Five bags of radioactive waste from the Sellafield nuclear processing facility were dumped in a landfill site after a faulty scanner wrongly passed them as safe.
Environment Agency inspectors have found one of the bags but is still searching for the other four at the Lillyhall landfill site near Workington, Cumbria.
The bags contained waste collected in restricted areas of Sellafield where disposal of all items, including protective clothing, is strictly controlled because of the risk of radioactive contamination. The waste should have been sent for storage in concrete vaults at the Low Level Waste Repository near Drigg in Cumbria.
Sellafield Ltd, which operates on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, has suspended the disposal of all bagged waste while the agency investigates.
The incident may undermine the nuclear industry’s plan to save billions of pounds by adopting lower safety standards for thousands of tonnes of low-level radioactive waste from decommissioned reactor sites. Several landfill sites have applied for permits to handle low-level waste. The exposure of the error in Sellafield’s safety monitoring system will also fuel debate over whether Britain should be committing to a new generation of nuclear power stations. Labour and the Conservatives support the new stations but the Lib Dems oppose them, partly because of the high cost of decommissioning.
The error is particularly embarrassing for Sellafield because it was uncovered two days after unions reported concerns that the company was seeking to cut up to 1,200 jobs. The company admitted that it might reduce spending on “low hazard work” as part of an efficiency drive.
The error was discovered by a member of staff who became suspicious when a scanning machine declared as safe a bag that had come from the restricted area. Staff checked the machine’s records and found that five other contaminated bags had been passed as safe and sent to the nearby landfill site, which handles a mixture of household and industrial waste.
A Sellafield spokeswoman was unable to say for how long the machine had been malfunctioning. She said that the bags contained only low-level radioactive waste and there was no risk to the public or to staff at the landfill site.
Waste Recycling Ltd, which runs the Lillyhall site, is one of several landfill operators that have applied to the Environment Agency for permission to accommodate either “very low-level radioactive waste” or “low-level radioactive waste”.
The Government has agreed to consider such applications in an attempt to reduce the estimated £70 billion cost of decommissioning old reactors. There are millions of tonnes of what the nuclear industry describes as “potentially contaminated land” around these reactors and it would be far cheaper to dispose of them in landfill sites than transport them to the Cumbria repository.
– from timesonline.co.uk