21 March 2007
In the early 1990s, I helped Susan D'Arcy write a book about the loss of her young daughter, Gemma, to leukaemia - a loss for which she blamed the Sellafield nuclear plant in north west England. The book was published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 1995, and translated into six languages. Twelve years on it is not easy to find, though it is still relevant to the arguments over nuclear power. So I am putting it online.
All the sections of Still Fighting for Gemma are available to download as Word documents by clicking on the links below. Or you can download the whole book here (436KB, 204 pages).
Title pages and acknowledgements (3 pages)
1. The contaminated shore (11 pages)
2. The disease that dare not speak its name (10 pages)
4. The Sellafield experiment (20 pages)
5. Dying but not ill (18 pages)
6. Who wants to live for ever? (15 pages)
7. Satan in the house (18 pages)
8. I should be so lucky (35 pages)
9. Fairground in the sky (9 pages)
10. She wore blue velvet (9 pages)
Select bibliography and anti-nuclear organisations in Britain (2 pages)
Sellafield has been causing leukaemia for decades as have all the other nuclear sites in the UK and around the globe. Read 'Wolves of Water' by Chris Busby, ISBN 1-897761-26-0 £12 from Green Audit Books 2006, Aberystwyth, SY23 1DZ Wales. It includes everything anyone needs to know about nuclear radiation. Read it and then get the government to stop killing people with lies about nuclear power.
Posted by: J Brown | 26 March 2007 at 10:18 AM
Whilst I have the greatest sympathy for the family who suffered a tragic personal loss and I have had a similar experience myself to know that grief lasts a lifetime. Nevertheless there is no evidence whatsoever to point the finger a Sellafield. It is only too easy to let fear and prejudice take the place of rational evidence based analysis.
The true causes of childhood leukaemia are difficult to establish although genetic damage is one. We are surrounded by causual agents for genetic damage and such damage is happening to all of us all the time. In some cases the result is measurable harm. The human race would not be on this planet if it did not have a robust mechanism to combat genetic damage. Radiation is everywhere - there is a lot at Sellafield but that is relatively closely controlled.
I think you would be amazed at how much radiation is carried home from the supermarket on the weekly shopping trip, your basket of groceries may well be treated as Low Level Waste at Sellafield.
Please be careful when attributing harm to a convenient bogey man because the real bogey man may be something much closer to home and overlooked.
Posted by: Peter Gentry | 22 March 2007 at 10:14 AM