracted cancer as a result of the tests was probably between one and 14.

One fact not mentioned by the commission is that Australians individually have received four times more fallout exposure from the atmosphere bomb tests in the northern hemisphere and the Pacific than from the 12 British bombs exploded in Australia. According to detailed sampling

By

BRUCE PALLING

for the London“Gaurdian.” He is a

television documentary producer who has spent the past nine months as associate producer and research co-ordinator for a Australian TV series about British nuclear tests in Australia.

done by the A.R.L., a single 400 kiloton French blast in 1966 equalled the cumulative British fallout in Australia. This is caused by the fallout particles circling the globe in the stratosphere before eventually dispersing.

These facts do not make the British tests any more justifiable from an Australian point of view. Thirty years on, it is difficult to comprehend how any sovereign Government would invite another country to explode atomic bombs on its territory. Although the initial decision was taken by that most Anglophile of Australian Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Menzies, there was little objection at the time, from either Kliticians or the public. Nobody thered to canvas the opinion of the people most directly affected, the Aborigines. Besides, they did not have the vote in the 19505.

There has been an Aboriginal presence in the Emu/Marafinga area for thousands of years, and only last year thousands of square miles of the surrounding lands were given back to them. Eventually, they will claim the entire Maralinga test area, but not before it is resolved how to clean up the range.

Responsibility for keeping track of the Aborigines during the tests was Australian, and Government officials deliberately obstructed the heroic efforts of the native patrol officers to fulfill their near impossible task.

The most moving story told to the commission was that of Edie Milpuddie, who, along with her husband and two children, strayed oh to the range and slept unnoticed at the edge of a bomb crater. Edie was pregnant at the time and later suffered a miscarriage, although it would be impossible to say if the relatively slight radio-active contamination she suffered was a contributing factor. The Milpuddies, along with several hundred other Aborigines, are now returning to their traditional lands. Many of them lived in squalor at Yalata Mission south of the range. It is the safety of these people rather than the veterans, that will continue to preoccupy the Australian and British Governments.

The biggest single hazard to human health at the range is the plutonium which was scattered over several hundred acres by the numerous "minor trials.” These tests often involved exploding or burning a nuclear bomb without the exact configuration of triggering devices in order to establish how safe they would be in an accident.

The amount of plutonium involved is probably only two kilograms at most — the remaining 20 kilograms used in the tests is buried in large dumps on the site which can be rendered secure with some extra concreting. With its half life of 24,000 years and its tendency to cause cancer once it lodges in the bone, this is the biggest remaining problem on the range. The Australian Weapons Safety Committee, under the influence of Sir Ernest Titteron, is rightly condemned by the Royal Commission for its failure to give adequate consideration to the dangers inherent in allowing such widespread plutonium dispersal.

In order to lessen the risk of humans ingesting any of it, it will be necessary to dump nearly half a million tons of topsoil into a pit and then bury it for perhaps a depth of nine metres. It is doubtful whether this operation, vast enough as it is, would cost $270 million — more likely, less than a quarter. Given the willing complicity of the Australian authorities in the British test programme the counsel representiing the Aborigines at the Royal Commission reached the reasonable conclusion that both Governments should pay for the clean-up. Legally, Britain is absolved of any further costs regarding the clean-up because of Australia’s waiver in the 1960 s and reiteration in 1978, when %kg of plutonium was removed from one of the waste dumps and flown back to Britain.

The clean-up problem was explained quite nicely during the hearings. The area remains potentially dangerous for a million years, and while for the moment it is adequately guarded by two Commonwealth police officers with their four-wheel drive vehicles, a million years is too long to wait for such a hazard to decay into nothing.

Amazingly, Britain wrote to the Australian Safety Committee in the mid-1960s offering to render the range suitable “for permanent human habitation” but the Australians declined the offer. Perhaps, with hindsight, it was unlikely that such an operation would have taken place, but had the British adhered to this offer none of the talk of tens of millions of dollars for a clean-up now would have been necessary. Instead, British officials undertook a rather botched job called “Operation Brumby” which created a bigger mess by ploughing up the contaminated plutonium areas, thus dispersing it even further.