Question: Would a radioactive leak be possible in the UK and How could a radioactive leak affect the UK and its economy?

Becky Martin answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Hi Lucy!

It is possible, but very unlikely that we would have a leak of radiation from our nuclear power stations in the UK that affects the public. However, accidents do occasionally happen!

We classify radioactive leaks according to the international nuclear event (INES) scale which is categorised from 0 to 7, where 1-3 are considered to be a nuclear incident, and 4-7 are termed a nuclear accident. To give you some context, Fukushima and Chernobyl are classifed at 7 and are major incidents.

In the UK our worst nuclear accident occured over fifty years ago in 1957, when a fire occured at one of the nuclear reactors at Sellafield nuclear power station, in Cumbria. The incident ranked at level 4 on the INES scale, and the main economic impact of this was upon local dairy farms that were contaminated by radioactive iodine and caesium, so the farmers couldn’t produce milk.

If we were to have an incident of similar scale to Fukushima (which has never happened and hopefully will never happen!), then we would experience a similar economic impact. The greatest losses would be to fisheries, agriculture and forestry due to contaminated land and sea. There would also be an increased cost to healthcare which would affect the economy, due to perceived or actual health effects of radiation exposure. Finally, the stigma of radiation accidents could affect overseas investment, and have a knock-on effect upon our finance and banking sector. The cost of the clean-up operations would also affect our economy, as it’s not cheap to remove radiation from the environment. However, this is of course a very worst case scenario!

In the UK, when we have a release of radiation then we prioritise managing the incident to prevent exposure or harm to the environment over economic cost. In 2005 we had a leak from a cracked pipe into a sump chamber that was build to contain leaks, at the Thorp nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Sellafield. This incident was quite serious, ranking at 3 on the INES scale because over 83000 litres leaked out! No radiation was released into the environment and no one was injured, but we spent over £40 million to make sure that the leak was safe and managed. Sellafield was fined £500,000 and the Thorp plant wasn’t restarted until 2007, when everything was safe again.

So we are pretty safe in the UK. We invest quite a lot of money to develop new ways of managing and preventing leaks within our nuclear industry, so there is also an ongoing cost of “risk of leak” that could be considered too, without even having a leak happen!

I hope that answers your question fully!