Five organisations were successfully prosecuted for offences under radiological protection legislation by the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) in 1999, according to the organisation's annual report yesterday. These involved incidents where radioactive material was lost in transit or inadvertently discarded as scrap.
The RPII said that while none of these incidents resulted in significant exposure of people to radiation, errors in other countries in the management of radiation sources had caused deaths and severe injuries.
It said that in 1999 it was granted unprecedented access to safety documentation relating to the storage of liquid, high-level radioactive waste at the Sellafield plant in England. It identified a number of actions which needed to be taken to minimise the risk of a major accident.
