Local Authority offsite emergency planning for UK nuclear power plants

Publication date: November 2002

Summary
This Review considers the requirements of The Radiation (Emergency Preparedness and Public Information) Regulations (REPPIR) for the local authority to provide off-site emergency plans in response to all reasonably foreseeable radioactive release incidents from nuclear plants these regulations are now in force and require the local authorities to provide adequate off-site emergency plans in contingency for specific and all reasonably foreseeable accidents and incidents that could result in the release of radioactivity and the declaration of a radiation emergency.

Two radiation incidents are nominated to determine the demands that would be placed on the off-site emergency plans and how the local authorities would cope with a radioactive release incident. The types of radiological incident considered are not full scale releases, being relatively moderate in terms of the total amount of radioactivity available for dispersion and deposition in public areas. These are based i) on an incident involving an irradiated fuel train moving intensely radioactive fuel from a power station to Sellafield, possibly occurring in a densely populated urban area and ii) a release from an operational nuclear reactor (power station) which requires rapid prophylactic countermeasures to thwart the health impact of radio-iodine uptake. Although the transportation of irradiated fuel is specifically exempted from REPPIR, if such an incident did occur then, no doubt, any existing local authority off-site emergency plan would be enacted.

Each of the release scenarios is framed to be just beyond what the nuclear industry considers to be foreseeable and credible accidents, which it determines largely by probabilistic forecasting. This is done for several reasons: First, the tragic events of 11 September introduced the real possibility of future intentional attacks against hazardous plants, so much so that the nuclear safety case has now to give cognisance to intelligently planned incursions rather than resist accidental and mostly random challenges other than to detect and prevent such acts at the planning stage, there is little that can be done to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorist attack. Second, the off-site plan must be sufficiently resourceful to respond to and cope with the unexpected since planning only for the entirely expected would be somewhat meaningless if, that is, the nuclear industry would have us believe that only relatively insignificant radioactive releases can occur at UK nuclear power plants. Third and coupled with the release severity is the capability of the off-site plan to extend beyond the immediate locality of the nuclear plant.Inreal terms, this means extending from the detailed emergency planning zone (DEPZ) of one to three kilometres, out to tens of kilometres.