Hadrians Wall Cycleway (Sellafield)

As I rode along the coast the nagging headwind had picked up bringing my progress to a slow grinding crawl but the sun was shining, the sky was a hearty blue and my hangover was lifting, in the distance I could see the towers, buildings and ball shaped objects of my next port of call, things were looking up.

The route led to and then followed a perimeter fence, riding along trying not to draw too much attention too myself by showing to keen an interest, I have to say I was impressed. It was the size of a small town and had a modern efficient look about it; this was Sellafield, the home of all things nuclear and an interesting place for a number of reasons.

In the run up to and during the Second World War it was a Royal Ordinance Factory producing explosives, which it managed with distinction, much to the relief of everyone living in the vicinity.

Come the end of the war, when half of Europe lay in ruins and the Japanese were staggering about in a state of stunned shock wondering what the fuck those bright blinding flashes were and moreover where a couple of their cities had disappeared to, in the corridors of power a cool appraisal was taking place.

After much erudite deliberation it was decided that the ability to outshoot, bomb and generally rearrange your neighbour’s towns and cities just wouldn’t cut it anymore, to be a real player, you needed to be able to give them the ‘bright blinding flash treatment’ and the brighter the better.

Now wanting such a beast and actually acquiring it were two completely different things. The scientific part of the decision making process said, ‘no hassle, the bloke who first split the atom is after all British, we’ll figure it out.’

The politicians on the other hand said. “Shit if this goes wrong it’ll cost us dearly, let’s see if the yanks will sell us one, then if it all goes to rat shit we can blame them.”

In the event the Yanks, once they had stopped laughing and gained a semblance of composure enquired. “Are you shitting us?”

To which Whitehall solemnly replied. “We shit you not.”

In response to which, the Yanks replied. “No way buddy, you already owe us more than you could quantitative ease in a life time.”

And so it was that the ball was firmly bounced back into the politician’s court to a resounding. “The bastards!!”

The buck had finally come to a jarring stop, it was decision time.

On hearing this rather gloomy news the scientific part of the decision making process again volunteered to have a crack at producing an atomic bomb.

To which an exasperated politician lamented. “You don’t get it, you just don’t bloody get it, do you? Have you any concept of what would happen if you inadvertently vaporised half the country?”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about, it would be a total disaster and the loss of life would be appalling, but I don’t believe that would be the outcome.” The somewhat startled scientist stuttered.

“You bet it would be a disaster, a losing the damn election type of disaster, that’s what it would be my friend, anyway, I thought we had already been through this!” Shouted the now seriously exasperated politician swinging round to face the scientist, only to find he had gone.

“Where the hell is he, I don’t recall telling him he could leave?”demanded the now apoplectic politician, glowering at his somewhat bemused secretary.

“He mentioned something about algae and looking for intelligent life forms minister.” The secretary said with a practiced deference.

In the event, not having a lot of choice, it was decided to build the bomb.

Given Sellafield’s exemplary performance during the war, and the fact that it was out of the way it was decided to build the bomb there. The nation’s best and brightest were duly rounded up, briefed, quarantined and after a great deal of pencil sucking, head scratching and scribbling on a big blackboard, came up with the blue print for a bright blinding flash.

With a tingle of excitement this success was jubilantly reported to our minister who said,” You better get on with it and build the damn thing, the Russians are getting away from us.”

The sites name was changed to Windscale, two military plutonium reactors which they named the Windscale Piles where hastily built, tested, found to work and Britain gleefully pulled two fingers up at the Yanks. They’d come of age, or so they thought.

Throughout those heady plutonium charged days the Yanks had also been feverishly scribbling on an even larger blackboard and had come up with and detonated the biggest bright blinding flash the world had ever seen. The site for this test was the tiny idyllic Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The test was set up, the scientists and the other interested parties retreated to what they felt was a safe distance and pushed the button.

For a fraction of a second nothing happened, and then with a roar, the likes of which had never been heard before, the earth moved.  The scale and the ferocity of the blast literally flattened them and after a minute or two of grimly clutching on to the ground they hesitantly stood up and with mouths a gape and ears ringing saw a mushroom cloud 10 miles high with a diameter of 62 miles and a stem an impressive 4 miles wide rising up into the morning sky-this had been a truly monstrous explosion, far and away bigger than they had calculated or anticipated.

It blasted a crater 250ft deep and 1.5 miles in diameter into the seabed, the radiation fallout contaminated the entire area and ships 50 miles upwind of the test were absolutely hammered. Not bothering to look for their hats, which had been lost during the blast, they beat a hasty retreat.

The H bomb had arrived.  Such was the enthusiasm for this explosion in the USA that the newly invented woman’s two piece swim suit was named ‘the bikini’ after the atoll that was almost obliterated, as all the newly exposed flesh apparently ‘just blew the blokes away’.

Meanwhile back in London things were starting to overheat...

“They are really taking the piss now!”Is what our minister is reported to have said when news of this explosion reached him, his Russian counterpart was by all accounts of the same opinion.

“This is turning into something that is starting to resemble a race, something that we don’t want to be involved in, just let them get on with it,” was the view of the decision makers.

It was however not to be, a clause in a nuclear weapons agreement required the UK to be a technological equal, in other words, they had to have the ability to build this bomb.

Once this sobering fact had sunk in the nation’s best and brightest were yet again summonsed, given a blackboard, and told to pull their fingers out.

By this time our team had become quite adept at this sort of thing and it wasn’t long before they realized that this new bomb required tritium rather than plutonium and to produce tritium they needed a new reactor.

Armed with this discovery the head of the research facility went to see our minister who on hearing this news flipped.

“It’s time you people joined the real world, this isn’t fucking America in case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have the time or the money for this type of crap as you well know, now bugger off and improvise!” was the guidance the minister gave him.

Well, that was precisely what he did. He converted one of the plutonium reactors, his biggest concern was that the temperature generated by the new process far exceeded what the reactor had been designed to handle; he none the less gave it a go. The initial trial worked, and so without further ado they launched into full production.

To cut a long story short, it caught fire, not only did it catch fire but it burnt for 48 hours before it was decided that it was actually on fire. Once this unhappy discovery had been made it very soon became apparent that nobody had the faintest idea what to do about it.

The nation’s best and brightest immediately went into pencil sucking, head scratching and scribbling on big blackboard mode, whilst extravagant quantities of radioactivity were silently and lethally pumping into the atmosphere…..

The fire was eventually extinguished, the core of the reactor was sealed off, the doors were shut and they never went back. The official response to this was to pour all the milk produced within 200 miles of the site down the drain, and then get their heads down. The general consensus amongst people in the know was ‘shit that was a close shave.’ This fiasco did little to deter or dampen the desire for all things nuclear and not long after this ‘incident’ Calder Hall, the world’s first nuclear power station, went on line and operated until 2003.

Up until the 1980s the site was guilty of paying shamefully scant attention to safety or the environment and had become a world leader in the field of mishaps and pollution. It all reached a point where something had to be done as things were starting to get seriously out of control and people were starting to get really pissed off with glowing in the dark and having to constantly wash radioactive seagull shit off their cars. A meeting was hastily called, as it was feared that this rising level of discontent might affect their chances of re-election, it was unanimously agreed that the way forward would be to change the sites name as this would throw people off the scent. And so it was that it was renamed Sellafield, ‘and we all fell for it, thinking that it was a new site.’

It was at around this time that the Russians decided to carry out a routine shutdown of one of their reactors and things went catastrophically wrong, the reactor suffered a total meltdown and polluted large parts of Western Russia and the whole of Europe. The world was introduced to Chernobyl. When reports of this disaster first started appearing, a cartoon appeared in one of the UK papers showing one Russian nuclear scientist saying to another. “We have sought advice from the United Kingdom and they suggest we change the name.”

On a more serious note, the West Cumbrian coast and the Irish Sea have been victim to the effects of large and prolonged levels of pollution. The wild life in places has been decimated, the seagulls are radioactive, and a fishing industry on the West Coast is no more as the fish are believed to be contaminated…….

Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to man, a spoonful could wipe out a city, this stuff has a shelf life of over 250 000 years and the government hasn’t managed to keep it safe for even 50 years. Should we be allowing them to have it, given their apparent  lack of concern regarding this industry?

And so it was that with a radiant glow, I headed for Egremont, being careful to avoid the seagulls.