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Terror attack on Sellafield 'would wipe out the north'

A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday.

The most vulnerable part of the facilities at Sellafield, dating back to the 1950s, contain giant tanks of high level radioactive waste which has to be constantly cooled and stirred to prevent a chain reaction.

Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he believed that documents from both the nuclear industry and the government showed neither had ever attempted a thorough analysis of the threat or the options for reducing it.

Dr Thompson, who was based in the UK for 10 years and gave evidence at the 1977 Windscale inquiry into reprocessing at Sellafield, and the Sizewell inquiry, is an expert on the potential fallout from a nuclear accident or deliberate act of terrorism.

As well as the threat of a bomb, missile or hijacked plane hitting Sellafield, Dr Thompson raises the possibility of a rogue worker or terrorist infiltrator at Sellafield sabotaging the cooling equipment which prevents the stored waste from boiling and causing a massive radioactive release.

Dr Thompson's report, sent this week in response to the committee's call for new evidence following a report it published last month, is likely further to alarm the Irish government, which has repeatedly protested about danger from the high level waste tanks at Sellafield.

The problem is that the plant which is supposed to turn this liquid waste into more managable and less dangerous glass blocks has never worked properly and a backlog cannot be cleared for another 15 years. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible.

Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer.

Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin.

Dr Thompson said: "A civilian nuclear facility is a potential radiological weapon if the facility contains a large amount of radioactive material that can be released into the environment.

"A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation."

He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident.

The total amount released from Chernobyl was 27 kilograms, almost 100 times less than the potential release from the facility at Sellafield.

Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner.

The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations".

However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack.

The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire.

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