Brand Failures

218 Brand failures
77 Windscale to
Sellafield
Same identity, different name
At the risk of understating the case, nuclear energy has always had something
of an image problem. When incidents happen at nuclear plants this ‘problem’
becomes a nightmare.
For instance, when massive amounts of radioactive material were released
from the UK’s Windscale atomic works in 1957, following a serious fire, the
consequences were disastrous. The local community in Cumbria were
understandably terrified about the health implications of uncontained
radiation.
Rather than close the plant down, the government believed the best way
to put distance between the disaster and the nuclear plant as a whole was to
change the name, from Windscale to Sellafield. However, everybody knew
that the nuclear facility was essentially the same, and so all the negative
associations were simply transferred to the new name. The name-change
certainly didn’t stop the rise in health problems in the area as this 1999 article
from a local Cumbria newspaper testifies:
While animals are still being irradiated in laboratories all over the
country to ‘study’ the effects, Dr Martin Gardner and colleagues of the
Medical Research Council in Southampton have learned that the
children of fathers who worked at the Sellafield nuclear-reprocessing
plant were six times more likely to be afflicted by leukaemia than