‘Catalogue of safety fears’ at nuclear site

A “CATALOGUE of safety concerns” have been uncovered by a BBC Panorama investigation at Cumbria nuclear site Sellafield.

Screened last night, Panorama found that parts of Sellafield have too few staff to operate safely and radioactive materials have been stored in degrading plastic bottles.

Helped by an insider who has worked at a senior level at the facility who the BBC called “Neptune” to protect his identity, the programme revealed how parts of the site are dangerously run down.

The whistle-blower said his biggest fear was a fire in one of the nuclear waste silos or one of the processing plants.

“If there is a fire there it could generate a plume of radiological waste that will go across Western Europe,” he said.

Meg Hillier MP, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said she was shocked figures: “It is incredible. It defies belief actually that anything could be working at below safe staffing levels. There is no excuse.”

The insider said Sellafield, which stores and processes nearly all the UK’s nuclear waste, frequently did not have enough staff working to operate at minimum safety levels.

In a processing plant of 60 people the safe minimum manning level might be only six workers, he said.

Sellafield says the site in Cumbria is safe and has been improved with significant investment in recent years.

Dr Rex Strong, head of nuclear safety at Sellafield, denied that operating below these levels was dangerous.

He said: “You make alternative arrangements, so the things that have to be done get done. Facilities are shut down if we’re not able to operate them in the way that we want to.”

In addition, Panorama raised concerns about the way radioactive materials have been stored at Sellafield.

It discovered liquid containing plutonium and uranium had been kept in thousands of plastic bottles for years. The bottles were only intended for temporary storage and some of them are degrading.

Sellafield has been working to remove them, but there are still more than 2,000 bottles containing plutonium and uranium on the site.

Dr Strong told Panorama that Sellafield had been working to get the material into proper storage: “The organisation is now focusing on putting right some underinvestments of the past in order to support the hazard and waste reduction mission that the site has.”

Panorama has also said it had seen leaked reports that suggest Sellafield had problems with emergency management and with maintaining the site’s infrastructure. One report from 2013 says “years of neglect” had led to “intolerable conditions”.

Dr Strong rejected the BBC’s description of the site. He said: “There’s been huge and sustained investment in infrastructure at Sellafield over recent years.”

“Safety is our priority and we are managing a very complex site which has got a great deal of hazardous radioactive materials on it.”