Sellafield workers return after high radioactivity alert

Britain's Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant cleared workers to resume activity following a radiation alert earlier today.

The Cumbria, England-based company, which employs 10,000 people, said the elevated levels of radioactivity detected overnight were the result of normal background radiation and not attributable to any problem any operations onsite.

Standard weekend working operations will continue and day staff can resume work on Monday as normal, it said in a statement.

The site in northern England, which reprocesses atomic fuel, was operating normally with reduced manning levels.

The plant, site of Britain’s worst nuclear accident in 1957 and once the producer of plutonium for nuclear bombs, said there was no risk to the public, a statement echoed by the government.

The operator said the facility, just outside Britain’s striking Lake District national park on the coast of the Irish sea in northwest England, was operating normally.

A higher than normal radiation reading was logged overnight via an air monitor at a perimeter fence, but Britain’s state nuclear decommissioning agency, which owns the site, said the source of the reading was unclear.

“It is far too early to say there is a leak. Everything being done is precautionary. There is no danger to the workforce, communities or wildlife,” said Bill Hamilton, a spokesman from Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

“At the moment we don’t know where the radiation is coming from.”

Sellafield, a patchwork of grey buildings, industrial cylinders and cooling towers surrounded by grassland, said the decision to keep staff at home was conservative.

“As a result of a conservative and prudent decision, the Sellafield site is operating normally but with reduced manning levels today,” Sellafield said in a statement, adding that only essential workers were being asked to report to work.

The British government said it was in constant contact with the site, about 480 km northwest of London, and that there was no risk to the public from the raised level of radioactivity.

Nuclear safety

Once the source of plutonium for Britain’s nuclear bombs, Sellafield was the site of the October 1957 Windscale fire, Britain’s worst nuclear accident, when a plutonium reactor burned for five days, belching radiation into the atmosphere.

It is the site of a civilian nuclear power station that is being decommissioned by a consortium of British company Amec , French group Areva, and US firm URS.

Now one of two nuclear fuel reprocessing plants in Europe along with Areva’s La Hague plant in France, Sellafield receives spent fuel from power plants across the world, including Japan. It employs over 10,000 people.

Alongside government and company assurances that there was no danger to the public, nuclear experts and academics said initial information available to the public indicated this was a minor incident that had little in common with the 2011 Fukushima and 1986 Chernobyl disasters.

“This is a prudent precaution until the cause is known and the situation rectified,” said Richard Wakeford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Manchester.

“It’s a different situation here than it was at Fukushima and Chernobyl because you haven‘t got operating reactors,” he said.

When asked how serious the Sellafield incident appeared, Andrew Sherry, Director of the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester, said: “From the detail that we have got, I think it’s very minor. Very minor. Right down the bottom of the list, if on the list at all, I suspect.”

But the increased radiation reading, even from one monitor, is likely to increase scrutiny of Sellafield’s safety record.

Environmental group Greenpeace says Sellafield has the highest concentration of radioactivity on the planet and that its reprocessing plants discharge some 8 million litres of nuclear waste into the sea each day.

It also contains what its deputy managing director George Beveridge described in 2009 as “the most hazardous industrial building in western Europe”, housing a 150-metre-long pond used to store spent nuclear fuel.

In April 2005, leaked radioactive waste was discovered from Sellafield’s THORP reprocessing plant which may have started as early as August 2004. It was categorised as a level 3 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale and resulted in fines.

British prime minister David Cameron has thrown his weight behind building new nuclear power stations as a way to replace ageing coal and nuclear power plants.

The government last year signed a $26 billion deal to build a new nuclear plant in southwest England with the support of France’s EDF and two Chinese partners.

NuGen, a nuclear new build joint venture between Japan’s Toshiba and France’s GDF Suez, owns a site adjacent to the Sellafield reprocessing plant to build a new nuclear power station. The group wants to build three reactors on the site, the first scheduled for service in 2024.

Agencies