British Nuclear Fuels was yesterday given an official warning over its failure to check radioactivity levels in thousands of gallons of waste water being discharged into the Solway Firth and the Irish Sea from the Chapelcross power station.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency warned it could toughen the safety regime or prosecute if a similar mistake is made again, though the maximum fine would amount to only £20,000 sterling. The incident took place on January 17th and 18th this year, when 26,000 gallons of effluent was discharged without being sampled in the way the operating licence requires at the 40-year-old Chapelcross plant.
A BNFL spokesman explained that the water was used for storage of spent fuel rods before they were taken to Sellafield for reprocessing. The water is discharged when the storage tanks are cleaned. It was sampled once, but a second sample was not carried out as required.
The effluent contained caesium and tritium, the latter being unusual for nuclear power stations, as it is produced at the plant for the UK's nuclear weapons.
A protection officer, Dr Jim Gemmill, said: "The company failed to take the samples they should have taken before making a discharge. It's a cause of great concern if accurate environmental data is not returned to us. That is information we make available to the public to let them know what is happening in their local environment."
The Chapelcross station manager, Mr Mike Smith, admitted the mistake: "We're disappointed that we were not able to live up to our high standards of compliance with authorisations. It resulted from a confusion from two shifts as to whether a particular sample had been taken, as a result of a loophole in our paperwork which we have now closed." But Mr Lang Banks, Scottish spokesman for Friends of the Earth, commented: "This is one in a long line of incidents at Chapelcross. It's a shame that SEPA has not seen fit to report this to the procurator fiscal (the Scottish prosecutor), as it's time Chapelcross felt the heat of the law."