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190 Chapter 7 Purely for Political Reasons When british health physicist H. J. (John) Dunster visited Lisbon in April 1967, the city recently had constructed a new suspension bridge that boasted the longest suspended span in Europe. Overlooking the wide Tagus River, the bridge was named after Portugal’s longtime prime minister, Ant ónio de Oliveira Salazar. Dunster had come to the city to participate in what promised to be a contentious meeting of the European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA), which was planning to dump thousands of drums of radioactive waste into the ocean far off Portugal’s coast. Dunster had a lot at stake; he had been an influential health physicist advising on waste disposal policy in Britain for many years, and everyone knew that Britain was behind the ENEA dumps. He also was the author of the specific hazard assessment that had to be “sold” to the Portuguese. He was not surprised to find some resistance to his ideas among the Portuguese delegates, and he tried to warm up to them by putting his safety assessment into a hypothetically local context. He said that these radioactive wastes were so safe that, were it not for the solid components in them, they could just as easily be taken out onto the Salazar bridge and put directly into the Tagus River.1 Dunster’s attitude’s outraged the Portuguese. Even if they could agree with the safety assessment, there was more at stake than the safety of the Portuguese people. The ENEA operation undoubtedly would make world headlines , and everyone would know that the first Europe-wide dumping operation had taken place not far from Portuguese beaches. What would become of the tourist industry that drove an important segment of the country’s economy? With the contentious nature of the effects of radiation exposure, and the political controversy that surrounded French efforts to dump in the Mediterranean in 1960, surely such an operation would scare away tourists and Purely for Political Reasons 191 beachgoers. Besides, there were some oceanographers in Portugal and Spain who claimed that the currents off the coast would bring the radioactivity close to the shore. Dunster had tried to brush aside these objections with his flip remark about the Salazar Bridge, adding that he had come to give a scienti fic assessment to a scientific audience, and that all nonscientific objections to his assessment were fundamentally illogical.2 Dunster had been criticized nearly a decade earlier for his lack of political aptitude in contentious international meetings, yet here he was again, lecturing oceanographers and political representatives on the rectitude of British policies. But by this time Dunster was well aware, as were many of his compatriots , that political and diplomatic concessions needed to be made from time to time. Throughout the 1960s, Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority developed strategies to protect itself against international criticism by doing just that. It acquiesced in what its health physicists saw as senseless monitoring programs, and it developed a keen sense of public relations. Most important, Britain embarked on an effort to cooperate with other nations in dumping radioactive waste at sea. By doing so, British officials at the AEA and Foreign Office hoped to share the burden of Soviet criticism among the several small European states that had begun to accumulate bothersome amounts of radioactive waste. After the United States abandoned the sea as a major waste disposal option, creating new allies became a central concern. In the process, however, Britain created new opponents, particularly the politicians in those countries closest to the dump sites, such as Portugal and, later, Ireland. British efforts to normalize radioactive waste disposal by widening participation also widened the diplomatic problem beyond the Soviet Union. Worse still was the growing general awareness of the practice, which threatened to conflate radioactive waste disposal with the other forms of marine pollution that grabbed headlines in the late 1960s. Much Too Dull for Drama? In 1959, the American magazine National Geographic planned a story about French bathyscaphe dives in the Pacific and the studies of deep-sea currents. As in the past when the IGY scientists had used deep-sea studies to search for stagnant water, the issue of radioactive waste arose. The magazine wanted to include an editorial note explaining the situation thus: “The British, in fact, are at present pumping liquid low-level waste without any containers into the Irish Sea, to the amount of 10,000...

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