Dounreay facing legal action on contamination

from Sunday Herald, 28 January 2007

The Dounreay nuclear complex is facing legal action for failing to store radioactive waste safely after an incident in which a worker was contaminated with plutonium.

The government's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) has served two improvement notices on the plant's operator, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), obliging it to remedy the problem. Inspectors are also considering sending a report to the Procurator Fiscal.

A worker was found to have accidentally inhaled plutonium while decommissioning an old fuel processing laboratory on 12 January 2006. Subsequent investigations uncovered half a dozen contaminated lead bricks left on a shelf nearby.

According to one of the legal notices issued by the NII, the bricks were stored "without adequate levels of containment". They also lacked "adequate means of physical protection" and "any identification by means of marking or labelling".

The other legal notice alleges that inadequate safety records were kept. Dounreay has been given until 6 April 2007 to comply with both notices, and could be fined if it fails to do so.

According to Dounreay's spokesman, Colin Punler, the plan had been to reuse the bricks but the project for which they were intended had been shelved. "We have very good procedures for dealing with items with significant amounts of radioactivity," he said.

"But this revealed gaps in the way we dealt with items with small amounts of radioactivity. We are now fixing those gaps and confident of complying with the requirements laid down by the regulator."

News of the latest legal action comes after it was confirmed that Dounreay is to be prosecuted for allowing hundreds of thousands of radioactive particles to leak into the sea and onto local beaches before 1984. The UKAEA has been cited to appear in court in Wick on 6 February.

The Sunday Herald revealed last week that decommissioning work at Dounreay was threatened with delays and job losses because of a government financial crisis. The plant could see major cuts in its budget for 2007-08 because of losses made by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the state agency that funds Dounreay.

Dounreay's troubles have sparked criticism from environmental groups. "Cleaning up radioactive waste is hazardous enough without UKAEA unnecessarily exposing workers to contamination," said the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, Duncan McLaren.

"The NII is right to take Dounreay bosses to task over this extremely serious incident. One can only hope that the enforced cost-cutting exercise now underway will not lead to similar incidents in the future."