‘Naturally, in most cases the strength of the dosage affects the seriousness of primary and secondary radiation exposure. A small degree of exposure might increase one’s risk of contracting cancer by one in a thousand – not much, you might say, since cancer already kills off prematurely one in four people on the face of the earth. And yet, as I have just mentioned, it is not always true that small doses are less harmful: just one particle of plutonium dioxide is all that’s required. You wouldn’t know if you breathed that particle in. You cannot see, smell or feel radiation, except with a Geiger counter. It is the potential of radiation as a killer that I find gravely disturbing, and the quantities of radioactivity inside nuclear reactors are positively alarming. The bomb that killed one hundred and forty thousand people within thirty days at Hiroshima, was a fifteen-kiloton bomb, a very small bomb indeed by today’s standards. Inside the containment building of the average nuclear reactor in service in the world today is seven hundred times the amount of radioactivity released onto Hiroshima by Littlejohn.’

Fifeshire looked at a sheet of notepaper. ‘That, by calculations that have been prepared for me, is enough to kill eighty-four million people – or, if you like, the entire population of the British Isles, Canada and Australia, with ten million to spare – and this from the contents of just one reactor. There are, in the British Isles, at the present time, sixteen operating nuclear power stations, with a total of forty-two reactors – and I am excluding other nuclear establishments, such as fuel-reprocessing plants like Windscale. There are thirteen reactors in Canada, two hundred and four reactors in the United States. You will probably remember the fire at Windscale in 1957, which caused the release of a cloud of radio-isotopes into the atmosphere. As a result of this, a million gallons of milk from cows within a two-hundred square-mile radius had to be thrown away – and this was a very minor incident indeed. The locals report a greatly increased incidence of cancer in the region, but this has not been substantiated, as no records were kept.

‘During the past week, I have myself spoken to a number of eminent scientists in the nuclear energy industry, including Sir Isaac. Some are anti nuclear and some pro. I put to each the same question: What would be the immediate, the short-term and the long-term effects of a nuclear reactor being blown up? I asked them to concentrate on the three systems in use in this country: the magnox, the advanced gas-cooled reactors, and the pressurized-water reactors. We have only two of the latter at the present time – at Sizewell and at Huntspill Head – but it is the most commonly used system in the United States and France, and more will be built in this country.