9
Clean-ups and cover-ups
Long-term or permanent habitation of contaminated areas is improbable even in the distant future.
Eames: When it came to the clean-up exercise, was the situation this: that the Australians had absolutely no way of knowing what the debris was that would have occurred from these tests apart from what you told them?
Pearce: That is so.
There came a point, when Sir Ernest Titterton was giving evidence, when there was almost no point asking him anything, because we could not get the facts out of him.
What do you do with a vast nuclear weapons test site that is now surplus to requirements? The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 made official what the moratorium of 1958 to 1961 had begun – there could be no more legal atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons by nations who signed the agreement. Maralinga was built for atmospheric tests. Between the end of the moratorium in 1961 and the start of the treaty in 1963, there was even some thought that Maralinga might resume a major trials program, especially if the touchy Americans pushed the British away from Nevada again. However, the treaty came in and Britain worked with America in Nevada and the Pacific. Maralinga was history.
The British did canvass the possibility of taking the tests underground and hinted at a site about 400 kilometres from Maralinga where a hill rose 700 metres above the plain, generally considered to be Mt Lindsay. By now, though, the Australians had had enough. The hill looked like it was in an Aboriginal reserve, and drilling into it would, at the very least, likely cause water flow problems in the area. The final meeting on the subject took place in December 1963 between senior members of the Prime Minister’s Department and their counterparts from the UK weapons establishment and the UK High Commission. The talks came to nothing. The Australian Government was a signatory to the Partial Test Ban Treaty and in no mood to test its limits, or to contend with a restive populace who no longer thought atomic weapons testing desirable. The idea of underground tests quietly died. The Menzies government was relieved.
No-one really knew what to do about Maralinga though. The British kept their options open for a while and took several years to close it down fully. The original agreement to allow the British to test atomic weapons at Maralinga committed them to clean up what they left behind. Clause 12 made the British liable ‘for such corrective measures as may be practicable in the event of radio-active contamination resulting from tests on the site’.
The first attempt to put the site right was called simply Operation Clean-Up, a basic name for a basic operation organised by the range commander. Just about all remaining personnel on site pitched in. Every Tuesday afternoon from 25 June 1963 for a number of weeks, they carried out an ‘emu parade’, picking up scraps of various kinds. Site personnel gathered 175 tonnes of contaminated material from the three Naya sites, as well as TM100, TM101 and Wewak. This debris was all placed into a pit at the ‘cemetery’ at TM101. (As a side note, there was no actual cemetery there, or at the airfield. The name was an in-joke about a burial place for inconvenient items.)
Also in 1963, AWTSC secretary John Moroney reviewed radio-active contamination at the site. He reported on 5 September 1963 that the plutonium used in the minor trials was the most dangerous hazard, particularly that at Taranaki left over from Vixen B. He also found quantities of the bone-seeking radioactive element strontium-90 at the site. However, he was hamstrung by not having detailed information from the British, particularly data to do with the minor trials. The British had shared virtually no information about the minor trials with the Australians, even when the Department of Defence reacted against the Titterton-inspired information bottle-neck. Moroney wrote to the AWRE in November 1963 seeking more information, but, at that stage anyway, it was not forthcoming.
The biggest problem left behind was plutonium. That word alone should have been enough to ensure a thorough clean-up. Make no mistake; the dangers of plutonium were well known in the 1960s – ignorance does not explain the persistence of the contamination problems at Maralinga. These might not have been so severe, either, if the British had not whitewashed the true state of the range via a nondescript document called the Pearce Report.
Noah Pearce, the author of the report, looms large in this part of the story. Pearce had an honours degree in physics and had worked during the latter years of World War II on measuring the effects of bomb blasts for the UK Ministry of Supply. He lived a long life, dying in 2009 at the age of 91. He worked for the AWRE in various capacities, particularly in the early days measuring the explosive yield of Hurricane and Totem. In the late 1950s he was responsible for health aspects of the minor trials and, later, for the clean-up operations: Operation Hercules in 1964 and Operation Brumby in 1967. Both these operations made the contamination problem worse, and both seem to have been conducted largely for the sake of appearances, rather than to actually clean up the appalling mess at the site. ‘Operation Brumby’, said the Royal Commission, ‘was based on wrong assumptions. It was planned in haste to meet political deadlines and, in some cases, the tasks undertaken made the ultimate clean-up of the Range more difficult’. Later, a report by the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) on the rehabilitation of the Maralinga site stated that Hercules and Brumby ‘did not rehabilitate the site to the standard later recognised to be necessary for the protection of people and the environment’. How could something so important be so wrong?
For a number of years, the Pearce Report was held to be the final word on the radioactivity at both Maralinga and Emu. Never has there been a greater example of the bureaucratic convenience of an official report – a report that’s completed, checked, signed off, printed, filed and then forever taken as true. Well, not actually forever in this case. The Pearce Report is a pivotal document because its contents were the backdrop to the formal agreement to hand the site back to the Australian Government. The British and Australian governments both clung to it as to flotsam from a shipwreck for way too long, even though the evidence suggests that the Australian officials had not read it closely. In fact, the Pearce Report was barely the first word. That it was not forever taken as true came down to a combination of whistleblowing and investigative journalism.
The first Pearce clean-up, known officially as Hercules 5, arose from the growing conviction that Maralinga would never again be used for atomic weapons testing, and therefore the range was likely to be left unattended and unmaintained indefinitely. Key on site personnel such as the Australian health physics representative Harry Turner had already been relocated (Turner was transferred to the Department of Defence in Canberra). There was no health physics expert on site, no-one to deal with a radiation emergency or keep an eye out for untoward scatterings of cobalt-60 beads.