Safety officials at Sellafield have yet to find a way to clean-up a major radioactive leak 22 days after the discovery of a broken pipe at the nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria.
The highly toxic mix contains plutonium and uranium dissolved in acid and enough spilled out to fill two typical family livingrooms right to the ceiling.
The "pipework failure" occurred at Sellafield's €3,000 million Thorp plant. Remote camera checks first detected the leak on April 18th and the radioactive "liquor" now covers the floor of a concrete chamber, according to a spokeswoman for the company.
"It has leaked into this cell, which isn't ideal, but it is able to contain the leak," she said yesterday. "There is no safety threat to employees or to the environment. The plutonium is in a safe and stable state."
About 83 cubic metres of radioactive liquor escaped into the concrete chamber, the spokeswoman said. "We raised a Sellafield incident report and are required to publish this in the Sellafield newsletter. It was published on Wednesday 27th April."
The company has yet to devise a way to get the highly radioactive liquid out of the chamber, but the incident has forced the closure of the controversial Thorp plant, which reprocesses spent nuclear reactor fuel to recover its plutonium and uranium.
"It is a relatively serious event though there was no release," stated the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland's director of advisory services, Tony Colgan. "It is all contained within a building which has walls several feet thick. The issue for [the company] is how they are going to get access and get the liquor out and what they do with it afterwards. It is a big headache for them."
The institute received notification of the incident on April 21st and the Department of the Environment got details of the event the following day. "We were advised on the 22nd of April by our UK counterparts in compliance with agreements," the departmental spokesman said yesterday.
"We were advised no one was hurt and there was no release to the environment," he added. "We got the information and immediately put out a release."
Safety officials began looking for a leak when they discovered the amount of radioactive liquor being produced was "8 per cent lower than it ought to be", he said.
The Sellafield spokeswoman suggested the Thorp plant would be closed for several weeks or a few months, but Dr Colgan doubted this estimate. "A couple of months is optimistic. I think we are talking six months."
The pipe carrying the radioactive liquor would have leaked for some time before its discovery, he added.
"We don't have information from them as yet when the leak started," Dr Colgan said.
The improved early warning system for nuclear incidents agreed between the Irish and British governments last December had worked well, according to Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Dick Roche.
The incident however, demonstrated the justification for Irish concerns regarding nuclear installations in the UK, he added in a statement.
The Thorp closure is a blow to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which took over ownership of Sellafield from British Nuclear Fuels Ltd on April 1st. Thorp's €1.4 million a day income is meant to finance clean-up costs at other British nuclear facilities.
