‘There’s a second major problem if the containment did blow to pieces: the blast would almost certainly sever the coolant pipes. The result would be that the core would become so hot that it would start to melt into a solid lump – and go on heating up.

‘This is the worst nightmare of the nuclear energy industry – the Americans call it the China Syndrome, because some believe, if this happened, the core would start burning its way down through the centre of the earth, down towards China, China being the other side of the globe from the United States. We would call it here the Australia Syndrome, I suppose. Of course, it would not actually get to Australia, it would come to a halt in the first water substrata layer – not that that would stop the reaction. It would sit in the water for the best part of a couple of weeks before it burned itself out.’

‘Sending up steam?’ said Fifeshire.

‘Yes, the steam would shoot straight up the funnel it had made, through the breached containment, and it would then spread out downwind.’

‘Highly radioactive?’

‘Highly.’

‘And what about this substrata water: does man come into contact with it?’

‘Good lord, yes, Sir Charles, elementary geography, you must have learned it at school: streams, rivers, lakes, rain, you name it.’

‘And it would be polluted?’

‘Couldn’t touch it for centuries.’

‘Didn’t you fellows consider this angle when you built your bloody reactors?’ asked Fifeshire, with more than a trace of anger in his voice.

‘When you are dealing with something as potentially hazardous as nuclear fission, it is impossible to cover all the angles. We have to go, to quite a large extent, by what we call “risk relativities”. By this, I mean, we have to say to ourselves, “How many people are going to be killed per thousand kilowatts of nuclear generated electricity, as opposed to other methods of generated energy? How many coal-mining accidents, for example? How many coal-miners would be killed mining the coal for coal-burning generators? How many drivers killed in road accidents delivering that coal? How many members of the public killed by the radiation and the carcinogens put in the atmosphere by the burning of the coal?”’

‘The ecologists say, for instance, what about water mills? Good question: water mills, why not indeed?’ Quoit took his glasses off and began chewing enthusiastically on the end of the arm. ‘Did you know that the average water mill kills someone once every two hundred years. A proven statistic. To get the same electricity output from water mills as is currently produced by Britain’s nuclear reactors, two hundred thousand water mills would have to be built. Based on proven statistics, that would kill, by drowning, one thousand people a year. There is no evidence to prove nuclear energy kills anyone at all.’