Ever so slowly, Sellafield and the British nuclear industry give up their secrets. The disclosure that the government will hold an inquiry into claims that the body parts of workers who died in west Cumbria and at other nuclear plants were secretly taken for testing without families' consent is shocking but not surprising.
Secrecy has always been the norm at Sellafield. The vast west Cumbrian complex was born of the Cold War and its arms race. The generation of electricity from the site, from 1956 onwards, was a sideline to the government's real intention - to manufacture weapons grade plutonium. After America, Britain was the west's greatest bomb maker.
But the taking and testing of body parts almost certainly goes directly back to the major fire at Sellafield in 1957. This was the second worst accident in nuclear history and it is something of a miracle that it was not as bad as Chernobyl in 1986.
The accident was hushed up and played down and, even to this day, we have little idea how serious it was and how many people were affected. The routine testing of the body parts of workers would have provided nuclear scientists with a perfect medical laboratory. That the government did not tell the families of the deceased what they were doing speaks volumes of the paternalistic medical profession at the time and the culture of obsessive secrecy that still prevails throughout the nuclear industry.
Over the next few years, Sellafield will be hard pressed to give up more of its murky past. Aside from the fire, top of the list will be the mystery of its finances. All the public knows is that hundreds of billions of pounds have been more or less unaccountably spent on nuclear power. Where the money really went and how wisely it was spent is unknown.
The body parts inquiry will flush out a lot of what happened in the 1960s at Sellafield, but we should not expect it to get to the truth. Many people who would have known the details of this murky period of British history are now dead or bound by the Official Secrets Act and it is not easy for anyone to talk in public about what the biggest employer by far in the north west may have done with dad's body parts.
