The Englishman wasn’t going to let that one go quite so easily. ‘The people of Huntspill might be all right – but what about other places downwind? What about Bristol? Bath? Reading? Basingstoke? Oxford? And what about London?’

‘Well – the steam should have dispersed into the atmosphere by the time it reached any of those cities; but depending on the strength of the wind, people close to the station could be in some danger, that’s true.’

Yeodall looked anxiously about the sea of faces, searching for a fresh hand so he could move away from this Englishman, but he could only see the Englishman’s hand. ‘The steam might disperse into the atmosphere, but there is no reason why the radioactive particles should stay in the steam. They would drop out of it, into the wind, and eventually down to earth. It could take hours before they all come down to ground. There was a volcanic eruption in Washington in 1980 that showered ash onto countries up to five thousand miles away. And you have just told us that some of these particles will live for decades and some for tens of thousands of years, so wherever this stuff lands will be contaminated for a very long time.’

‘We think that there would be such small radioactive particles ending up inside human beings that they would do absolutely no harm at all.’

‘You might think that, Mr Yeodall, but do you know that for sure? Or are you going to wait until it happens and use the whole world as your guinea pig?’

‘No, it is not our intention to use the world as our testing ground. Radiation is only harmful in large and prolonged quantities. There is a great deal of radiation in natural life – from the sun, from the burning of fires, from minerals. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and humans ingest it daily. You, walking down a street, will ingest in one day more radiation than a worker in this station is permitted to receive, working indoors, in that same period. The worst possible disaster in a nuclear power station would put the most insignificant amount of radiation into the atmosphere.’

Ron Tenney, the station’s general manager, poured a hefty measure of Scotch over the ice cubes, and handed me the glass. He turned down the volume control on the video monitor and grinned at me. He was a jovial man in his early forties, with the same sort of rugged good looks as the successful businessmen-hero characters that are portrayed in television soap operas – dark hair, slightly rugged features, and skin pockmarked from childhood acne – and he spoke with a smooth confident voice that was given an added warmth by the faintest drawl of an Irish brogue.