Sellafield hit by two leaks in two days

Sellafield's effort to show off nuclear power as clean and safe suffered its second setback in two days yesterday, when British Nuclear Fuels admitted that radioactive liquid had seeped from a faulty valve on to a roof inside the complex earlier this week.

The leak, from the nuclear waste reprocessing facility, was only discovered on Tuesday, after heavy overnight rain washed the radioactive liquid by- products into the plant's drainage system. The liquids had been passing through a pipe between waste storage tanks inside the complex, a BNFL spokesman said.

On Sunday night, six workers were contaminated by an internal leak of radioactive dust. However, a BNFL spokesman said yesterday that the workers had been cleared. "It looks as though any extra dose of radiation received in that incident will be fairly trivial," he said.

BNFL is still examining the scene of the valve leak in order to determine exactly how much radiation was released from the pipe.

"The volume of rain on Monday night was such that there was a back-up in the drainage system and some of the contamination spilled on to ground," the company reported in its weekly newsletter, published yesterday. The incident was not announced separately to the media, and was placed eighth in the newsletter, after items celebrating the pouring of concrete for a waste installation and the retirement of a fireman.

The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, already investigating the earlier leak late on Sunday night, had been called in to examine the causes of the incident and an internal investigation into safety procedures was under way, a spokesman added.

The announcement was attacked by the environmental group Greenpeace. "This is the latest in a catalogue of accidents at Sellafield," said Helen Wallace, a Greenpeace scientist.

"Reprocessing should stop. It leads to greater discharges of radiation into the air and sea, and it is notable that BNFL is trying to increase its permitted discharges of radiation into the air."

Both leaks were graded level two on the International Nuclear Event Scale, on an ascending scale of one to seven, but were officially not regarded as "serious".

The BNFL spokesman said: "The two events are in no way connected. We haven't had a level two in a long time and it just seems to be an unfortunate coincidence."