The Colonel's Plute

The Colonel's Plute is set in the 1970s and 1980s, when plutonium was thought to be vital to the UK's nuclear energy programme. The book includes short but important appearances by famous people, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Ronald Reagan, Tony Benn, and Arthur Scargill, as well as members of the IRA, and Greenpeace, the leading environmentalist group at the time.

The story centres, however, upon ordinary people: a family with working links to Sellafield, where much o...