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Professor John Robertson OBA
From the Guardian two days ago:
‘Families are dying’: an Ohio town suffering from fallout years after nuclear plant’s closure – As Trump calls for more nuclear power, Piketon, the site of an enrichment facility, knows first hand its ill effects. Three years after starting work as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Vina Colley started getting sick.
The huge facility in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio was opened in 1954 to enrich weapons-grade uranium for the military as America’s cold war with the Soviet Union ramped up, and later, for commercial purposes.
But in the decades since, Colley, her fellow former workers and the wider Pike county community find themselves paying a terrible price. The cancer mortality rate in Pike county for the years 2018 to 2022 was 44% above the national rate and well exceeded the state level. At 70.6 years, Pike county’s life expectancy at birth is nearly eight years below the national rate.
“I don’t think anyone disputes the fact that hosting a former uranium enrichment plant has led to our high cancer rates. The independent assessment showed widespread off-site contamination,” said Matt Brewster, the Pike county health commissioner. “Those samples were taken before open-air demolition began of some of the most contaminated buildings in the world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/23/ohio-piketon-nuclear-enrichment-facility-health
Remind you of anything, closer to home?
From BBC Cumbria, in March 2025:
A longstanding leak at “Britain’s most hazardous building” is a nuclear plant’s “single biggest environmental issue”, a select committee has heard. The leak in the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) – built more than 50 years ago at Sellafield in Cumbria – started in 2019 after first occurring in the 1970s. Labour MP Luke Charters told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday that every three years the silo leaked enough material to fill an “Olympic-sized swimming pool”. A longstanding leak at “Britain’s most hazardous building” is a nuclear plant’s “single biggest environmental issue”, a select committee has heard. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgy77y21djo
BBC Scotland have shown no interest in this. Well, it’s not in Scotland is it? It’s not, just, but it is upstream and upwind of most of Scotland.
Why would that matter?
In Scotland, downstream and downwind:
In 2021, the rate, or risk, of new cancers also increased to 644 per 100,000 [around 700 for men and 600 for women (an increase of 3.1% compared with 2019).
In England, in 2020, the rate for men was 590 and for women, 487.
These are significant differences.
There are several explanatory factors including smoking (England lowest 13%, Scotland next at 13.9%, N Ireland at 14% and Wales at 14.1%) and better NHS detection services but you have to wonder about the Sellafield reprocessing plant, the most toxic nuclear plant in Europe, seeping pollutants around our coast for 70 years now, the nuclear submarines in the Clyde and munitions on the roads and rail, the waste travelling to Sellafield, the rotting nuclear hulks in Rosyth, as well as the power stations, only recently shut down.
Sources:
More on Sellafield, largely unreported in Scotland:
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 