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Professor John Robertson OBA
In the Daily Mail today:
Atomic bomb waste discovered beneath six homes in St Louis has sparked panic and renewed concern in other US cities still haunted by Manhattan Project contamination. St Louis is far from the only city still dealing with Manhattan Project fallout. Across the country, sites such as Hanford in Washington, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Los Alamos in New Mexico remain dangerously contaminated. A 2003 study surveyed 801 individuals who lived downwind of the Hanford plutonium production facility, finding greater-than-expected numbers of central nervous system tumors and cancers of the female reproductive system.
High incidences of all cancers, particularly thyroid cancer, were also identified.
The Hanford plutonium production facility has an equivalent, only a few miles from the Scottish border with Cumbria in the North West of England and, crucially, upwind and upstream so that, with the prevailing marine currents and winds, its airborne and waterborne pollution only goes one way – over and around Scotland – Sellafield, the most toxic site in Europe.
From the serious and reliable New Scientist, ten years ago:
URGENT clean-up of two of the world’s most dangerous radioactive waste stores will be delayed by at least five years, despite growing safety fears.
The waste is stored at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site, which holds radioactive waste dating back to the dawn of the nuclear age. An accident at the derelict site could release radioactive materials into the air over the UK [sic] and beyond.
Last week, the UK government sacked the private consortium running the £80-billion-programme to clean up Sellafield, and gave the job back to its own agency, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The clean-up operation, scheduled to end by 2120, costs the government £1.9 billion a year.
Nine years later and little meaningful progress judging by this from BBC Cumbria in August 2024:
The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has served two improvement notices on Sellafield Ltd, located near Whitehaven, in west Cumbria, after it “failed to manage the risks of working with nickel nitrate and to prevent or adequately control exposure of workers to this hazardous substance”.
In between and shocking in the full sense of the word, this from BBC Cumbria in September 2024:
A longstanding radioactive leak at a nuclear plant’s storage silo appears to have slowed down, a report has said. The leak in the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) – built more than 50 years ago at Sellafield in Cumbria – started in 2019 after first happening in the 1970s.
According to council documents, external, there has now been a “slight reduction in the rate of the leak“, raising hopes that waste products could be removed and an affected pond drained earlier than expected. Sellafield said it would continue to look for ways to “to stop or reduce the leak sooner”. The MSSS is considered to be Sellafield’s most hazardous building.
Do you have to read that twice to see clearly the shocking apathy, complacency, about this leak – off and on over 50 years and all the time over the last 6?
Where is it leaking into eventually? The Irish Sea and the Clyde Estuary before flowing all the way around Scotland.
Why does that matter?
Scotland has the highest cancer incidence rate in the UK at 635 per 100 0001 compared with 583 in England2 and 520 in Wales.3 The EU average is 590.4
Sources:
- https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/cancer-incidence-in-scotland/cancer-incidence-in-scotland-to-december-2022/
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/cancerdiagnosisanddeaths2019to2023
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/cancerdiagnosisanddeaths2019to2023
- https://ecis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Cumbria council have rejected English Labcons’ plans to dump more nuke waste in their region, I wonder where it will be dumped then, hmm.
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There was an earlier nuclear power station, Calder Hall, on the Windscale (Sellafield) site. There was a ‘sister’ site, Chapelcross, built around the same time at Annan in Dumfries and Galloway.
It is likely that safety management at these sites suffered from similar laxity as occurred at Windscale (Sellafield) and elsewhere, such as Dounreay. Spillages and seepages from Chapelcross would have made their way to the Solway Firth and would have joined with the seepages coming up from Windscale (Sellafield) and whatever effluent comes from the huge munitions dump at Beaufort’s Dyke between Galloway and the North of Ireland.
In addition these power stations had chimneys and radioactive material would have been released in that. Although many particles would have been driven by the prevailing winds north eastwards and over the North Sea to the southern parts of Scandinavia, some would have been deposited in the area around Annan.
Due to the Official Secrets Acts any monitoring data would have been kept from the public for as long as possible. Statistical analyses of health of people relatively close the the plants compared to those for people more distant would also have been restricted.
Although much data is now available from many parts of the world, it is not something that the mainstream media or Tory and Labour politicians have spoken of and when they have done they have tended to downplay the effects by using decontextualised data. Profit looms large in the decision making process. Sadly, trade unions have not protected their members as highly as they should, with a number of senior trade unionists also holding influential positions in the Labour Party.
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an absolute scandal perpetrated and covered up over many decades. The BBC is complicit as are the supposedly Scottish newspapers. What further crimes will the Westminster establishment need to commit before the Scottish people END LONDON RULE and BANISH the ENGLISH PRESS AND TV NEWS from our nation? John Lawson
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The Councils must refuse permission. The people must decide. Instead of crooks in Westminster polluting every where. These decisions will be tied up in Court. Instead of poisoning people. Polluting the air and country. Taking Scotland renewables and wasting them.
More people are supporting Independence.
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