快猫短视频

RADIOACTIVE waste dumped by the Sellafield nuclear plant in north-west
England will expose populations to a thousand times more radiation than British
Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) admits, according to a report commissioned by the
environmental group Greenpeace. The scientists who wrote the report say that
this could cause hundreds of deaths over thousands of years. The conflict raises
the question of how you judge the risks from this kind of contamination.

BNFL plans to offload 510 terabecquerels of technetium-99 into the Irish Sea
over the next six years. The radioactive isotope is a by-product of the
reprocessing of spent fuel from Britain鈥檚 first generation of Magnox
reactors.

In a consultation exercise completed this month, England鈥檚 Environment Agency
said that its 鈥減referred option鈥� was to let the discharge go ahead. According to
BNFL鈥檚 calculations, it would only mean a collective radiation dose of 2.7
person sieverts鈥攅nough, statistically, to cause 0.1 deaths. The company
argues that this tiny risk does not justify spending up to 拢700 million to
cut the discharges.

But now the radiation scientists who produced the report, Ian Fairlie and
David Sumner, say that the real radiation dose is nearer 5000 person sieverts
and could cause many more deaths. They point out that BNFL鈥檚 calculations only
take into account exposure to technetium-99 over the next 500 years, although it
has a half-life of 213,000 years.

鈥淭runcating doses at 500 years just doesn鈥檛 make sense for technetium-99,鈥�
Fairlie told 快猫短视频. His calculations assume that millions of
people around the world will be exposed to the isotope over hundreds of
thousands of years, so many more risk developing fatal cancers. It may be worth
spending money now to reduce that risk, he says.

BNFL, however, highlights the enormous problems of making predictions many
thousands of years into the future, and points out that the company agreed their
methodology with the Environment Agency. The annual doses people receive from
emissions of technetium-99 are 鈥渢iny鈥� compared to those from natural
radioactivity, the company maintains.