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ARTICLE

SELLARFIELD

Whilst traveling in Great Britain I spent some time in a place called Cumbria, otherwise known as the Lake District. I was there for about six months on an unemployed writing sabbatical. The area is beautiful, with rolling hills and of course the inspirational lakes that invoked such great writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Yeats. However, after wandering around for a while and getting to know the native folk I began to sense a strange air that hung like a blanket over the entire district. The folk are simple people, farms abound everywhere and of course the unemployment rate is high, and there is a great sense of community spirit. But that old film The Stepford Wives kept coming to mind, because there was something that nobody would talk about.

I endeavored to find a job in the area, and somebody suggested that I could wash windows at Sellarfield, the local Nuclear Reactor. I wouldn't, purely because of my own principles, but I was surprised to find that the job payed an extremely good wage, better than those in London. I had also began to notice the adverts on television about Sellarfield. Little birdies and animals of all sorts, nested just outside the entrance crying out, "Come and see our Visitors Centre, for free, and learn all about radiation!" What perturbed me about these adverts is that I had never seen them screened in any other district in England, nor for that matter seen anything about Sellarfield in the newspapers. On top of that, when I got back to London I asked if anybody had ever heard of it, most of them were quite ignorant of its' existence. So I decided to pop along to Sellarfield with a girlfriend of mine, most of her ex lovers in the area had suffered from testicular cancer, but she didn't seem too perturbed about it.

The Visitors Centre was very nice, I had to fill in a card to state what country I was from, and was immediately given the shifty eye when I told them I was from South Africa. We traipsed through the complex with great plastic atoms abound, but what fascinated me was this huge wheel that they had. It moved around and in certain segments they had mounds of natural minerals, soils, and objects. The wheel would turn and these goodies would come to rest under a Geiger Counter, which would of course measure the so called natural radiation in the soil or object. However the readings were a little bit exaggerated. Personally, being an educated person, I was too shit scared to ever pick up a Coke can again, due to the natural radiation prevalent in Aluminium, according to Sellarfield. I suppose the object of the exercise was to make the local community more comfortable with radiation. Mmmmmm? We were then taken on a bus tour, the bus had built in video screens that played out pictures as we passed certain structures outside, the bus drivers' timing was impeccable, and the Hal 2001 A Space Oddysey type voiceover was just perfect. The trip ended all too quickly, and the girlfriend said she had had a nice time. She had a ten year old son, and they had been to this place about 20 times. Well hell, it was about the only thing to do in the area, and it was free, with lunch.

The place had been called Windscales before, but apparently they nearly had a Critical Mass back in the 70's or 80's, so all they did was change the name. I had heard of a television interview with an MP that was on the BBC, the MP was declaring that there was no radiation on Windscales beach when suddenly a Greenpeace representative burst into the studios in a suit and plonked down a bag of sand, taken from the beach, in front of the MP and put a Geiger Counter to it. The counter went of the scale and the MP went green and threw up. I also discovered that back in the 70's there had been about five main roads and ten rail tracks that led through Cumbria from London to Scotland. There is now one main road and two working rail lines, so they say. Nobody wanted to talk about Sellarfield, because it is one of the only industries in the area that provides employment, with astronomical paychecks to add. A few months later I was privy to a traumatic situation. I was seeing a different girlfriend, I left the other one because I was too scared of getting testicular cancer. I went round to this womans' house and she had a friend there in tears. Her husband had died at Sellarfield, there had been a leak in one of the chambers. His friend had said that there was something wrong with this man's suit, their canaries, which they called these small pieces of yellow litmus paper, had turned blue and the chap had died on the spot. They wouldn't let the wife see the body. There was nothing in the newspapers at all, and she was duly compensated. There is tons of plutonium waste stored in glass under the ground at Sellarfield, hence the name Cellar Field. I decided it was time to move!

When I was back in London I read a very small newspaper article about Windscales beach, it was written by Greenpeace. It said that a small single cell radioactive life form, something like algae, was mutating at an incredibly rapid rate along the shores. I haven't heard anything since. Mmmmm?

ANONYMOUS