Source: For The First Time, World Learns Truth About Risk Of Nuclear | Medium, by David Watson
Originally published in the UK Nuclear Institute’s Nuclear Future magazine in July 2020.
RE: Coping with a big nuclear accident; Closing papers from the NREFS project | Process Safety and Environmental Protection (Volume 112, Part A, Pages 1-198 (November 2017))
- Remediation and food bans are good value for money
- The presumption that long term relocations are a good policy tool needs re-evaluating
While accidents at nuclear plants are very rare, it is impossible to say that they will never occur. As Prof Thomas says, “I’ve often met with the reaction that we should make sure accidents don’t happen. And that’s fine. But accidents do happen, they have happened — and what do you do then?” The NREFS project sought to measure objectively the effectiveness of actions (usually referred to as ‘countermeasures’) a government could take following an accident, principally evacuation, sheltering (staying indoors for a period of hours to days), bans on the consumption of locally grown foods, remediation (cleaning of buildings and soils to remove contamination) and long-term relocation.