Chernobyl comes to Paradise

Sunday Times Magazine, March 15, 1987

On 26 April 1986, the worst nuclear power accident in history occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine) when disregard for safety procedures led to explosions and a fireball which blew the steel and concrete lid off reactor 4. The accident killed more than 30 people immediately; some 135,00 people were evacuated from the surrounding area. For years the fallout continued to kill trees and animals, contaminate crops, and cause illness and deformity in people. The local ecosystem was most profoundly affected, but the impact of Chernobyl was felt across the entire northern hemisphere. A year after the accident, Jim Crace reported on the plight of Welsh hill farmers in the aftermath of Chernobyl, and on their fears that a local power station might prove even more of a menace.

This was my last piece of journalism, Jim Crace recalls, written between the hardback and paperback publication of Continent and showing a favourite theme of my novels: landscape, and a community under pressure. The original article was accompanied by evocative black-and-white photographs by Peter Marlow.

Somebody not a local Welshman has scratched the word PARADISE on a car-park slate by the Celyn reservoir, in the Snowdonia National Park. Few of the many outsiders who pause for a while on the lake shore as they drive seawards towards holidays in Porthmadog or Dolgellau would argue with such a judgement. Here are the glistening waters, the multi-tinted mountains of one of Britains greatest landscapes. But listen to the local Jeremiahs. For them particularly since the rains of early may last year the land is tainted, the paradise lost.

When I was at school in the valley there were 65 pupils, and the chapel was full every Sunday night, says 73-year-old Robyn Jones who, together with his son, Elfin, farms 428 acres on the Ty-nant stream above the lake. Though we took our water from the stream in a kettle, we could make the best cup of tea you ever drank, thats for sure. He points to the scattered outcrops of brick, the makeshift sheepfolds, which punctuate the hillsides. Each was once a family home. But now, its all gone or its under water, he says. They flooded the valley and its 18 farms in 1963 to provide free water to Liverpool from the poor country of Meirionydd. The chapels closed; the schools gone; and theres pollution in our hills. The reservoir was stocked with 60,000 brown trout some years ago. But I havent seen a brownie down there for ages. Not a single one. All dead. Acid rain. Theres no telling what the rain might bring these days or the damage it might do.

Robyn Jones looks heavenwards with transparent dismay. Behind him, in a stone outhouse, officials from the Welsh office are running a hand-held scintillation meter which measures radioactivity over the rumps of Ty-nant lambs. All 54 are judged to be clean. A certificate is issued and the lambs can now go to Ruthin market for slaughter. Not before time, says Elfin Jones. It is seven months to the day since Chernobyl came to Wales.

It was on Friday May 2 that the cloudborne remnants from the explosion of reactor number 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power station began to fall as rain over Snowdonia. On April 30, four days after the accident, the weathermen predicted that south-westerly winds cutting across the North Sea would confine radioactive fallout to Poland and Scandinavia. And, according to Britians National Radiological Protection Board, if anything did come our way, it would be so diluted as to be effectively irrelevant.

The weathermen were wrong. The winds changed. And seven days after Chernobyl the clouds burst over the Celyn reservoir and the hillsides of North Wales and Cumbria. The weekend of rain deposited a pot-pourri of over 30 nuclear contaminants on the two National Parks. Iodine 131 the most immediate and deadly of the isotopes had, with a half-life of under nine days, largely decayed during its progress over northern Europe. What did remain in the Welsh rain, however (at levels which would add 15 per cent to the yearly human dosage of background radiation) were the caesiums 134 and 137. Once ingested, they are easily dissolved and distributed throughout the body. Nobody is certain what human damage they can cause.

The locals thought little of it, particularly when the Secretary of State for the Environment, Kenneth Baker, told the House of Commons on the following Tuesday that radioactivity was nowhere near the levels at which there is any hazard to health. The rains of early May were forgotten and the business of lambing got underway.

And then, on June 20, came the news that has disrupted and dismayed the farming community of North Wales ever since. Michael Jopling, the minister of Agriculture, reported to the Commons that the monitoring of young unfinished lambs not yet ready for market in certain areas of Cumbria and North Wales indicates higher levels of radio-caesium than in the rest of the country. The figures were rather more alarming than the minister was prepared to admit. Random sampling of sheep muscle and liver in Gwynedd had revealed levels of caesiums up to 4216 becquerels per kilogram. The action level for lamb or mutton (rather than a safety or danger level) had been established by British governments as 1000bqs/kg. In Sweden the level had been set at a more cautious 300bqs/kg.

The half-life of caesium 137, the predominant isotope found in the samples, was known to be approximately 30 years. But the assumption was that caesium 137 in a living body would be naturally excreted. Ninety days was the more conservative estimate. However, the farmers of Wales were happy to believe the whisper from Whitehall that their sheep would be clean within 30 days. In the meantime, the Ministry of Agriculture had little choice but to prevent more Welsh lamb from entering the food chain. There would be, therefore, a ban on the movement and slaughter of sheep within parts of Snowdonia (and Cumbria) for 21 days. Robyn Joness flocks, together with those of 5100 other Welsh farmers with holdings from Holy Island in the west to Lake Vyrnwy in the south to Rhyl on the northern coast, were to be as confined and inert as camels in a safari park.

The year 1986 had not been a good one for Welsh hill farmers. The droughts of the previous summer and an unusually severe winter had delayed the spring growth of both lambs and grazing. Despite a system of hill compensatory allowances and price guarantees, many of the smaller holders described themselves as under pressure.

Were in the survival business, says Bernard Malethan who, with the help of his wife Glenys, Wyn the YTS, and a shed of ageing machinery, breeds from 500 hardy pure-bred Welsh mountain ewes on poor-quality land to the south of Colwyn Bay. The squeeze is on. The banks are getting jittery. Land prices are tumbling. There is no wealth in these farms. Were not complaining. Our community is close-knit, slightly isolated, yet going well. But life is not easy for us as it might be for some farmers in the Home Counties. For him and his colleagues the working vehicle is more likely to be a J-registered Land Rover or a converted Post Office van than the newish Range Rover usually associated with farming life. Their homes are mostly plain, with few signs of conspicuous consumption, though enriched by the smells of solid fuel stoves and drying waterproofs, and by scenery of such magnificence that there is hardly a day in the year when the view from their windows is not punctuated by the red and blue cagoules of the tourists who count the cynefins (or sheep-walks) as an extension of the public domain.

You cant eat scenery and you cant bank fresh air, say the farmers; yet the benefits of landscape and culture are clearly powerful inducements to remain in the hills. It is a land of stone walls, wind and (most of all) a rain which echoes the curiously watery cadences of the Welsh tongue. Here are found the only two constituencies with Plaid Cymru MPs. Even though it is generally English voices that are heard behind the counters of shops and hotels or living off such fireside talents as pottery and candlestick making, the children of these newcomers are Welsh within a year. They attend local schools where everything from physics to French is taught in the language of heaven.

Im embarrassed by city friends who say, "My God, youve got a hard life!" says John Hooson, who farms at Pentrefoelas. Compared to what? Compared to people in London, living under the threat of redundancy and travelling to and from work for two hours on the train each day? How does that measure up, he wonders, against his neighbourhood, his lifestyle? There was one crime last year in Pentrefoelas, the theft of a goose. The resident policeman despite 18 road accidents on the A5 and the 22,000 holiday-makers who visited the villages public lavatory on one particularly busy August weekend had so little to do that he was moved elsewhere.

It is true that life is not often leisurely. There is the routine of husbandry, the cycle of seasonal appointments, lambing, ditching, hedging, shearing, cutting silage, working dogs, maintaining ancient stone walls against the pressure of wind, ramblers and (not infrequently in North Wales) the occasional earth tremor. But farmers talk of being woven into the landscape, of having soil in their blood. I would not claim to be downtrodden, says John Hooson. Our life is tough. We grapple with the elements, single handed. But we have chosen to stay. We are volunteers.

John and Nesta Hooson were in Venice when the restrictions were imposed. John spotted a map of Wales in a British newspaper with a shaded area covering Pentrefoelas. He returned to Wales expecting a short-lived disruption. He was to be disappointed. After three weeks the restrictions were reimposed. Caesium levels in lambs were not dropping as predicted. They were rising. Readings of more than 4100bqs/kg were to be recorded in Meironydd, Aberconwy, and Montgomery in mid-September, three months after the end of the supposed half-life of caesium in live sheep.

By mid-July we had begun to get nervous, says Hooson, who farms in the traditional hafod and hendre (upland and lowland) style, with 500 acres of the poorest, grade five, land around his 12^th-century farmhouse, Plas Iolyn. Still, compare to the Bhopal disaster, this was a mere hiccup. But how did officialdom cope? They were running about like chickens with their heads cut off.

He presents a picture of husbandry during a normal year with spring lambs progressing from birth to marketplace on a carefully modulated conveyor belt. The farmer is constantly removing mouths. The lambs that are mature in June are sold, and grazing is freed for the smaller lambs to reach maturity in July. Now we couldnt move sheep off our land, says Hooson. What happens in these circumstances? The mature lamb is competing with its siblings for food. It loses bloom. It deteriorates like an overripe fruit and its value in the marketplace drops. Your land is grazed into the ground and that includes land that was earmarked as hay and silage for the winter. Youve got rogue tups on your hands. Theyre randy and running free, working the fat off their backs, causing a nuisance. Youve had to spend extra money on dipping and dosing for fluke and worm. Youve told your bank manager that the overdraft is soon to come down. Now, suddenly, you cant sell lambs. You have no cash flow. And theres nothing you can do about it. Except protest.

On Wednesday, September 3, the small and normally quiescent town of Llanwrst in Aberconwy became the unlikely setting for a near riot. In late August, after two months of forced internment for the flocks in the restricted areas, a mark and release scheme had been introduced. Chernobyl specials or blues, as the lambs became known, could now be sold to farmers outside the restricted areas. But they could not be slaughtered until all the farms in North Wales had been declared clean. The blues were to be shorn and marked with a 5in stripe on their snouts and foreheads. The ministry provided paint: swimming pool blue, a job lot left over, according to wags, from the private swimming pools of top civil servants in the Home Counties.

Inevitably the blues, which struck an odd, punkish note as they were driven to the auction pens, commanded a poor price, sometimes as low as £1 a head. The lowland farmers who bought them were taking a gamble. If controls were lifted quickly they could make a huge profit. If restrictions persisted, the maintenance of their blues throughout the winter might damage their farms and bank balances irrevocably. For the restricted farmers there was compensation. But any such schemes which resulted from what the Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, describes as these unprecedented problems, would inevitablyinvolve a measure of rough justice.

By early September, despite the ministers evident pragmatism, there was widespread dissatisfaction. The farmers wanted the averaging method of calculating market losses changed it enriched farmers selling unfinished lambs at the expense of those whose early lambs had become overfat following slaughter restrictions. They also wanted compensation not only on the low prices that their lambs and breeding ewes were fetching in the market, but also on the consequential losses, the costs of holding unfinished lambs on the farm.

The farmers might have been chatting like nuclear scientists about becquerels and half-lives, says John Hooson. They might have cheered to the rafters any farmer who made an emotional speech about the dangers of radiation for our childrens children. But it was fear of going bust, of losing out on compensation, and not caesium 137 that kept our passions flaming.

And so it was that, on the evening of September 3, 300 or so irate farmers gathered outside the Eagles Hotel at Llanwrst to welcome Martin Bevan, an assistant secretary in the Welsh office. John Hooson, who was among the official delegates inside the hotel, told Martin Bevan, This is a moderate meeting. If things dont improve in the next few days, it will not be so moderate. Feelings are running very high. Outside, moderation was giving way to exasperation.

If our problems had occurred for wealthy Englishmen in Surrey they would have been sorted out in a fortnight, says Bernard Malethan. But this isnt Surrey. This is some native backwater. Wed co-operated with the restrictions, wed talked and been polite and got nowhere. Wed been ignored. Because the rain had fallen on the most Welsh area of Wales, our battle had been fought in Welsh. It had dominated the Welsh media. But the English papers werent interested. The public beyond Wales didnt know what was going on. Diplomacy had failed. I thought, those who shout loudest get the attention. And so I shouted, "Lets go in!"

The farmers stormed into the hotel ballroom where the meeting was being held. Chairs were banged on tables. Coins were thrown. Welsh oaths were aired. And Martin Bevan, legs visibly quivering at the knees, was escorted to the telephone to cries of, We want the organ grinder, not the bloody monkey. Mr Bevan handled himself perfectly, says Bernard Malethan, but he could see we wouldnt let our hostage go until he had extracted a promise from Nicholas Edwards to meet the farmers.

Already the mythology of the Welsh hills is that the rapid introduction of new schemes for market losses and direct additional expenses was directly due to the mob at Llanwrst. Were more politically alive than the hill farmers in Cumbria, Exmoor and the Pennines, comments John Hooson drily. We are noisy and we are stubborn there is no doubt about that.

The organ grinder, as minister Nicholas Edwards had been called, was sympathetic to the noises coming out of Snowdonia. He himself lives in a valley in Pembrokeshire with Welsh hill farmers as neighbours. But the events of Chernobyl were unprecedented. It wasnt long before we realised that, certainly on the high ground, we had a problem that would run on at least till the end of the year, he says. Our over-riding considerations were to prevent the meat entering the markets and the food chain and to maintain customer confidence in the reputation of the product.

When the restrictions were first imposed, I thought it would be the finish of the sheep industry in Wales for 10 years at least, says Richard Jones, a livestock auctioneer. The early indications were that the consumers would follow the Greek model, where the market totally collapsed (and has yet to recover). The price of fat lambs dropped by up to a quarter as major customers cancelled orders. Rumours abounded: the man in Dolgellau who demanded a refund for his leg of lamb; the butcher in Shrewsbury who boasted, No Welsh lamb here! Farmers gathered at the Royal Hotel in Caernarfon to dine on lamb, the flavour of Wales for the television cameras. If this doesnt work, said one, our sheep will be good for only fish fingers and pork pies. But it soon became clear that their fears were largely unfounded. The market impact was unexpectedly small, says Nicholas Edwards. By late summer the distinctive dragon flag of Welsh lamb was once again flying in British shops.

Seven May lambs managed to escape the flock and the foxes on Trebor Robertss hill, the Aran Fawddwi, which rises just short of 3000ft to the west of Dolgellau. It was not until late November that he finally brought them down to the pasture land which surrounds Esgair Gawr, the farmhouse in which his wife, Annwen, was born and which Trebor had tenanted and then owned for over 20 years. On December 5, sporting the last of the governments blue paint on their foreheads, they were put to auction at the livestock market in Dolgellau.

In a normal year and with lambs of this quality and weight he would have expected to have made, say, £26 for each animal. In the end, despite the auctioneers exhortations (Youve got a bonus here a dab of blue paint), the seven sheep are knocked down to £14 a head. Not bad, considering, says Trebor Roberts as he passes 50p luck money to the buyer, Wellan Beamond from Newtown in mid-Wales. The coin adds a sentimental touch to the transaction but Trebor Roberts is a sentimental man when it comes to sheep. He presents them as wise, prescient and home-loving. Thats something to spit on, he comments, though Mr Beamond has hopes for a greater profit than 50p. Its a gamble but he already has 300 blues. In April they could make him £30 a head.

For Trebor Roberts the departure of his last seven lambs marks the end of his most worrying year: his land contaminated, his sheep dirty, their lambs blighted.

We live poor and we die rich in hill farming, he says. All my spare cash is tied up in stock and land. But Im not only worried about money and sheep. Im worried about the people of Wales. That dark cloud has been hanging over our heads, too. I know of a farmer in the Bala area. They went to monitor his sheep with a Geiger counter and monitored him first in order to discover the background radiation. And he was higher than the sheep. Now thats a worry. The canteen at the market in Dolgellau is full of such stories. The belief most vehemently held is that the major cause for the contamination is not only Chernobyl but also the ageing Magnox nuclear power station which has operated since 1965 on Trawsfynydd Lake near Ffestiniog.

Three of four times a week a goods train crosses the farm at Teilau Bach near Blaenau. The farmer and his mother, Heddwyn and Olwyn Hughes, remember happier, safer days when GWR steam locomotives carried holiday-makers to Bala. Then there was a halt on their land where locals could board the train for shopping expeditions or trips to school. Now the only traffic comes from the nuclear power station. The cargo of drums and 50-ton flasks contains industrial trash and spent fuel contaminated with radioactivity.

For Heddwyn Hughes the railway is a death line, threatening his health, his income, his peace of mind. Every train has come to represent a cocktail of worries and pressures. Not only Chernobyl, but the overdraft, the weather, the falling value of land. The CEGB says that the power station is perfectly safe, he says. But people feel that there is contamination from Trawsfynydd. Its like a car. The filth has to go somewhere. Why do we need it when all around we have so much power in the wind and the water? We have lived off these mountains for generations and now, thanks to Chernobyl and Trawsfynydd, our land has become dirty.

Heddwyn Hughes is not alone. Throughout the valleys and hill farms of Snowdonia there is an emotive chorus of cynicism and mistrust about the local nuclear power station. Farmers and their wives point towards the square and functional building at Trawsfynydd, at the grey steam which rises from it, at the humming pylons. Apart from the slate quarries at Llechwedd, it is the ugliest site in Snowdonia.

Most of the farmers would like Trawsfynydd to close right now, says Myfanwy Evans. She and her husband, John, farm 700 acres up-valley from Trebor Roberts. Her sister dies in 1964 from leukaemia and she wonders whether their land was contaminated long before Chernobyl. I would be a strange mother, she says, if sometimes, tucking my children up in bed, I didnt wonder whether Trawsfynydd is as safe as they claim.

There are wild rumours of dangerously irradiated sulphur emissions from the stations smoke stack, of a corridor of unexplained cancers along the railway, of a major leak into Trawsfynydd Lake, even of offices in concrete bunkers and evacuation villas in Spain for Trawsfynydd top brass. None can be substantiated. But local alarmists, as they are described by station manager Donald Doo, have found courage in Chernobyl and are confusing the debate with misleading information.

Yet research from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food showed abnormal levels of caesium in Trawsfynydd waters (which are used to cool the reactors) before Chernobyl. Their Aquatic Environment Monitoring Report of 1985 recorded caesium levels in Trawsfynydd lake mud of 7800 becquerels per kilogram and in lake shore peat of 1500bqs/kg (compared with normal background radiation of less than 300bqs/kg). Stewart Boyle, national energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth, comments: There is a fish farm in the lake, not very far from the power stations discharge pipe. How contaminated are the trout? The levels of radioactivity may, from Trawsfynydd, represent a statistically low risk for the people of North Wales. But how critical will it be, say, for a fisherman who is on that lake regularly and eats some of that fish?

I have never hesitated to eat trout from the lake, counters Mike Williams, the station health physicist. In order to get any radiation effect from the power station youd have to stand still in one spot, eating fish, for a year. But nobody does that, and nobody consumes mud. So the effects are infinitesimally small. So certain is he of the comparatively low levels of contamination that he ate more Welsh lamb after Chernobyl, not less. The falling price allowed him to stock his freezer. Lets keep this in proportion, he says. Brazil nuts have 300bqs/kg in them naturally nothing to do with nuclear power, nothing to do with Chernobyl. And I can bring you a piece of stone from Cornwall that will have a natural radiation level far higher than anything we have round here. (Recent reports have shown 20,000 households in the West Country to be vulnerable to the seepage of alarmingly high levels of the naturally-occurring radioactive gas radon, which is believed to increase susceptibility to respiratory cancers.)

One thing is certain, the Chernobyl accident together with the likelihood that the plant will be replaced by a new pressurised water reactor after 1995 has required the incumbents at Trawsfynydd to make a more open and informative stand within the community. A laymans guide to emergency procedures is to be distributed in Snowdonia. In the inconceivable event that an emergency does occur, we want Mrs Owen or Mrs Jones to know at what stage to pack the children in the car and set off, says Donald Doo. Yet there is no need for worry. Any contamination is negligible, insignificant, with nil effects on the environment.

He lists the employment record of Trawsfynydd 600 jobs in an area where 19 per cent of the population are out of work, the railway line kept open by the power station, the local roads built at CEGB expense. The Welshman complains that his sons and daughters leave the valleys. We offer jobs and we keep their children here. They should look on us not with fear but with fondness. His tone of voice suggests it is a cruel and undeserved irony that an environment and a lifestyle so disrupted by events at a nuclear power station 1400 miles away should have, on its doorstep, a nuclear plant of its own, an easy scapegoat for all the woes and resentments of the farmer. Ive even been blamed for the failings of the lamb compensation schemes, he says. Thats the confusion that Chernobyl has caused.

And when will it end? At the end of January this year 100,000 sheep in 315 holdings in upland Gwynedd were still under farm arrest (compared with the original 2 million sheep and 5100 holdings). Apricot paint had replaced swimming pool blue for those sheep which had failed a live monitoring test. The governments Cherno-bill for losses under the various compensation schemes had exceeded £2.1 million.

The hauliers, the slaughtermen, the livestock auctioneers, the farmers who had slipped through the net of schemes were counting the cost of an expensive and depressing year. It has been a disaster, says Richard Jones, the auctioneer whose company lost in excess of £3000 in three months because of low commission on Chernobyl specials. What the government should have done was slaughter all the blues and send them off. To Russia. With love.

The Welsh hill farmers are now preparing for this years lambs with a sense of foreboding. The idea that the caesium would simply pass through the sheep and just get washed away has proved not to be correct, says Professor John Owen, of University College, Bangor. There has been some reabsorption of caesium from the soil by vegetation. His Department of Agriculture placed clean sheep on the hills above Bangor during October. After four weeks of grazing they registered caesium levels in excess of 3000bqs/kg.

Only a fool would be blasé about what might happen in the next few months, he says. There is likely to be some recontamination of sheep on the mountain and, possibly, a reimposition of restrictions during the summer. And then what colour will we paint our sheep? Ask our farmers. Red for danger. Black for death. The more imaginative among them fuelled by press pictures of genetically deformed post-Chernobyl rabbits in Finland and the virtual breeding failure of migratory swans from eastern Europe have steeled themselves against the possibility of malformed lambs. Ministry scientists have given repeated assurances that (to quote Dr John Curtis) there can be no genetic side effect as a result of Chernobyl fallout. But the fears have proven to be as enduring and resistant as the caesium itself. What is the half-life of a rumour in an environment where the unthinkable has already occurred?

Lambing can be cold and hard work, says Myfanwy Evans, but it can be a pleasure, too, when everything is going well. We call it the local Spring Handicap Chase. You just gallop along, 24 hours a day, and get the lambs born. But I certainly dont want to be there alone at two or three in the morning and pulling out a deformed lamb.

There is no safe level of increase in radiation, warns Professor Owen. All the evidence suggests that genetic damage from radiation increases linearly and does not rely on passing a certain arbitrary threshold such as 1000bqs/kg. Any increase will cause extra deaths or genetic defects. Experts have calculated that some tens of people in Britain will die within a few decades of Chernobyl radiation. Professor Owen is reluctant to be too specific about human damage, but he is certain that, following the rains of May, some local mothers have good cause to believe that their families did eat material above levels that would normally be allowed.

With sheep he is less circumspect. You would be looking for malformation in lambs, he says. Aborted lambs. An increase in the abnormalities that occur already headless lambs, legless lambs, various deformations of the jaw. Embryos might simply fail to develop. Or there might be a slight mutation which does not show up until the second or third generation. It is possible that it might be several years before the worst effects of Chernobyl will present themselves.

Trebor Roberts still walks his hill and inspects his livestock with the calm and contentment of a man at peace with the landscape. His son, Emlyn, who is at agricultural college in Aberystwyth, will inherit the farm and, no doubt, his fathers ornate ramhorn and hazel crook. Personally I feel that my task is to leave theland in a better state than I found it, he says. Can I claim to have done that, after Chernobyl? He translates the words of a Welsh hymn into English: Our fathers are buried here. And our children will follow us. In the circumstances it is a sentiment of such ironic power that Trebor Roberts is uncertain whether his words sound a note of warning or of triumph over adversity.

© Jim Crace 1987
> Reprint permission from A. Hewitt 529/2003