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POLITICISING CHERNOBYL: WALES AND NUCLEAR POWER DURING THE 1980s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

Seán Aeron Martin and
Mari Elin Wiliam
Seán Aeron Martin
Affiliation:
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH WALES, CARDIFF
Mari Elin Wiliam
Affiliation:
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH WALES, CARDIFF
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Abstract

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 had international repercussions, as nuclear fallout, and accompanying fear, traversed well beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In Britain, raised radioactivity levels caused some upland regions, such as north-west Wales, to become subject to restrictions on the sale of livestock, which created upheaval for the agricultural community, leading to an uncharacteristic outburst of protest from farmers who were unhappy with the government's response to the crisis. Concurrently, nuclear sceptics in Wales attempted to politicise the tragedy in the Ukraine to underline the dangers of nuclear power, dovetailing the accident with the looming perils of Wales's domestic nuclear industry. In exploring these issues, this paper contributes to a growing body of work on ‘British nuclear cultures’, moving away from its generally urban focus by examining a Welsh rural case study. This approach also circumvents the well-trodden historiographical narrative surrounding the politics of nuclear warfare by highlighting debates arising from civil nuclear power. Crucially, the work demonstrates how looking at the modern Welsh past through the prism of a transnational nuclear event such as the Chernobyl catastrophe shows that the history of twentieth-century Wales is enriched by moving beyond the stereotypically ‘Welsh’ industrial shibboleths of the south Wales coalfield and the slate mines of north Wales.

Crynodeb

Roedd oblygiadau rhyngwladol i drychineb Chernobyl ym 1986, wrth i lwch ymbelydrol, ac ofnau cysylltiedig, deithio ymhell y tu hwnt i ffiniau'r Undeb Sofietaidd. Ym Mhrydain, achosodd lefelau ymbelydredd uwch i rai ucheldiroedd, megis yng ngogledd-orllewin Cymru, ddod o dan gyfyngiadau ar werthu da byw, gan arwain at ansicrwydd i'r gymuned amaethyddol, ynghyd â ffrwydrad o brotest gan ffermwyr oedd yn anhapus gydag ymateb y llywodraeth i'r argyfwng. Yn gydamserol, ceisiodd sgeptigiaid niwclear yng Nghymru wleidyddoli'r ddamwain yn yr Wcrain i danlinellu natur fygythiol ynni niwclear, gan blethu'r drychineb gyda pheryglon y diwydiant niwclear yng Nghymru. Trwy archwilio'r materion hyn cyfranna'r papur at gronfa gynyddol o waith ar ‘ddiwylliannau niwclear Prydeinig’, gan wthio heibio ei ffocws dinesig arferol trwy ganolbwyntio ar astudiaeth achos yn seiliedig ar gefn gwlad Cymru. Mae'r dull hwn hefyd yn dargyfeirio o'r naratif hanesyddiaethol traddodiadol am wleidyddiaeth rhyfel niwclear trwy amlygu trafodaethau a ddeilliai o gynlluniau ynni niwclear sifil. Yn hanfodol, dengys y gwaith y modd y gall edrych ar y gorffennol modern trwy brism digwyddiad niwclear trawsgenedlaethol, megis Chernobyl, gyfoethogi hanes Cymru'r ugeinfed-ganrif, gan symud y tu hwnt i sibolethau diwydiannol ystrydebol ‘Gymreig’ maes glo de Cymru a chwareli gogledd Cymru.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 29 , December 2019, pp. 273 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2019 

I Introduction

The Chernobyl catastrophe on 26 April 1986 in the Ukraine coincided with a decade of heightened Cold War tensions, leading to renewed nuclear scepticism, echoing concerns first seen during the birth of the ‘atomic age’ in the 1950s.Footnote 1 In Britain, this involved a resurgence in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) along with the development of grassroots anti-nuclear agitation, which in Wales included local authorities declaring the country the first European ‘nuclear (weapons) free zone’ in 1982.Footnote 2 However, as this example attests, the common spectre in the 1980s British nuclear debate was the cataclysm of nuclear warfare more than the perils of a nuclear accident.Footnote 3 This resonates in nuclear historiography, which has tended to pursue the politics of the nuclear deterrent and the threat of global annihilation, thereby overlooking more prosaic fields involving civil nuclear power and atomic stations.Footnote 4 Wales's own nuclear historiography, moreover, follows a similar – if considerably sparser – trajectory to its British counterpart, with historians’ pursuit of distinctively ‘Welsh’ industries such as coal and slate pushing the nuclear presence in Wales, most strikingly the power stations at Trawsfynydd and Wylfa in north-west Wales, to the margins, leading to a predictable emphasis on nuclear warfare discourse and its interaction with Welsh national identity.Footnote 5 This neglectful attitude towards civil nuclear power extends to the Chernobyl accident, which only makes very limited incursions into academic historical scholarship in the UK, let alone Wales, being conveyed as a tragic, overseas, Soviet-era accident, rather than an event with any deep repercussions on the British Isles, even though, as this paper contends, it accentuated the debate on the relationship between nuclear power and rural communities.Footnote 6

A significant departure in recent historiography is the growing emphasis by scholars such as Jonathan Hogg and Christoph Laucht on exploring ‘British nuclear culture’, moving away from the ‘official narrative’ of nuclear high-politics.Footnote 7 This fresh approach involves examining the varying responses of everyday people to different nuclear technologies through concentrating on more ‘unofficial narratives’, thus bolstering Jeff Hughes's argument that such is the phrase's pluralism, hybridity and openness to geographical particularisms that it should be recognised instead as ‘British nuclear cultures’.Footnote 8 This article will consider a different aspect of nuclear cultures in Britain by focusing on rural, Welsh responses to the risks of civil nuclear power, diversifying from the dominant regional case studies, which are mainly urban, English and based on rhetoric relating to atomic warfare.Footnote 9 Inherent in the examination of more ‘unofficial’ narratives is a challenge to the dominance of the nation-state in nuclear discourse. Chernobyl demonstrated, as the fallout from the accident spread far and wide, that nuclear power, in any guise, does not respect or recognise traditional borders of nations, and what in other circumstances would have been seen as a national problem, or easily dismissed in the West due to its occurrence behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, was very quickly acknowledged, in the words of Ursula K. Heise, as a European-wide, ‘transnational risk scenario’.Footnote 10 This blurs national lines, and suggests the potential for innovative subnational approaches, as demonstrated in this article, to assess the Chernobyl disaster's effect on the political debate over nuclear power in the mid-1980s.

One of the first signs that the Chernobyl fallout had arrived in north Wales was radiation alarms going off in the region's two nuclear power stations, as workers clocked in and triggered the alarms due to high readings on their clothing.Footnote 11 This transnational coalescing of nuclear sites in Wales with a spatially distant nuclear catastrophe is representative of two key ways Chernobyl shaped political discourse in Wales, which will be examined in this paper. Firstly, radioactive dust from the accident penetrated the uplands of north-west Wales, creating disruption for the food chain and farmers’ incomes, which consequently led to a rare period of political discontent in the agricultural sector. This paper will demonstrate how a distant nuclear accident was concurrently viewed as a threat to one of the most mythologised crucibles of Welshness, rural Wales, and as an uncertain risk to public health.Footnote 12 Secondly, the catastrophe was harnessed by more conventional nuclear agitators involved in environmental politics in Wales to highlight the dangers of producing nuclear energy, heightening fears over the safety ramifications of nuclear power stations and seemingly justifying the apocalyptic historical scenarios painted by activists since the 1950s. As research suggests, their narrative was shaped by casting doubt over the radiation's ownership: did it really all stem from Chernobyl, or was there more sinister ‘domestic’ radiation at work, particularly emanating from Trawsfynydd, the only inland nuclear power station in the UK, which was also based in a post-Chernobyl radiation hotspot? By deploying a range of rarely utilised bilingual source materials – from collections including the Welsh Office, CND Cymru and oral history – this paper will explore political expressions of nuclear scepticism from a Welsh, rural and civil perspective, underlining the plurality of ‘British nuclear cultures’, as well as shedding new light on the particularisms of the contemporary Welsh past.Footnote 13

II Fallout: fear, farmers and the Welsh Office

Whilst the Chernobyl ‘cloud’ that reached Britain at the beginning of May swathed many parts of the country, the topography of some regions meant that radioactive fallout was retained in the ground, and thus the food chain, for a longer period of time. Some of the uplands of north-west Wales – especially in parts of Snowdonia such as Meirionnydd, bordering on Trawsfynydd nuclear power station, towards the Denbigh Moors and briefly Anglesey – were particularly hospitable to this radioactivity due to the climate, soil type and drainage factors, meaning that the contamination, and the need for countermeasures, lingered for years.Footnote 14 However, despite these easily known facts, the initial reaction from the British government was one of calm, describing the contamination level as ‘very low’ and posing ‘no health risk to the public’.Footnote 15

Nevertheless, these reassurances failed to assuage the anxieties of the public, who, when looking at the wider international reaction, were frustrated by the reticence of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government on a matter that evidently had deeper repercussions than previously thought: visitors recently returned from ‘contaminated’ Eastern Europe were being told to report to their local police stations for ‘help’; serious rumours were circulating about the safety of staples such as meat, milk and vegetables; and governmental telephone lines were ‘jammed’ by concerned members of the public.Footnote 16 As time passed, monitoring of areas and foodstuffs affected by the fallout continued to display high levels of radioactivity, seemingly confirming such fears, and it became obvious to government ministers that they had gravely underestimated the problem: action was urgently needed in order to counter the public outcry that had already started to ferment around the country. Therefore, on 20 June 1986, seven weeks after the accident, Michael Jopling, the secretary of state for agriculture, announced that livestock with radiation levels over 1,000 Bq/kg would be prevented from entering the food chain, and introduced a prohibition on the movement and slaughter of sheep in regions that were registering a cluster of high measurements, such as south-west Cumbria, north Wales and parts of Scotland. Portraying it as a short-term problem, Jopling initially placed these restrictions for just twenty-one days, which would be ‘reduced as soon as the monitoring results … confirm the expected fall in levels’.Footnote 17

The initial groundswell of public anxiety due to Chernobyl was in no small part linked to the government's prevarication over firstly admitting there was a problem with radiation levels, and secondly identifying how to deal with it. Arguably, Jopling's hurried pronouncement on a Friday – breaking Parliamentary convention, Friday usually being a quiet day when MPs returned to their constituencies – cast a further shadow of uncertainty. In addition, due to this delay in enacting restrictions, speculation flourished on the potential contamination of meat that had already been on sale for over a month, which propagated the panic, the very element that the government wanted to arrest in the first place. According to one Welsh-language weekly paper, Y Cymro, this miscalculation was reprehensible, with an editorial in the newspaper stating in uncompromising, Cold War semiotics, ‘If there is no full explanation … then Michael Jopling and his ministers will be as guilty of concealing the truth as the Kremlin itself.’Footnote 18

The Welsh Office was in an understandably conflicted position. On the one hand, it was responsible for implementing the restrictions on animals out of a public health rationale. However, these measures were equally aimed at retaining and restoring market confidence in British agriculture, and officials therefore needed to minimise fears about the impact of the Chernobyl fallout on the food chain. This tightrope act was, almost inevitably, calamitous, with a press release in September 1986 announcing that there was ‘no hazard to the health of sheep and cattle grazing the most heavily contaminated pastures in the UK’, whilst simultaneously confirming the continuation of controls over tracts of Welsh land.Footnote 19 Although farmers understood the justification for the restrictions due to safety concerns, this contradictory language caused some bewilderment, for if lamb was apparently safe to eat, the fundamental question was why there was a ban on it in the first place.Footnote 20 Indeed, the regular insistence by officials in Cardiff that the 1,000 Bq/kg level was a ‘conservative figure’, ‘which incorporates a substantial safety margin’, would no doubt have caused further consternation to the agricultural communities affected, who could find little solace in statements which were clearly designed to reassure consumers.Footnote 21 Furthermore, in a debate in Parliament on the matter, Dafydd Wigley, Plaid Cymru MP for Caernarfonshire, chastised the government for its ‘haphazard’ and ‘chaotic’ introduction of the ban, which many believed had unwittingly amplified the panic, ultimately doing more harm than good when it came to the public's perception of the safety of Welsh lamb.Footnote 22

The impression of the Welsh Office in the midst of the Chernobyl crisis is of a department on the back foot, scantily prepared for a predicament of this nature and unsure of its remit. In one ‘Emergency Planning’ meeting in the autumn of 1986, officials expressed doubt as to whether they should be in charge of a civil nuclear emergency at all, and seemed to want to delegate responsibility back to Westminster. There was also bickering over who in the Welsh Office should be doing what, to the extent that the normally staid tone of the minutes was broken by a comment in parentheses ‘(Heated discussion followed!).’Footnote 23 Keith Best, the Conservative MP for Anglesey, brusquely conveyed his constituents’ scathing critique of the Welsh Office to the secretary of state for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, declaring that there were ‘grave misgivings’ about whether officials appreciated the seriousness of the situation for the agriculture industry, and that they were ‘deeply aggrieved’ that no minister had visited the area, since this was emerging as ‘a most damaging and critical situation’ for his government.Footnote 24 However, as strong an advocate as Best was for the island's farmers, as a Conservative MP he was also tainted by the Thatcher government's perceived silence over the central issue of compensation. In between the announcement of controls on 20 June and early July, nothing seemed to have been done to assuage the financial concerns of the agricultural sector. This led to the Anglesey Conservative Association writing to Nicholas Edwards and senior Tory Norman Tebbit to express concern about the potential ‘adverse political effects’ on Best and the constituency, unless the government took swift action over the lamb compensation issue since Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, was already trying to ‘blacken his reputation’.Footnote 25 A Conservative peer from Anglesey described the Ministry of Agriculture's handling of the crisis as ‘ghastly’, even acidly commenting that the government was clearly intent on provoking farmers to ‘break the law and vote Plaid’.Footnote 26 The Welsh Countryside Landowners’ Association drew up a highly critical report on the Welsh Office's handling of the compensation issue, and it was clearly a matter that percolated through the agricultural industry from the landed elite to the marginal hill farmer.Footnote 27 Indeed, criticism was not limited to political point-scoring or farmers with a vested interest in the issue. Professor Glyn O. Phillips, founder and editor of Welsh language science journal Y Gwyddonydd (The Scientist), claimed that there was ‘complete befuddlement’ in the response of political leaders to Chernobyl, with no one delivering an answer as to why there was such a difference in radiation levels between the uplands of Wales and the lowlands of England, and that clearly nobody in Britain had an idea how they would deal with a similar accident in Britain, least still a nuclear war.Footnote 28 These concerns were echoed in the political sphere by Dafydd Elis-Thomas, Plaid MP for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy, who believed that the British government and Welsh Office's response in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster was a ‘moral failure’:

If we have a nuclear industry, we have a moral responsibility to cope with the effects of the industry. If we have a defence policy that is based upon a nuclear deterrent, we have a moral obligation to ensure that the basic industry of society is not damaged as a result of any prospect of nuclear fission. We have failed in that moral responsibility.Footnote 29

However, financial compensation for losses due to ‘Chernobyl-lambs’ was the paramount issue for farmers, some of whom were ‘disgusted’ that they appeared to have to persuade the government of the severity of their situation.Footnote 30 This was intermixed with some obscurity over whose government should shoulder the responsibility. Beata Brookes, the Conservative MEP for North Wales, resorted to writing to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, claiming that the Kremlin should pay for all the losses shouldered by the agricultural community in her constituency, since their livelihoods had been ‘devastated by the radiation’.Footnote 31 There is no record of his response, but in trying to deflect blame away from her own government, she at least appeared to validate the concerns of farmers. Previously she had expressed concern that there was an attempt by officials to avoid paying compensation to the sheep industry in north Wales.Footnote 32 Simultaneously, some cursory efforts were made to draw compensation from the European Economic Community (EEC), although, ultimately, the agricultural challenges thrown up by this international emergency were viewed by the sector itself as ones to be tackled domestically by the national government.Footnote 33

Much to the chagrin of the farmers affected, a decisive response by the British government on the financial issue remained unforthcoming throughout the summer of 1986. The secretary of the Meirionnydd branch of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) wrote in early July that the lack of clarity over compensation was of ‘grave concern’, and that not only was compensation a necessity, but also an investment in a major drive to rehabilitate confidence in the safety of Welsh lamb, which through cruel irony had just been at the centre of a three-year promotional campaign, at a cost of £500,000 to the union.Footnote 34 Meanwhile, according to the Farmers’ Union of Wales (FUW) even an official assurance of eventual compensation would have sufficed as ‘considerable relief’ to many, and yet the attitude of the government, in the words of FUW president Huw Hughes, had been to ‘let the farmers stew’, leaving simmering tensions to increase throughout the summer.Footnote 35 A reply in early August by leading Welsh Office civil servant Martin Bevan warned that his office had no idea how much the ‘price blight’ of livestock held back from market would be, and that the level of compensation that would have to be paid by the Treasury was ‘unknowable’, especially since ‘the Farmers’ Unions were drumming up an ever-mounting bill for consequential losses (food, vet bills …)’.Footnote 36 The tone of his comments is indicative of the hostility between Welsh farmers and the Welsh Office, particularly in complaints from north Wales that the secretary of state had yet to visit the afflicted area ‘first hand’, sending in his place Welsh Office minister Wyn Roberts.Footnote 37 Edwards's insistence that meeting some of them at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells was sufficient demonstrated to many that their grievances were still being ignored.Footnote 38 The situation deteriorated to such an extent that in early September two hundred Welsh sheep farmers, angry at the lack of action regarding compensation, ‘rushed’ a meeting in Llanrwst, Conwy, and prevented two officials from the Welsh Office from leaving, in what was described in The Guardian as a ‘hostage’ situation.Footnote 39 In equally passionate language, leaders of the farmers’ unions stated that the farmers were at ‘boiling point’, and at risk of flouting regulations, since they expected the government ‘to do its duty’.Footnote 40 While the language does perhaps exaggerate the severity of the event – the so-called ‘blockade’ was lifted after two hours – it nevertheless shows the frustration felt by the farmers at not being taken seriously. It also interestingly displays a level of militancy and political engagement which is uncharacteristic of the farming community, who are usually portrayed as a quiet, reserved group, and associated with small-c conservatism.Footnote 41

This long-standing reputation stood the farmers in good stead, as far from ostracising them to the fringes of political influence, this unusual burst of radicalism brought them almost immediate gains. Following the Llanrwst meeting, Edwards met representatives of the farming unions in Cardiff, leading to the swift announcement of a compensation package worth around £5 million for the agricultural sector.Footnote 42 This fluid acquiescence demonstrates that farmers in 1980s Britain were not such a marginalised sector. Unlike the miners, they did not have a long list of grievances against Thatcher's Conservative administrations (nor vice versa), while most enjoyed relative economic prosperity and were generally satisfied with the status quo. These sentiments were reflected in our 2016 interview with Tom Jones, vice-president of the FUW during the Chernobyl crisis, who said he held no political or personal animosity towards the secretary of state for Wales, who he felt was generally sympathetic and supportive on the issue of compensation. He also empathised with the position of the British government at the time, saying that it was evidently not to blame for the radiation. However, he did reserve some ire for Welsh Office civil servants, recalling that it was the derogatory attitudes of senior officials such as Martin Bevan which had aggravated farmers, evoking a clash not so much based on political tribalism as founded in the chasm between grassroots rurality and metropolitan Cardiff-based elites.Footnote 43 Indeed, it was a clash that seemed to be defused by the offer of financial remuneration, exposing its essence as a single-issue protest. In a letter to Dafydd Elis-Thomas, for example, the county secretary of the Meirionnydd NFU commended the compensation arrangements, saying that they had worked effectively for those willing to engage with them.Footnote 44 The Parliamentary Agriculture Committee's Chernobyl Report of 1988 echoed these sentiments, commenting that ‘The Government got it right for nearly everybody.’Footnote 45

Nonetheless, this accomplishment did not mark the end of the issue, and although restrictions were lifted in many areas by late summer, in parts of Meirionnydd it was clear that Chernobyl countermeasures were going to become a protracted affair as radiation levels showed ‘no sign of falling’.Footnote 46 In fact, not only was the dissipation of radioactive fallout in north Wales a long-drawn-out issue, it was also an oscillating one, with fluctuating radioactivity levels leading to temporary derestriction, only for the controls to be reapplied later on in the year, making a mockery of the Ministry of Agriculture's initial short-term ‘21-day ban’.Footnote 47 Farmers still felt they were being kept in the dark about the radiation levels and the predicted longevity of the controls, leading to an aggrieved letter from Gwynedd County Council to Peter Walker, the new secretary of state for Wales in the summer of 1987, declaring that they were ‘most put out’ at having to find out about the newly imposed restrictions from the front page of the Daily Post, rather than from the Welsh Office, leading to more needless disruption for the farmers affected.Footnote 48 Moreover, the continuing restrictions on certain areas reopened the debate on compensatory measures, which, when compounded by apparently ‘unacceptable delays’ in meeting claims, led to further agitation from farmers, culminating in a mass picket outside the Welsh Office in London in late September 1987 to show their continuing dissatisfaction at the government's response.Footnote 49 By this time a Welsh Office Chernobyl Review meeting was wondering ‘Do we come clean with the farmers?’, since there was ‘no early end in sight’, admitting that for nearly eighteen months they had coped with the event on an ‘ad hoc basis’ which had undermined morale within Welsh agriculture.Footnote 50

In the grand narrative and debates on class, society and the state in 1980s Britain, farming communities are not traditionally depicted as being ‘on the margins’. Indeed, following the country's accession to the European Economic Community in 1973, and the introduction of grants under the Common Agricultural Policy,Footnote 51 there is a tendency to view their social position at this time as relatively privileged and prosperous. Nevertheless, following the prolonged agricultural crisis caused by the Chernobyl radiation fallout, this normally conservative and moderate social group suddenly found themselves at risk of being sidelined in a political debate in which they believed they were the main aggrieved parties. This shock to the system resulted in the use of uncharacteristic rhetoric and methods by a sector not known for rocking the boat, and a significant amount of political antagonism towards a government that in ideological terms was otherwise their natural ally, adding an intriguing new layer to Hughes's concept of ‘British nuclear cultures’. In fact, the discourse over Chernobyl led to some rather unusual alliances, with environmentalists and farmers finding some common ground in the wake of the disaster. Both groupings were, to quote a Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance (WANA) document, concerned about the ‘paucity of fallout information’, the lack of ‘leadership’ and the ‘disarray’ in the Welsh sheep industry.Footnote 52 Elisabeth Rowlands-Hughes, a CND Cymru activist, observed from her experiences at the Royal Welsh Show the ‘noticeable … changed response of the farmers. I tested this out with the Civil Defence … leaflets, and they not only accepted them gracefully but in quite a few cases were prepared to open up and give a few strongly worded opinions on the whole sorry saga.’Footnote 53 In another example of the merging of public concerns and heightening of nuclear scepticism, Dafydd Elis-Thomas saw Chernobyl as an event that had ‘imprinted on the agricultural community generally the dangers of the nuclear industry’.Footnote 54 Furthermore, former FUW vice-president Tom Jones recollected sharing platforms in public meetings with environmentalists, as the ‘token farmer’. Although he felt he was often talking in the abstract, about a lifestyle that was incomprehensible to many in the audience, he also saw an unfamiliar coalescing in their interests, as both wanted to protect their interpretation of the natural environment.Footnote 55

III ‘Lies, cover-ups, … and misinformation’: perceptions of the nuclear industry in Wales

Following the Chernobyl disaster, while some British farmers feared for their livelihoods, environmental activists turned their critical gaze on the country's own civil nuclear programme. The positioning of the accident in the Ukraine vis-à-vis the nuclear industry in Britain was certainly fruitful ground for accusations of cover-ups and conspiracies. A National and Local Government Officers’ Association magazine accused the government and the National Radiological Protection Board of collaborating to mislead the public by minimising the health risks from Chernobyl in an attempt to save the British nuclear industry: an industry that had a ‘great future behind it’, but now had its ‘back to the wall’.Footnote 56 A similar charge was made by Dafydd Elis-Thomas, who believed that Michael Jopling had delayed making a statement ‘until the last minute’ in the hope that radiation levels would drop, thus avoiding negative publicity for nuclear power.Footnote 57

Fears over the effect of this undesirable exposure were particularly acute in north Wales: concern had been growing in the 1980s about the economic and social impact of closing both nuclear power stations, Trawsfynydd in Meirionnydd and Wylfa on Anglesey, opened in 1965 and 1971 respectively, following the fast-approaching fulfilment of their operational lives. This escalated in the wake of the post-Chernobyl safety fears, with the chief executive of Gwynedd County Council warning that the closures would be a ‘tragedy’, using language that perhaps could have been reserved for the nuclear disaster itself.Footnote 58 Indeed, the accident in the Soviet Union happened at a particularly inopportune time for Trawsfynydd: the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) had been planning a highly publicised twenty-first birthday for the plant which now had to be curtailed; these planned celebrations also ironically coincided with an overdue twenty-year safety check; and there was intense speculation regarding the potential expansion of the site.Footnote 59 However, for the plethora of environmental groups who had long been hostile to and suspicious of the presence of nuclear power generation in Wales, Chernobyl had unmasked the true ‘tragedy’ of the dangers of the nuclear industry, encompassing not only nuclear weapons but also nuclear power stations.Footnote 60

In fact, in a rather perverse sense, Chernobyl presented a golden political opportunity for the environmentalists, which they grasped enthusiastically. In response to the accident, CND Cymru produced a document entitled ‘Chernobyl: The Silent Catastrophe’, claiming that the impact of the incident in Britain had been ‘surrounded, as is always the case with nuclear power, by lies, cover-ups, secrecy and misinformation’. It alleged that children and babies around Wylfa were as susceptible to the effects of radiation as those in Hiroshima, tainting north Wales's nuclear industry not only with the Chernobyl disaster, but also with the toxic legacy of international atomic warfare.Footnote 61 Moreover, Chernobyl was deployed by WANA as a key rationale to oppose the expansions discussed at Trawsfynydd and, due to its proximity to the Welsh border, the nuclear facility at Hinkley Point in Somerset. WANA also questioned the suppression of a Meteorological Office report which purportedly showed that only 40 per cent of the Chernobyl plume over the UK ‘fell out’. This was a minuscule amount in scientific terms, but still led to widespread problems with radioactive contamination.Footnote 62 Meanwhile, others noted the coincidence that high levels of radiation from Chernobyl were being registered in areas that housed nuclear power stations. This exhibited not only a genuine fear of a ‘British’ Chernobyl, but also demonstrated how the opponents of nuclear power employed the catastrophe to hammer home both the known and unknown dangers of such a nuclear accident.Footnote 63

The conflation of Trawsfynydd and Chernobyl was made explicit in the ‘Trawsfynydd Seminar’, held in November 1986 by opponents of nuclear power in Wales. One speaker ridiculed the CEGB's assurance that Chernobyl ‘could never happen here’ by arguing that ‘the poisonous finger of [Chernobyl's] radioactivity spread to the UK, it contaminated our crops, our livestock and our people, so in this respect Chernobyl has happened here’.Footnote 64 This rhetoric inferred Trawsfynydd's potential as a site for an international calamity that would rival such disasters as Windscale, the American SL-1, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, polemically linking these historical nuclear accidents with the dangers posed by Wales's own nuclear industry.Footnote 65 In response to these enhanced fears, Elis-Thomas promised to oppose the building of a new pressurised water reactor at Trawsfynydd – a move that could revitalise the site – due to safety concerns.Footnote 66 There was also a suggestion in the light of Chernobyl that the inquiry into commissioning a second reactor at the Sizewell nuclear complex in Suffolk – Sizewell B – was obsolete in light of the magnitude of effects from the Chernobyl fallout. The fermentation of public nuclear anxiety in the aftermath of Chernobyl was thus undoubtedly a useful tool for nuclear resistors.

This agitation was far from simply a case of political opportunism on the part of the environmental groups: Chernobyl exposed a severe lack of preparedness in dealing with potential nuclear crises in north Wales. Dr J. A. V. Pritchard, a scientific adviser at the Welsh Office, wrote to civil servants that pre-Chernobyl he had been under the impression that the CEGB had whole-body radiation counters at both Trawsfynydd and Wylfa. This had proved to be inaccurate, and since none were available at the regional hospital, Ysbyty Gwynedd, either, there were clearly insufficient monitoring preparations in place in the event of a comparable emergency at either of the north Wales nuclear power stations.Footnote 67 Similar concerns were expressed about lack of decontamination facilities in north Wales, and the Welsh Office also had to admit after Chernobyl that a major nuclear accident had not been incorporated into any of its emergency planning. This led it to look towards developing two separate plans, ‘one for “Welsh” incidents and one for international incidents affecting Wales’.Footnote 68 An article in WANA's newsletter in the winter of 1986/7 reported on a public open day at Trawsfynydd power station, which left the reporter aghast at the CEGB's over-confidence and ‘half-lies’ that no further safety measures were required at the reactor.Footnote 69 This prompted one nuclear opponent to announce that he was going on a hunger strike ‘to warn the nation of the risks involved in the nuclear programme’.Footnote 70 Such remonstrations were not confined to partisan campaigners: leading nuclear engineers also attacked the CEGB's emergency plans for handling a nuclear accident at Trawsfynydd ‘post-Chernobyl’ as ‘inadequate’, and ridiculed the board's claims of a 1.5-mile affected radius as ‘incredible’.Footnote 71 These allusions to ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’Chernobyl eras demonstrate the accident's place as a watershed moment in British nuclear politics. Moreover, before long, public fears about the immediate consequences of a potential nuclear accident became suffused with longer-term health concerns. By 1988, newspapers carried numerous items on north Wales cancer levels, some of them based on reports in the Welsh Office Environmental Digest for Wales, that young children in north Wales may have been exposed to much higher doses of radiation than normal in the wake of Chernobyl. The malignancy rates in the Bala & Penllyn area – which incorporated both the locale of Trawsfynydd nuclear power station and the area hit hardest by Chernobyl fallout – were reported as being much higher than the Welsh average.Footnote 72 Again, however, these issues were shrouded in uncertainty: was Chernobyl to blame, or the dosage of radiation emanating from Trawsfynydd?

The Welsh Office made convenient use of the existing radioactivity levels in north Wales, ironically in an attempt to mollify fears over elevated readings from the Chernobyl ‘cloud’. On 7 August 1986 a Welsh Office memorandum was sent to Nicholas Edwards, informing him that one brown trout caught in Trawsfynydd Lake had been measured with over the Ministry of Agriculture's ‘trigger level’ of 1,000 Bq/kg of radiation in its flesh. This sent civil servants into an initial frenzy, but one that was immediately ameliorated by the finding that radiation levels over 1,000 Bq/kg ‘are nothing new in this lake and are not connected to the Chernobyl disaster’, meaning that ‘There is no risk to anglers or the public.’Footnote 73 In 1977, for example, brown trout in Trawsfynydd Lake had averaged 2,300 Bq/kg, and perch even higher at 3,700 Bq/kg. In fact, the Welsh Office was keen to highlight that the only reason the reading was flagged up in the summer of 1986 was the introduction of the ‘generous’ 1,000 Bq/kg post-Chernobyl safety margin. As one civil servant, G. R. Waters, divulged, ‘Even in normal times, the level in Lake Trawsfynydd is likely to be of the order of 300 Bq because of the discharges into the lake from the nuclear power station … there is no cause for concern.’Footnote 74 The Welsh Office attempted to engage directly with the public over this matter, with R. A. Page from its environmental protection unit writing an article that he hoped would clarify the structure of radiological protection in Wales, but also ‘dispel’ many of the anxiety-driven conspiracies surrounding the dangers of nuclear. In this he stated that 87 per cent of UK radiation had ‘natural’ origins, with only 0.1 per cent from nuclear waste, and, at 0.5 per cent of the total, that televisions and watches emitted more radiation than the nuclear industry.Footnote 75

However, although this diluted the risk factors stemming directly from Chernobyl itself, it nonetheless had the unwelcome effect of bringing the nation's own nuclear programme into sharp focus. Some people wondered why this ‘trigger level’, regardless of its ‘conservative’ nature, had not been brought to bear on Britain's own nuclear industry earlier. Indeed, for anti-nuclear campaigners, this type of evidence signified the long-standing health perils that had been oozing from the two nuclear power stations in north Wales for decades, posing the question of whose radiation was being scattered in north Wales during the mid-1980s. The Wales Green Party expressed its doubts in June 1986 about the long-term accuracy of historical radioactivity data, stating that ‘most of what had been collected was being withheld from the public’.Footnote 76 In a letter to Peter Walker, Dafydd Elis-Thomas expressed his concern following the results of ‘Whole Body Monitoring for Radioactivity in Gwynedd’ which had been conducted in the autumn of 1987, asking if there was any possibility of distinguishing between discharges emanating from the Chernobyl fallout and any ‘untoward discharge from Trawsfynydd during an operational fault’, an issue his fellow Plaid MP Dafydd Wigley deemed worthy of an ‘urgent’ investigation.Footnote 77 Similarly, in October 1987, nearby Bala town council requested that the Welsh Office conduct two independent surveys, one into radiation levels in the Gwynedd population, and the other into working practices at Trawsfynydd nuclear power station.Footnote 78 Clearly Chernobyl had tapped into local concerns, even validating them, helping to move nuclear health fears from the realm of conspiracy into the mainstream. As late as 1994, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Cymru: Land of Radiation’, CND Cymru were linking Trawsfynydd – which allegedly hosted ‘the most radioactive lake in the world’ – with the Chernobyl fallout, leaving 337 farms in Wales ‘still radioactive’, and concluding with a missive that ‘Radiation knows no boundaries.’Footnote 79 A similar narrative was at play in Cumbria, with the Farmers’ Weekly reporting that the spectre of Sellafield nuclear power station – also adjacent to Chernobyl restriction zones – made local inhabitants equally ‘suspicious of the nuclear power industry and the government's willingness to deal honestly with its problems’.Footnote 80

Inevitably, a transnational event of Chernobyl's magnitude would see a shared experience of public health fears, anger and nuclear resistance across national borders,Footnote 81 but regional particularisms also played a role in shaping political responses. In Wales, a certain anti-nuclear Welsh pride had been established by the mid-1980s, institutionalised by the existence of a decentralised Green Party in Wales, a CND Cymru, and WANA, as well as the anti-nuclear credentials of several Welsh Labour politicians, and by a left-leaning, environmentalist surge in Plaid Cymru.Footnote 82 However, two flagship events reinforced this impression: firstly, the well-documented role of Welsh women in the peace protests at Greenham Common, and secondly, the campaign for Wales to become the first European country to declare itself ‘nuclear-free’, a goal reached in 1982.Footnote 83 This was, according to CND Cymru, achieved in a spirit of local anti-nuclear activism, which gave a ‘moral lead to … the World’.Footnote 84 Of course, one could question the validity of such a declaration whilst the country continued to accommodate two nuclear power stations – and an atomic weapons component factory outside Cardiff – within its borders.Footnote 85 Nonetheless, its significance was arguably symbolic, signifying a broader Cold War context, by linking Wales with the global ‘nuclear-free zone’ movement, where local authorities in Britain, and throughout the world, responded to the heightened tensions between the great powers and the accompanying nuclear fear by refusing to have nuclear weapons positioned in their jurisdictions. In this respect, the next natural step for Wales to become a ‘nuclear-free zone’ in the eyes of the world was to reject not only nuclear weapons, but also civil nuclear power. As a post-Chernobyl Green Party Wales local authority election leaflet declared, the accident's fallout had ‘blighted’ a large part of north Wales, so the onus was now on to ‘phase out … these deadly nuclear power stations before the next century’.Footnote 86

Jonathan Hogg has delineated the 1980s as a period of ‘Extreme Realism’ for those catastrophising a nuclear apocalypse.Footnote 87 However, his discussion is predominantly based on debates surrounding nuclear war: a travesty that ultimately remained in the realms of the imagination. By contrast, Chernobyl was a real, measurable nuclear event, which patently showed that the elongated entrails of nuclear fallout need not originate from an atomic bomb to create devastation. This was capitalised upon by Welsh anti-nuclear campaigners, who enmeshed the Chernobyl accident with localised and historical concerns about the nuclear industry in Wales, particularly in Trawsfynydd, consciously merging the radioactivity from both locations into one transnational concern. This narrative was made more compelling by the fact that the disaster had not only revealed the flaws of the government in dealing with a major international accident, but also exposed dire shortcomings in dealing with emergencies at Welsh nuclear plants. In this respect, a transnational, Welsh and localised discourse over Chernobyl was carved out by nuclear sceptics, demonstrating that nuclear cultures could paradoxically perpetuate national borders out of a seemingly ‘borderless’ event.

IV Conclusion

The legacy of Chernobyl in Wales lasted well-beyond the hotspots of 1986–7. Regular ‘Cofio Chernobyl’ (Remember Chernobyl) rallies were held in the country, and many campaigners became involved in the Chernobyl Children's Project, where Welsh communities hosted, and raised money for, the victims of the tragedy. A letter written by Jill Stallard, the general secretary of CND Cymru, in 1994, ‘to the Children of Chernobyl’, stated that the radioactive connection between the Ukraine and Wales would last ‘forever’, in what can be seen as an attempt to create a lasting transnational link between these two geographically disparate regions.Footnote 88 Long-term health concerns regarding the disaster also retained a powerful hold on some Welsh rural communities. In 2004 the Western Mail carried the headline ‘Chernobyl “to blame” for Bala cancers’, although the article still showed some prevarication over ultimate responsibility: it could either be ‘Chernobyl’, ‘Trawsfynydd’, or even social deprivation and unhealthy lifestyles.Footnote 89 This further demonstrates how the disaster in Ukraine muddied the waters between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ contamination, contributing to the nation's ongoing engagement with international nuclear anxiety. Crucially, the restrictions put on sheep farming in north Wales, initially thought to be a short-term measure, were in fact not lifted entirely until 2012, a staggering twenty-six years after the disaster, ensuring that Chernobyl would live long in the memory of the Welsh agricultural sector.

Of course, the significance of this catastrophe in changing the narrative on nuclear culture should not be overstated. There was no grand shift away from the ‘nuclear deterrent’ policy, and the ‘fall’ of the British nuclear industry in the 1990s owed as much to the economic realities of the private sector as to the agitation over health and safety fears.Footnote 90 Moreover, with the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the thawing of enmities between the great powers, anxieties over nuclear power gradually receded as a salient issue for the British public. Nevertheless, Chernobyl arguably opened the eyes of the public to the potential dangers of civil nuclear power generation, while also exposing the serious shortcomings of the British government in dealing with both an international nuclear disaster and a potential home-grown catastrophe, forcing administrations throughout Europe to effectively rewrite the rulebook on large-scale nuclear emergencies. In this sense then, it seems that the green surge that accompanied the Chernobyl crises may not have been such a temporary aberration, as the ‘unofficial’ narrative of the 1980s, over time, came to the forefront of global politics. This change in attitudes can even be seen in the Welsh Office, which, despite initially perpetuating the chaos in the aftermath of the nuclear fallout crisis, did seem to make the concerns of the activists more mainstream, affirming that the disaster had drawn attention to ‘the importance of nuclear safety’, spawning a concern amongst the public ‘for the natural environment in which they live’.Footnote 91

German sociologist Ulrich Beck identified during this period the emergence of a ‘risk society’, where the perils of technological modernisation became far more prominent in public debate.Footnote 92 Arguably, this article demonstrates how this ‘risk society’, far from being exclusively an ‘urban’ phenomenon, could permeate the least expected of spaces, namely a small region of rural Wales. In contrast to much of the existing scholarship around nuclear discourse, it breaks down the nation-state centricity of nuclear historiography, allowing an alternative depiction to emerge of British nuclear cultures. Furthermore, it demonstrates not only the salience of exploring a more rural angle to nuclear politics, but also displays how this novel approach can broaden the understanding of the historical shibboleth that is ‘rural Wales’,Footnote 93 while at the same time opening a hitherto largely unexplored avenue of historical research: ‘nuclear Wales’.

Footnotes

1 Hogg, Jonathan, ‘Cultures of Nuclear Resistance in 1980s Liverpool’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 1–19; Phythian, Mark, ‘CND's Cold War’, Contemporary British History, 15 (2001), 133–56; Johnes, Martin, ‘Wales and the Cold War’, Llafur, 10 (2011), 5–15.

2 Laucht, Christoph and Johnes, Martin, ‘Resist and Survive: Welsh Protests and the British Nuclear State in the 1980s’, Contemporary British History, 33 (2019), 226–45.

3 The ‘immediate threat of nuclear war’ suffuses an infamous civil defence campaign of the 1980s: Central Office of Information, Protect and Survive (1980).

4 This is often blatant, e.g. Barnaby, Frank and Holdstock, Douglas, The British Nuclear Weapons Programme, 1952–2002 (Abingdon, 2003), but also central to more socio-cultural works, e.g. Baylis, John and Stoddart, Kristan, The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity (Oxford, 2014).

5 Rare engagement includes a Llafur special Cold War edition in 2011; Hill, Christopher R., ‘Nations of Peace: Nuclear Disarmament and the Making of National Identity in Scotland and Wales’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 26–50; and most recently and comprehensively, Laucht, and Johnes, , ‘Resist and Survive’, and Baylis, John, Wales and the Bomb (Cardiff, 2019). Historical emphasis on the civil nuclear industry in Wales is virtually non-existent. For a comprehensive overview of historical writing on modern Wales see Johnes, Martin, ‘For Class and Nation: Dominant Trends in the Historiography of Twentieth-Century Wales’, History Compass, 8 (2010), 1257–74.

6 Examples of recent popular historical scholarship include Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: A History of a Tragedy (2018); Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019). The recent release of UK government documents could change this; see Robertson, Alan W., ‘Chernobyl: The Response in Northern Ireland’, History Ireland, 24 (2016), 46–8.

7 Key works include a 2012 special edition of the British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS), esp. Hogg, Jonathan and Laucht, Christoph, ‘Introduction: British Nuclear Culture’, BJHS, 45 (2012), 479–93; Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long Twentieth Century (2016).

8 Hughes, Jeff, ‘What Is British Nuclear Culture? Understanding Uranium 235’, BJHS, 45 (2012), 495–518; Hecht, Gabrielle, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Boston, MA, 2009).

9 Hogg's British Nuclear Culture makes only three short mentions of Chernobyl on 133, 144, 164. See special edition of Urban History, esp. Farish, Matthew and Monteyne, David, ‘Introduction: Histories of Cold War Cities’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 543–6.

10 Heise, Ursula K., Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford, 2008), 177. For a transnational approach to nuclear culture see Laucht, Christoph, ‘Transnational Professional Activism and the Prevention of Nuclear War in Britain’, Journal of Social History, 52 (2017), 1–29.

11 Authors’ interview with Tom Jones, Anglesey, 16 August 2016.

12 Griffith, Wil, ‘Saving the Soul of the Nation: Essentialist Nationalism and Interwar Rural Wales’, Rural History, 21 (2010), 177–94; Hughes, Gareth, Midmore, Peter and Sherwood, Anne-Marie, ‘The Welsh Language and Agricultural Communities in the Twentieth Century’, in Let's Do Our Best for the Ancient Tongue, ed. Jenkins, Geraint H. and Williams, Mari A. (Cardiff, 2000), 551–76.

13 All source translations from Welsh to English provided by the authors.

14 The National Archives, Kew (TNA), Welsh Office (WO), BD 119/32, Chernobyl Incident, Memorandum 26 September 1986.

15 The Guardian, 3 May 1986.

16 House of Commons Agriculture Committee, Second Report, Chernobyl: The Government's Reaction, Vol. 1, Section III (1988).

17 Hansard, House of Commons Debate (HC Deb), 20 June 1986, vol. 99 cc 1333–8. The becquerel (Bq) is the unit of radioactivity, 1 Bq being defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one atom decays per second. Thus, 1000 Bq/kg means for every second in every kilogram of lamb.

18 Y Cymro, 25 June 1986, 6.

19 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, Welsh Office News, 26 September 1986.

20 National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (NLW), Keith Best Papers (KB), KB 21, Chernobyl Radioactivity Lamb, G. Moss Jones, Cymdeithas Defaid Mynydd Cymreig to Keith Best, 7 July 1986.

21 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, Briefing note ‘The Ban on the Movement and Slaughter of Sheep in North Wales’, 26 September 1986.

22 HC Deb, 24 July 1986, vol. 102, cc 736–56.

23 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, ‘Emergency Planning Meeting’, September 1986.

24 TNA, WO, BD 119/31, Chernobyl Incident Welsh Office, ‘Sheepmeat restrictions, note of conference held on Monday 23 June 1986’; NLW, KB 21, Keith Best to Nicholas Edwards, 1 July 1986.

25 NLW, KB 21, M. H. Norris to Nicholas Edwards, 1 July 1986.

26 NLW, KB 21, ‘Tom’, Lord Stanley of Alderley, Amlwch to Keith Best, 17 September 1986.

27 ‘Chernobyl: Our Hills are Hot’, Farmers’ Weekly, 4 March 1988.

28 Glyn O. Phillips, ‘Golygyddol’, Y Gwyddonydd, Summer 1986, 4.

29 HC Deb, 24 July 1986, vol. 102, cc 736–56.

30 NLW, KB 21, Keith Best to Nicholas Edwards, 1 July 1986.

31 NLW, Beata Brookes Papers 72, Letter from Beata Brookes, Daily Post, 24 June 1986.

32 NLW, KB 21, Beata Brookes to Nicholas Edwards, cc Keith Best, 3 July 1986.

33 NLW, Dafydd Elis-Thomas Papers (DET), E2/4, Dafydd Elis-Thomas to F. H. J. Andriessen, vice president, European Communities Commission, 3 July 1986.

34 NLW, KB 21, NFU Memorandum, 3 July 1986.

35 Y Cymro, 23 July 1986, 3.

36 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, ‘Chernobyl: Compensation’, 7 August 1986.

37 Footnote Ibid.

38 NLW, KB 21, ‘Parliamentary Question for Answer on Friday 25th July 1986’.

39 The Guardian, 5 September 1986.

40 NLW, DET E2/4, FUW Press Release, ‘Llanrwst Meeting on Restriction Regulations’, 2 September 1986.

41 Butler, Chris, ‘The Conservative Party in Wales: Remoulding a Radical Tradition’, in Osmond, John, The National Question Again (Llandysul, 1985), 155–68; Woods, Michael, ‘Deconstructing Rural Protest: The Emergence of a New Social Movement’, Journal of Rural Studies, 19 (2003), 309–25.

42 The Guardian, 6 September 1986.

43 Footnote Ibid., 5 September 1986; interview with Tom Jones, 16 August 2016.

44 NLW, DET, E2/4, David James Jones, NFU to Dafydd Elis-Thomas, 3 November 1986.

45 House of Commons Agriculture Committee, Second Report, Chernobyl: The Government's Reaction, Vol. 1, Section III (1988).

46 The Guardian, 29 September 1987.

47 See copies of Welsh Office News, June 1986–August 1987, in NLW, DET, E2/4.

48 NLW, DET, E2/4, Ioan Bowen Rees to Peter Walker, cc Dafydd Elis-Thomas, August 1987.

49 The Guardian, 29 September 1987.

50 TNA, WO, BD 119/34, Chernobyl Review Meeting Notes, c. September 1987.

51 Martin Johnes, Wales since 1939 (Manchester, 2012), 399–400.

52 NLW, CND Cymru Archive (CND), D/31, WANA Memorandum, 29 June 1986.

53 NLW, DET, E2/4, Elisabeth Rowlands Hughes to Dafydd Elis-Thomas, 24 July 1986.

54 NLW, DET, E2/4, Dafydd Elis-Thomas to Alun Hughes, 1 July 1986.

55 Interview with Tom Jones.

56 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, Copy of ‘Chernobyl Fallout: How We Were Deceived and Why’, The Steward Magazine, 5 September 1986.

57 Y Cymro, 25 June 1986, 1.

58 NLW, Beata Brookes Papers 107, copy of Pamela M. Lewis, Institute of Economic Research, UCNW Bangor, ‘The Economic Impact of the Closure, without replacement, of Trawsfynydd Power Station’, May 1985; Daily Post, 17 June 1986.

59 The Guardian, 7 May 1986.

60 Hill, Christopher R., ‘Nations of Peace: Nuclear Disarmament and the Making of National Identity in Scotland and Wales’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 26–50.

61 NLW, CND, F/5, ‘Chernobyl: The Silent Catastrophe’.

62 NLW, Wales Green Party Papers (WGP), 5, Report from the Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance Meeting, 6 December 1987.

63 NLW, CND, D/31, News/ Newyddion WANA/ CWNC, Summer 1986.

64 NLW, DET, C40, Trawsfynydd Seminar – R. Ross Mackay, ‘Trawsfynydd – An Alternative Strategy’, 19 November 1986.

65 Y Cymro, 25 June 1986.

66 Western Mail, 25 September 1987.

67 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, Circular from Dr J. A. V Pritchard, Scientific Adviser WO on ‘Medical Physics North Wales: Post Chernobyl’, August 1986.

68 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, J. P. Williams, General Administration Gwynedd Health Authority, to M. L. Lloyd, Welsh Office, 11 July 1986; ‘Note of meeting held on 6 June 1986 to review Chernobyl nuclear incident’.

69 NLW, CND, D/31, Newyddion/ News WANA/ CWNC, Winter 1986/87.

70 NLW, CND, D/31, News/ Newyddion WANA/ CWNC, Summer 1986.

71 The Guardian, 14 October 1986.

72 Western Mail, 20 July 1988; Daily Post, 11 March 1988.

73 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, ‘Contamination of Lake Trawsfynydd Fishery’, 12 August 1986.

74 TNA, WO, BD 119/32, Memorandum by G. R. Waters, 7 August 1986.

75 R. A. Page, ‘Ymbelydredd yng Nghymru’, Y Gwyddonydd, Summer 1986, 10–14.

76 NLW, WGP, 4, Minutes 7 June 1986.

77 TNA, WO, BD 119/34, Dafydd Elis-Thomas to Peter Walker, 21 December 1987; Western Mail, 30 September 1987.

78 TNA, WO, BD 119/34, Bala Town Council to Welsh Office, 17 October 1987.

79 NLW, CND, A1/92, ‘Radiation in Wales’.

80 Farmers’ Weekly, 11 March 1988.

81 Heise, Sense of Place, 177–81.

82 Johnes, Wales since 1939, 304–6; Jones, Richard Wyn, Rhoi Cymru'n Gyntaf: Syniadaeth Plaid Cymru (Caerdydd, 2007), 202–60.

83 Rolph, Avril, ‘Greenham and its Legacy: The Women's Peace Movement in Wales in the 1980s’, in The Idiom of Dissent: Protest and Propaganda in Wales, ed. Champan, T. Robin (Llandysul, 2006), 97–122.

84 NLW, CND, A1/68 File 2, YNNI, CND Cymru newsletter, March/April 1982; Clwyd Declaration, 23 February 1982.

85 For more on this see Laucht and Johnes, ‘Resist and Survive’, esp. 234–5.

86 NLW, Ian and Thalia Campbell Papers, 9/2/1, Toby Hodd Election Leaflet, Cardiganshire District Council Elections, 1982–89.

87 Hogg, British Nuclear Culture, 133.

88 NLW, CND, F/6 1994/95, ‘From the Children of Cynghordy to the Children of Chernobyl’.

89 Western Mail, 22 June 2004.

90 Taylor, Simon, The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain: A History (Cambridge, 2016).

91 NLW, DET, E2/4, Welsh Office News, 24 July 1986.

92 English version in Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992).

93 Moving away from the traditional socio-economic story conveyed in works such as Moore-Colyer, Richard, Farming in Wales 1936–2011 (Talybont, 2011).

Ibid
Ibid