Science, Ethics and Public Policy

Abstract

In an area of northwestern England, close to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, there occurred an excess of childhood leukaemia which is unlikely to have been due to chance. Epidemiologists and radiation experts have been sharply divided on its cause. The epidemiologists, on the one hand, have a lot of experience of phenomena whose mechanisms they cannot explain, going back to the days of the smoking/lung cancer association, and beyond; and they have been impressed by the facts that radiation causes leukaemia and that Sellafield emits more radiation than any plant in western Europe. The epidemiologists also point out that the real dose received by individuals can only be guessed, not known, and that the tissue susceptibilities of young children are also uncertain. This leaves them unimpressed by the argument of the radiation and environmental experts: they tend to exonerate radiation, saying, in effect, “Radiation-induced leukaemia would be inexplicable here, so it did not happen”.