Nuclear catastrophe

Brenda Weaver keeps her daughter's eyes in a small cardboard box. "I don't know why I keep them really. Sort of sentimental, I guess." Her finger lovingly fishes inside the box, turning each eye over as if she were looking for one in particular. The beautiful painted glass balls record the history of Brenda's daughter, Jamie. They stare at you coldly. Jamie was born in 1965 without eyeballs in the sockets. According to her doctor, this was the result of exposure to iodine-31 from the Hanford plant.

A quote from a Stephen King chiller? Dialog from a Hitchcock film? No, this is a true story from a new book called Real Lives, Half Lives, Tales from the Atomic Wasteland by Jeremy Hall.

Hanford is located in the Pacific north-west of Washington State. It is here plutonium was manufactured for the very first successful A-bomb test at Alomogordo, New Mexico in 1945. It was at this event that, spellbound by his handiwork, the nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered the line from Bhagavad Gita, "I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds."

It could have been Chernobyl or the Taiwanese nuclear plant (remember, they wish to send their nuclear waste to North Korea of all places), home to large numbers of Quasimodo fish. It is the tocsin of destruction they chime, the Quasimodo, like the poor unfortunate Notre Dame in Hugo's novel, seriously deformed. Mutants.

It could also have been Sellafield in England's northwest where British Nuclear Fuels pumped irradiated waste into the Irish Sea. The area now has one of the highest rates of leukemia in the United Kingdom. Up in the hills in the lovely Lake District behind Sellafield, they also know about nuclear radiation. Farmers were forced to destroy thousands of sheep after the Chernobyl cloud with its pure ruthenium affected their pastures.

Is this what awaits the people of the Muria peninsula?

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta