Is it going to happen again?

With Belarus planning a new nuclear plant just 25 miles from the zone contaminated by Chernobyl, Kathy Sheridan, in the last of a three-part series, looks at the 'nuclear renaissance' and, below, hears the views of a Belarussian scientist who refused to be silenced

Chernobyl is over. That is basically the message of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Chernobyl Forum, the British nuclear industry and the Belarussian government. People died, but not many; the industry made mistakes, but it's all part of the "historical legacy" which the industry has bravely put behind it - so the message goes.

And the whole affair has given the Belarussian government such insights into nuclear power that it plans to build its own plant just 25 miles from the contaminated zone, a plan which has attracted surprisingly little comment from western democracies. Belarus, after all, is "the last dictatorship in Europe", according to Condoleezza Rice, a place where independent voices have systematically been silenced.

If Iran is suspect, why not Belarus? Belarus is simply tapping into what is being called a "nuclear renaissance", an apt term given that it is being led by France, a country with 59 reactors rolling out nearly 80 per cent of its electricity. Its slick marketing and expertise has been given weight by prominent environmentalists such as Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, and James Lovelock, who have switched sides in the belief that nuclear plants could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while satisfying voracious energy demands.

Finland is building the first new reactor in western Europe since 1991. Italy and the Netherlands are talking about the option. With memories fading of the near-catastrophic partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania 27 years ago, the Bush administration has also felt able to make a pitch for nuclear energy.

Across the world, some 25 reactors are under construction according to Associated Press, adding to the network of 440 commercial nuclear power plants, spread out over 31 countries, that supply 16 per cent of the world's total electricity.

By contrast, Sweden and Germany are choosing to shut down their nuclear options. But just across the Irish Sea, the handsome €82 billion to be forked out by the British taxpayer, merely to write off the British nuclear industry's liabilities, has failed to dampen official ardour for nuclear power. With the last of Britain's nuclear power stations due for closure in 2035, Tony Blair has clearly signalled his wish to build a new generation of them.

In a scathing piece in this newspaper in February, the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, recalled that Sellafield (aka Windscale) was the site of the world's first significant nuclear accident. The 1957 fire "marked an early example of the nuclear industry's reluctance to make information available to the public and to deal with issues in an open and transparent manner".

Between 1950 and 1976, there were 177 incidents grave enough to warrant investigation. In 1980, the UK safety regulator determined that safety at the site had deteriorated to a level which "should not have been allowed to develop, nor should it be permitted to occur again". In 1999, there was the notorious falsification of data at Sellafield's MOX Demonstration Facility.

Last year, at the Thorp plant, there was a leak of 83,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid from a tank into a concrete containment cell. A report on the incident referred to a failure by staff to act appropriately; a culture of complacency; failure to act on information; a prioritising of production over planned inspections; and ambiguous operating instructions.

It is worth remembering that the Soviet authorities only admitted to the Chernobyl disaster after the radiation was detected in Sweden.

The industry has still to produce a credible, environmentally sustainable solution to the problem of radioactive waste, which must be nursed for thousands of years.

MEANWHILE, THERE ARE many who question the current benign thinking on the effects of low-level radiation. Michael Meacher, the British MP who set up the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters, has pointed out that such thinking is based on "the known effects of external bomb-blast radiation [ie, Hiroshima], not on the less well- studied effects of swallowing radionuclides which then discharge radioactivity into key body organs".

As well as its own home-grown problems, Britain is still coping with the after-shock of Chernobyl. Emergency orders imposed in 1986 still apply to 375 farms in the UK, 355 of them in Wales. The British Department of Health has admitted that more than 200,000 sheep graze on land still poisoned by the fallout. No sheep can be moved out of these areas without a special licence. Those showing higher than permitted levels of radioactive caesium are marked with a special indelible dye and must spend months grazing on uncontaminated grass before they are declared fit for market.

David Ellwood, a Cumbrian farmer, told Britain's Independent that before taking sheep to auction, they take them off the fells and put them in the fields for a couple of weeks, "so readings are usually low. But the odd one gets a high reading if it comes straight in off the fell, and has to be slaughtered".

In the Republic, a spokesman for the Radiological Protection Institute (RPII) says that no farms are now or were ever restricted here, because our "management practices" are different from those in the UK. Here, sheep from the contaminated uplands are brought down to the lowlands for grazing before being sold and "as caesium-137 has a biological half-life of 10 days, the sheep excreted all this before going to the mart". In England, the spokesman says, "all sheep are sold straight from the uplands".

He also points out that sheep here are monitored in the marts rather than on the farms, so there is no need to restrict the farms. Now, Department of Agriculture vets use in vivo monitors on one sheep in every 10 going to marts.

There have been cases where flocks have failed the test and been returned to the lowlands "for maybe 10 days, but it would be a long time ago since that happened," he adds.

It's the RPII's view that the British "made a mistake of bringing in the restrictions". Farmers such as David Ellwood in Cumbria were told the emergency order could last about three weeks, but the agriculture officials were only guessing. According to the RPII, the UK is now "artificially stuck" with restriction orders and is unable to release the farms.

DATA FROM THE institute show that the two biggest contaminants in Irish foodstuffs in 1986 were iodine-131 and C137. While virtually all of the iodine had disappeared by the end of May that year, the C137 lingered much longer. During the first two weeks of May, the mean C137 concentration in milk was 120 becquerels per litre; it was September before this had declined to two becquerels per litre. According to the RPII, Ireland, "in line with most other European countries, adopted an intervention level for foodstuffs of 1,000 becquerels per kilogram as the level of contamination at which control measures would be considered. During the six months following the accident, this was only exceeded in one sample and so it was considered unnecessary to restrict the sale or consumption of foodstuffs produced within Ireland".

The institute estimates that Chernobyl resulted in "an approximate 3 per cent increase in radiation exposure to the average Irish person" in the following 12 months. It also estimates that in the 70 years following 1986, "approximately 18 fatal cancers are likely to occur in Ireland as a result of the accident. These cancer deaths will, however, be indistinguishable among the 450,000 cancers caused by other agents in the same period".