All the papers carried accounts of parliamentary debates in which “outbursts from all sides” had shown the anger at the scarcity of information coming from the Soviet Union. Reports claimed that wheat futures were climbing at a great rate. They had shrewdly seen that if the leak from Chernobyl contaminated the ground water of the lush, grain producing areas of the Ukraine, then spring and winter wheat would be affected. Incidentally, so had the wide boys of the international markets. The next day demonstrated that the press had got its second wind. Perhaps a hint of Schadenfreude crept into the report of “An American nuclear safety expert” who had said that “the leak made Three Mile Island look like a tea-party”. Thousands flee leak.” It was clear that Chernobyl was about to become as well, or better, known than Three Mile Island or Windscale. Today raised a mild eyebrow with “Atom leak”, but the Sun was less inhibited. “Atom cloud horror”, said The Star the Daily Express, “Nuclear disaster-radioactive cloud heads for Britain” and “Russia’s cloud of death” in The Mirror. Its stories were based on no more than the other papers had, but the headlines were definite enough. The popular press, or at least its subeditors, was in no doubt about the dimensions of the accident from the start. It looked as if the so-called “quality” newspapers were, on the whole, holding off until more was known the big question in everyone’s mind was: What precisely had happened? The Daily Telegraph remained cool, with a straightforward account of events so far. The Guardian was lower in temperature (“Radioactive Russian dust cloud escapes”), and filled its space with a rundown of facts about other nuclear accidents and an explanation by its science correspondent of the types of radioisotope released and their effects on the human body. The Times’s science editor reported the opinion of the spokesman from the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) that Britain had no need to fear radiation released in the accident (“Britain safe, says watchdog body”), and a rather soothing statement from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Science journalists were concerned early on. It, too, printed a map, with arrows to show the track of the radioactive cloud, reminiscent of those over the same territory a generation before, showing German attacks. The Times was a little more excited (“Huge nuclear leak at Soviet plant”, “Overheating of nuclear fuel raises fear of possible meltdown”, “European alarm” and “Moscow acts”), and gave the news much more prominence. It also carried some details of the capacity and design of the reactor concerned. It printed a map of northern Europe that located the nuclear site and quoted remarks from Swedish authorities outraged at the lack of warning from the Soviets. “Serious accident hits nuclear power plant in Soviet Union,” said the Financial Times, reporting the official (and terse) announcement from the Soviet news agency, TASS, that one of the reactors at Chernobyl had been damaged. 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.
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