Digging Deeper podcast excerpt | A local’s perspective on nuclear energy and their experience with Chernobyl

Before Chernobyl had even happened, Roy was a passionate advocate against nuclear power plants, which he touches on in this podcast and this was further affirmed during his education later in life.

Roy has worked in the chemistry industry and now in agriculture and has gained a lot of knowledge on the topic over the years and as a proponent for the environment and agriculture, he had a lot of say on the matter.

Here’s some of what he had to say.

Nicola: Roy, can you tell me a bit about your experience over in Scotland during 1986?

Roy: In 1986, April, it was a long weekend. I'd been camping up in Scotland with a girlfriend at the time. Unfortunately, the Chernobyl accident occurred, and the nuclear fallout came drifting over Scotland and, it rained and brought down, nuclear fallout, which was caesium 137 and 134. It took about a week for the fallout to reach Scotland because Chernobyl's 2000 kilometres away, and you can't see it, it just feels like ordinary Scottish rain, which is pretty cold. But it came down with nuclear fallout with the caesium and that seeped into the ground and the government introduced emergency powers to restrict the sale of sheep and livestock from parts of Scotland and the UK, which affected 9700 farms.

I just think it's something which isn't spoken of is that, there can be a nuclear accident 2000 kilometres away that can affect agriculture to that extent. I think that's really interesting. And, you know, I'd rather have, probably not been, doused in Chernobyl radiation. I feel fine at the moment, but, yeah, I think the impacts on agriculture were ongoing.

Nicola: So at the time that this happened, did you know when that rain fell that it was radioactive?

Roy: No, in fact, we didn’t find out until we’d come back from Scotland and less remote areas and found out that, actually, we had been doused with fallout.

Nicola: What was your first reaction when you found out that it was radioactive rain that fell on you?

Roy: It’s interesting, it's a long time ago now ‘86, and I can't remember exactly what the emotions were. I think bear in mind that, I grew up in the Cold War period, meaning that Russia and America had nuclear weapons pointing at each other. The UK was very much in the middle of it all. So even as school kids, we'd been schooled in the four-minute warning thing where if you hear a certain alarm go off, you know, expect some sort of nuclear attack. So nuclear fallout doesn't seem as extreme as you might think. But, I wasn’t happy I could tell you that.

I must admit, these things are predictable, these accidents, nuclear reaction accidents, I think are to be expected because we've got humans involved in these processes. So human error is always going to be with us.

You've got somewhere between 500 and 800 people working at a nuclear power plant, they're not all going to be having a good day. Things aren’t always going to be right.

I had this discussion when I was studying advanced maths, physics and economics at school, and we had British Nuclear Fuels come in to give us a presentation, and it was all rather glossy, and very spin orientated, and they were pushing the industry, looking for people like me to join the industry, being a physics student. It was obvious to me that really it was spin, and they were telling untruths, or they were pushing it in a way that implied it was all fine.

For example, they had shown us a palm sized piece of glass and said, all the highly radioactive material we can store in this without actually saying that you couldn't get anywhere near the stuff because it's highly dangerous.

So I actually had a bit of a stand-up argument with British Nuclear Fuels and head of science at the time, who was Doctor Sykes, and arms were flying around and really, after that, I felt a little bit disillusioned with the education system and sort of dropped out of education, although I did go on to work in the chemical industry for a couple of years.

Nicola: The education that you had wasn't really discussing the dangers of nuclear power, so what was the education that led you to the conclusion that it wasn’t safe?

Roy: I suppose it's probably useful to know that the UK is the home of nuclear power. The first nuclear reactor was in the UK, Calder Hall in 1956. So we had had other accidents before, that's one of the things. So Windscale had a nuclear accident,, occurred in the fifties, so there was a precedence for some mistakes already.

Windscale was quite significant. We also had Three Mile Island in America which was another accident so it wasn’t as if accidents weren’t already happening or possible.

Hear about what Roy has to say on the Coalition’s proposed nuclear future and the rest of his story by listening to the podcast here.