Court fines Sellafield €750,000 for massive leak
Tuesday October 17 2006
Carlisle Crown Court yesterday ordered British Nuclear Group (BNG) to pay €743,019, plus €100,981 in costs, after 83,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid leaked from a pipe over a nine-month period.
Environment Minister Dick Roche said yesterday that safety concerns regarding the nuclear plant remain. But he welcomed the actions of the UK Regulator in holding the operators accountable for the serious lapses in safety procedures. Fine Gael's environment spokesman, Fergus O'Dowd, heavily criticised the fine, however, labelling it an "absolute pittance". He said Sellafield still posed a "clear and present danger" to Ireland.
"This case was based on the leak last year of 83,000 litres of radioactive material at the Thorp facility and it is no surprise that Sellafield's operators pleaded as they did, as they were guilty of three breaches of the Nuclear Installations Act.
"The fact that enough nuclear waste to fill a 25-metre pool leaked undetected for months highlights the lax attitude to safety at the plant and the real danger it poses to Ireland."
The £1.8bn (€2.7bn) flagship reprocessing plant is still closed after the leak.
As a result of the incident, BNG has already had to pay a €3m penalty to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which said the operators failed to meet the high-quality safety and environmental requirements. The company had faced an unlimited fine when it appeared in court yesterday having admitted three charges brought by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) at an earlier hearing in June.
The court heard that faulty machinery allowed the leak to go undetected from August 2004 until April 2005. An alarm system did sound, but the workforce had a culture of coping with alarms by ignoring them.
At the time of the leak's discovery, the British shadow trade secretary David Willets described it as a failure "worthy of Homer Simpson", the inept nuclear plant worker from TV cartoon series 'The Simpsons'.
BNG had originally hoped to restart the Thorp plant this summer, but it can only reopen once all of the necessary permissions have been obtained from the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and the NDA, and this is likely to take until the end of the year.
Since the leak, BNG has been giving staff training in "behaviour and technical matters" and a new CCTV camera has been installed.
- Karl Connor
