Scientists had detected radioactive fallout in Sweden and traced it to the area around Kiev in the Soviet Union. The papers were in no doubt from the reports coming in from their diplomatic corespondents, foreign staff and the agencies that, some days before, an accident of an appalling nature had happened. The points were to be made sharper by events elsewhere. Early in April, the new chairman of British Nuclear Fuels was saying that the nuclear industry had to learn to adjust to the outside world, to communicate with it in everyday language, while denying that the industry was defensive and secretive. The successful meeting of spacecraft and Halley’s Comet hardly made up for the unease about technology in general, and nuclear matters especially.

This, if noticed, was probably put down to the slaphappiness of Americans, and the nuclear industry in particular.

In the US, it was reported, some workers at a nuclear plant had heated up an overfull tank of liquid radioactive waste to reduce its volume, the way cooks do with a sauce. Sellafield and its mysterious sequence of mishaps was hardly ever out of the news or the mouths of MPs, both uncomfortable places for the nuclear industry. There had been the Challenger explosion and there was continuing uproar about nuclear waste, signalled by that infallible evidence of public debate in Britain, the daubing of slogans on motorway bridges. Science and technology took a beating in the press in the first months of 1986. This article was originally published in the 23 April 1987 issue of New Scientist, a year after the Chernobyl accident occurred.

Doom nuclear plant secrets