Locating the site

During and after the liquidation of the programme many documents were lost, including any information about the pilot site and its location. For a long time we believed that the enemies of the programme, in their attempts to erase it from history, had destroyed them: it now seems at least plausible that some – perhaps many – were secreted by defenders of the programme against future need. This we believe because copies of programme documents have on occasion appeared in the society's library in unexplained circumstances. Our catalogue of the library is extremely well-maintained and so we are certain that these documents were not simply previously missed: they have in fact been placed in the library. The security of the library is also extremely rigorous, so it is unclear how this placement occurs although we have drawn some somewhat speculative conclusions. Since this report may become public we will not go into this further here¹.

Be that as it may, a document was recently placed in the library which appears to be an excerpt from a report on the closure of the pilot site, and which, crucially, includes its location. Following the discovery of this document, an initial excursion to the site was undertaken.

Our goals

Once the location of the site was known our goals were threefold. Firstly we wished to establish whether the site was safe enough for further investigation. Secondly we wished to make a preliminary assessment as to whether the site could be reactivated. Finally we wished to establish whether any activity has taken place at the site since it was decommissioned, particularly in more recent history, and also, if possible, who is responsible for any such activity, if any has taken place.

Establishing site safety

Although members of the society are accustomed to a certain level of risk, the dangers associated with the special fuels are well beyond any acceptable level, even for the most hardy society members. For years, residual radiation was considered the main problem, but more recently it has been discovered that under conditions we do not fully understand, the fuels can decay into nerve agent analogues of a peculiarly unpleasant nature².

As a result the first steps of our exploration of the site consisted of a cautious approach while measuring radiation levels combined with extensive testing for chemical agents using one of the portable chemical agent monitors the society has acquired from its contacts in the military. Although we did not explore the entire site (see below) the conclusions we came to were as follows.

Radiation levels appear to be significantly elevated but not prohibitively so. A week or so near the fence surrounding the central area of the site, inside which we did not venture, would be equivalent to a few years of normal exposure. Significantly the radiation does not appear to be coming from any single central point but rather from what are presumably old spills of fuel³. This means that we do not expect radiation levels to be much higher in the central region of the site. A map of the measured levels is attached [redacted in this version of the document].

Nerve agents and other fuel decay products were not detected. We did discover some curious alterations in local fauna and flora which may have been caused by the previous existence of high levels of mutagens in the past, but we did not detect any current levels. This is also a safe assumption as the decay products are not stable under prolonged exposure to UV light. We would therefore suggest extreme caution if entering any areas where daylight does not penetrate, but we believe the rest of the site to be safe.

Outwith the fenced-off central area we therefore believe the site to be reasonably safe, at least for short periods. Further tests are required however and we would certainly suggest that any members considering a visit carry both a dosimiter and one of the chemical agent monitors⁴.

An initial survey

The layout of the site will be familiar to anyone who knows the layout of the production facilities: it is simply on a much smaller scale. We made a survey map included as an appendix to this paper [redacted in this version] and took a large number of photographs, of which three are reproduced below. More details and photographs are available on request from the authors: all our data has also been deposited in the library.

The site was surprisingly unexceptional, appearing like a miniature version of a production site. This makes it clear that the methods and safety protocols for production of the special fuels did not significantly develop over the life or the programme. Either safety protocols were already good or the programme simply did not work to improve safety until it was too late. Given what else is known we believe the latter case to be more likely, and this should certainly be a consideration if any reactivation is to be attempted.

Although we made photographs of the central area we did not venture into it for reasons explained below. It is therefore possible that there are unexpected differences in this area. We do not expect so, however.

The possibility of reactivation

If the society is to achieve its goals, production of special fuels will be required. Indeed lab-scale production has already been attempted with some success. To proceed beyond this stage we will either need to build a facility of our own or to reactivate one of the programme's facilities. Since our needs are far lower than that of the programme at its peak and the operating costs of even one of the programme's production facilities would be very high, an obvious hope, once its location became known, was that we could reactivate the pilot plant.

Sadly we do not believe this would be easy or, probably, realistically possible: the pilot plant was closed too long ago and there seems to have been no maintenance of it even during the later stages of the programme.

Initially we were optimistic: the view of the fuel mixing tank here seems to show that is is in surprisingly good condition with no obvious structural problems or leaks.

Note that unlike the production facilities there was only one fuel mixing tank: there was no need, in the pilot plant, for continuous production, so production was simply paused while contaminant buildup was removed.

However we quickly realised that the settling and separation tank was in very poor condition.

What is clear in this image is that, after the site was decommissioned, little or no maintenance was done, and vegetation, including trees, has seeded itself in the tank. The trees must have been exposed to very high levels of radiation and other mutagens, but have nevertheless thrived. What is not quite so clear is that the walls of the tank have been breached in several places, and we assume also that tree roots have damaged the integrity of the floor of the tank. This tank is certainly not usable as it is, and we believe in fact that is is not usefully recoverable: building a new tank would be both cheaper and safer.

We believe, sadly, that the state of the settling tank alone is sufficient to prohibit useful recommissioning of this facility. However we also found numerous other problems: please contact the authors for details. The implausibility of reactivation combined with possible increased risk is also why we did not explore the central area in detail: there seemed little point as this purpose of our exploration had been achieved.

Traces of recent activity

The final purpose of our visit was to asses what activity, if any, has taken place at the site since it was decommissioned, and whether such activity was recent. Here we have a more positive report.

Firstly it appears that the site, once decommissioned, received either minimal or no maintenance by the programme. That undoubtedly contributed to the current very poor state of the separation tank as described above.

Secondly it seems that either the location of the site was not known to the programme's liquidators or that they did not consider it important enough to demolish and erase. Given their behaviour with other relatively minor sites of the programme the second option seems implausible. We thus are led to an intriguing conclusion: not all of the programme's documents were available to them. In other words, someone⁵ removed at least some of the documents of the programme before the liquidators took over its sites. We might further assume that some of those documents survived in other hands, and that, perhaps, it is these documents to which we are now, gradually, being given access.

Finally there are clear signs of more recent activity at the site. There are paths which seem to be in current or very recent use, including within the central area of the facility, and we also chanced upon what seems to be a kind of garden where some of the altered flora were being, it seems, cultivated. This garden – if garden it is – has a most curious appearance as seen in this photograph.

[redacted in this public version]

We also, as reported by explorers of other sites of the programme, caught several glimpses of movement, although we did not see anyone – or anything – directly.

We hesitate to draw conclusions from this, but we believe that further investigation would be warranted. If what we have found is traces of those others so widely reported then we believe that an attempt to make contact with them can only be helpful to the society⁶.

Conclusions

The site appears to be radiologically and chemically safe. We do not believe reactivation is realistically possible.

There are clear signs of recent activity which we believe may well be those others with whom some initial contact has been made by other members of the society recently. We strongly believe that cautious approaches should be made to them if this is so.

The current state of the site indicates that it was probably unknown to the liquidators, and leads to the conclusion that someone, or something, removed some – perhaps many – of the programme's documents before they fell into the hands of the liquidators. We speculatively conclude that this was done by the others mentioned in some of the programme's surviving papers, and that these others are closely related to, if not identical with, those others we have recently encountered. We believe that they may still have a large amount of the programme's documents, and that for this reason alone contact with them would be very beneficial to the society.