Fallout Part 2: Drama documentary about nuclear accident in Sellafield

national | environment | event notice Monday April 24, 2006 15:01 by Terence

Dramatises how Ireland might react to a major nuke accident across the water.

RTE 1: Mon 23rd at 9:35 pm

This is the 2nd part of the two part series called Fallout which is a drama documentary about a serious nuclear accident across the water in Sellafield.

Tonight deals with the situation one year on.

In tonights episode apparently it deals with the situation one year after the accident.

Presumably as is the case with Belarus and Northern Ukraine the land is badly contaminated and will remain so for many hundreds if not thousands of years. As in Belarus where 75% of those now born have some sort of genetic damage and associated defect, it would possibly be the same in the Eastern half of Ireland if an accident at Sellafield released a significant amount of radiation as in the scenario for the programme.

Here's a sample of some of the the way life has changed in and around Chernobyl taken from:
http://www.chernobyl-international.com/aboutchernobyl/l...s.asp

For those who have not been evacuated and are still living in the contaminated zones, life has also changed dramatically since the disaster:

* People must change their clothes twice a day, and may not walk in the woods for more than two hours a month.
* Radiation level charts are printed in the newspapers and dictate decisions such as whether children can be allowed out to play
* People are told to wash food at least five times in “clean water” but nobody is told where this clean water is to be found.
* Farmers are told to separate cream and use fatless milk, but are not told how or where to dispose of the remaining liquid.
* Cattle are not supposed to graze in areas where the grass is less than 10cm high so their mouths won’t touch the earth.
* Most people find it impossible to adhere to these elaborate and inconsistent instructions, and simply give up trying.

As to what might happen in Ireland in the long run, the government would have to undertake some kind of cleanup and lean on the nuclear radiation board (NRB) to declare the Dublin area and surrounds safer than it probably was. There is just no way the value of all that property could be ignored and there is simply no-way a new Dublin would be built some 50 miles westward while Dublin was abandoned. No the political impetus would be to return, play down the risks, censor the health data and continue.

Indeed very shortly after the accident in Chernobyl the Soviet government revised the safety figures for radiation dramatically by decree which meant the size of the areas to be evacuated long term were a lot smaller.

One other thing that happened in Chernobyl and as relayed in one of Adi Roches books is that many of the wooden dacha (houses) that dotted the landscape and which happened to absorb a huge amount of radiation into the wood, were dismantled and shipped South to places like the Black Sea where they were sold as summer homes and the like. Unbeknownst to the new inhabitats they are living in houses with very high and dangerous levels of radiation.

Surely the same might happen to cars left behind in the panic and looted furniture and so on. As in Chernoby and would be the case anywhere else, there are always those either through ignorance or otherwise do not care or worry about entering highly radioactive areas whether it is to continue living there or to salvage or loot various materials.