Sheep farmers still stuck under a Chernobyl cloud

Leo Hickman reports for the Guardian

Lakeland sheep farmers, like the rare-breed Herdwicks many still rear today, are of hardy stock and refuse to be moved by a forecast of rain. It was no different during the first few days of May 1986, when an unseasonably intense downpour lashed down on the Cumbrian fells, topping its tarns and lakes, and driving walkers and day-trippers towards the sanctuary of the tea rooms.

David Ellwood – then a 30-year-old sheep farmer who had just taken on a National Trust tenant farm above the hamlet of Ulpha in the Duddon valley – remembers that week well. "It was lambing time," he recalls. "It was really, really wet. And then we got the message from the ministry. All the sheep farmers in the area were told there was to be a fortnight-long restriction on the sale and movement of our sheep."

A week earlier, on 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine exploded, sending a plume of radioactive particles – equivalent in toxicity to 400 Hiroshima bombs – more than seven kilometres up into the atmosphere and due east in the breeze. In the days that followed, as a fire raged unchecked inside the twisted, white-hot remains of the reactor, the wind direction reversed and the plume, now a kilometre tall, headed west towards north-western Europe. It wasn't until workers at a nuclear reactor in Finland detected abnormally high doses of radioactivity on their clothes - up to 100 times normal background levels – that anyone outside the Soviet Union realised the true severity of the accident.

On 2 May 1986, the plume finally passed over parts of the UK and, with fateful timing, so too did a column of cloud carrying heavy rain. The rain fell hardest where it always falls hardest – on the uplands. As the droplets of water fell from the sky, they carried with them the radionuclides – in particular, caesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium-90 – that had been dispersed from Chernobyl. It is estimated that 1% of the radiation released from the reactor fell on the UK. In an effort to prevent these radionuclides entering the food chain once they had settled on the upland soil, the ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food, as it was then known, ordered an immediate restriction on the movement and sale of sheep within the most affected areas – particularly north Wales, south-west Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Lake District, where the landscape is predominantly suited to grazing sheep. In total, almost 9,000 farms, and four million sheep, were placed under restriction.

"We couldn't believe it at first," says Ellwood today, leaning on his crook and looking up from his farmhouse towards the smooth dome of Hesk Fell – an ascent that Alfred Wainwright, the fellwalker's guidebook guru, said would lead nobody to "drop dead with excitement or suffer spasms of emotion" – where the majority of his 600 sheep still roam. "The radiation had come from 3,000 miles away and you couldn't see it. For many farmers around here, it brought back memories of the Windscale nuclear accident in 1957. My father, who was a sheep farmer at that time up near Eskdale, reassured me by saying he didn't have any problems with Windscale, but we didn't know anything about these sorts of things back then."

In fact, Ellwood still lives under the cloud of Chernobyl's legacy today. Baskell Farm, the 1,000-acre tenant farm he operates with his wife Heather, is one of the farms still under government restriction due to the risks of any remaining radionuclides passing into the human food chain via sheep meat. The vast majority of affected sheep farms – 355, to be precise – are located in and around Snowdonia in Wales, whereas nine, including Baskell Farm, are still being monitored in England and seven in Scotland. (All the farms in Northern Ireland were "derestricted" in 2000.)

~ more... ~