Dumping on Britain : MOTHER COUNTRY <i> by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 261 pp.; 0-374-21361-5) </i>

The announcer of the British Broadcasting Co. radio program, “The World News,” signs off in a clear and pleasant voice, untroubled by calamity. “This,” the broadcaster says, “is the end of ‘The World News.’ ” It is a phrase easy to misconstrue. Anthony Burgess, author of “Clockwork Orange,” thought so, too. Another of his books is called “The End of the World News.”

American essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson tells us in “Mother Country,” her own end-of-the-world news, that Great Britain is the largest commercial producer of plutonium in the world. Great Britain is also “the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world’s environment.”

Nuclear waste arriving in England from client countries--Japan, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Spain among them--is likely to enter England at the port of Dover for transport by train on a diagonal cross-country journey via London to Cumbria on the shores of the Irish Sea.

There, at Sellafield, on a site shared with Calder Hall, Britain’s first, aging and still-operating nuclear power station (1956), the waste is processed by government-owned British Nuclear Fuels.

Sellafield is near the Lake District, a countryside so beautiful, one map exults, “few places can compare.” It is Wordsworth country, Beatrix Potter country, shepherd’s country; fells and dales with wonderful names: Windermere, Buttermere. But the lambs on the deep green hills are radioactive.

At Sellafield--called Windscale until the disgrace of a major nuclear accident in 1957--the houses are radioactive. So are--because of 30 years’ contamination, occasional bursts of high emission and irradiated slicks--the Irish Sea and its spray, the sand, the seaweed and flotsam, the fish, the boats and the wind. One in 60 children in nearby Seascale village dies of leukemia, a rate 1,000 times the national average.

Really.

The nuclear accident at Chernobyl was a boon to Sellafield apologists. Its fallout, they say, contaminated Cumbrian fields and lambs. No one had tested local livestock for radiation before Chernobyl; no one, in fact, tested the livestock for months after. (And the only post-Chernobyl Geiger-counter readings on the west coast of England were made by a high school science class.) But Sellafield is closer to Cumbria than Chernobyl is, by many thousand miles, and “so productive of contamination that there is no reason to look elsewhere for a source.”

What happens at Sellafield? The waste products of British and foreign nuclear reactors are delivered, cleansed with solvents (if “cleansed” is the right word), processed to yield usable, salable plutonium and uranium, and disposed of (if “disposed” is the right word).

Sellafield is part of the power industry (in England a government monopoly) because it handles the wastes of British reactors which produce power. Sellafield has a military function because its processing produces weapons-grade plutonium for British military use. Its civilian cum military function, Robinson says, “limits its accessibility to EEC (European Economic Community) inspection, among other advantages.”

Britain has long produced its own toxic wastes. It was, after all, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Britain has long imported chemical toxics, for profitable disposal. Now it has found that disposal of imported nuclear waste is profitable, too.

Britain’s attitude toward virulent waste is relatively carefree. There is no legal obligation, for instance, to warn developers that a site has been a toxic dump. There is no restriction on the use of radioactive materials in British goods. Poisoning the well, Robinson says, is “established practice . . . a bit of 19th-Century tradition.”

According to Robinson and the many journalists whose articles comprise the 20-page Selected Bibliography at the back of “Mother Country,” Britain is still poisoning the well.

“Their solution to the problem,” Robinson says, “amounts to extracting as much usable plutonium and uranium from the waste as they find practicable and flushing the rest into the sea or venting it through smokestacks into the air. There are waste silos, some of which leak uncontrollably. In an area called Driggs, near Sellafield, wastes are buried in shallow earth trenches. Until the practice was supposedly ended in 1983 by the refusal of the National Union of Seamen to man the ships, barrels of nuclear waste were dropped routinely into the Atlantic. In other words, Britain has not solved the problem of nuclear waste, and has, in fact, greatly compounded it in the course of producing plutonium in undivulged quantities.”

Two kilometers or 1.2 miles offshore, a “lake” of plutonium lies under the Irish Sea, formed by the million-gallon-a-day discharge from Sellafield’s pipeline. A contaminated slick in 1983 brought radiation to levels ten thousand times background.

Incredibly, “Sellafield is no secret,” yet the press outside Britain does not report its significance. Despite censure in the world courts, despite local protest and that of the nearest international neighbors, despite criticism in the British media, Sellafield is expanding. Sellafield must expand, to handle the increasing volume of nuclear waste entrusted to it.

“Mother Country” is not itself investigative reporting, but a sequential interpretation of other people’s reportage. It is not a primary work of science; its data was gathered by British journalists. This second-stage journalism, from a citizen-of-the-world stunned by what she read in British newspapers, is a tocsin meant to warn Americans--or anyone who will listen--of a grave situation.

How can such things happen? So asks a book-within-the-book where Robinson looks to the past, even unto Poor Law of the 14th Century, for the secrets of national character. What does she find? That beneath the famous civility the British have always wasted lives and credited the idea of human surplus; that there have in the past been policies of depopulation. That there is a lack “of positive, substantive personal and political rights.” That industrial illness and accident are common and customary. That there has never been a minimum wage. That many factors, including the Official Secrets Act, restrict the flow of information. That the (non-elected) Permanent Civil Service is professional and very powerful. That bumbling amateurism is still respectable, with chilling ramifications--an inability to gather meaningful statistics, for instance, or to keep track of such crucial documents as half the mortality data on workers at Windscale. That the citizenry is passive. That it is hard to locate responsibility, and that profit is motive and justification enough for almost anything.

With such friends we need no enemies.

When Robinson wrote a novel, she chose to call it “Housekeeping.” Now, in this earnest nonfiction, she is aghast at how Britain’s house is kept.