Wormwood (ePub)

ELECTRICITY WILL SOON BE TOO CHEAP TO METER! But this wonderful news was not on one of today's front pages. It was on the front page of a newspaper yellow with age and over sixty years old. The headline reflected the optimism of the early years of atomic energy production in Britain.

Tom Brown (17) and his sister Christina (15) are working on a school project highlighting the dangers of nuclear-power generation, but their father works at Sizewell B, a big nuclear power-station on the east coast of England. The school project examines various serious nuclear accidents, beginning with the early British one at Windscale, where the children's grandfather was working in the 1950s. Tom, Christina and Ruth Underhill, the teacher in charge of the anti-nuclear project and who has been deeply affected by a visit to Chernobyl (the name means "Wormwood" in Ukrainian) thus form a strong opposition to Mr Brown's optimistic belief in safe nuclear power generation.

A freshly arrival from America in Christina's class, Sindy Gerschwitz, whose mother once worked at Sizewell before moving to the USA after marrying an American engineer on temporary assignment to Sizewell, tells the class about the death of her father, who developed a rare and fatal cancer after working on the clean-up after the Three-Mile-Island nuclear accident at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: "He had cancer pretty bad, and he was in such pain at the end that when he died, Mom said it was a mercy…"

"Our safety record is second to none," insists Mr Brown more than once in this story. But is it? The protesters camping outside the nuclear plant at Sizewell do not think so. So will the final nail-biting incident prove Mr Brown wrong? Read on...