SCOTLAND’S nuclear watchdog has accused the owners of Dounreay of misleading the public over the threat posed to public health by radioactive leaks from the plant.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) said the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was guilty of publishing false and conflicting information regarding thousands of plutonium and uranium particles washed up on beaches close to the Caithness plant.

Campbell Gemmell, chief executive of SEPA, said the UKAEA had offered assurances regarding the safety of the area before a proper risk assessment had been done.

Last year a stone contaminated with caesium-137 was recovered from a beach 20 miles from Dounreay. The authority admitted that “at least several hundreds of thousands” of plutonium and uranium particles, each the size of a grain of sand, have been released from Dounreay over the past 30 years.

A former safety officer at the plant claimed, in a Sunday Times article, that safety breaches had resulted in the radioactive particles escaping into the environment.

Highly radioactive waste was pumped into the sea and evidence of the pollution was covered up by managers who had a “reckless” disregard for public health, according to Herbie Lyall, who was a health physics surveyor at the plant from 1960 until 1989.

SEPA’s concerns follow the publication of a report on the UKAEA website in December, which claimed certain radioactive particles posed a “low” risk to human health.

In a letter to Norman Harrison, the head of Dounreay, Gemmell wrote: “SEPA has commissioned a revised risk assessment of the health risks associated with the particles and, until this work is concluded, I consider that such a statement may be premature and is certainly oddly timed.”

The letter also adds that the particles, which contain caesium-137, “do pose a potential hazard to human health and, if present in sufficient numbers, could pose a significant collective risk to health”.

The letter goes on to state that assurances that particles of caesium-137 can be considered as not being a hazard is “inappropriate, misleading and would provide false assurances to any persons reading this document”.

Gemmell also criticised the UKAEA for publishing conflicting figures on the number of particles that have polluted the sea bed. Independent tests have been carried out on the devices and results are expected next month.

Since November 1983, more than 900 particles — fragments of irradiated nuclear fuel — have been found on the sea bed and another 238 on the enclosed beach at Dounreay.

A further 59 have turned up on the public beach at Sandside and one on the public beach at Dunnet, which is close to the Castle of Mey, a former residence of the Queen Mother.

While the UKAEA insists the source for these particles is a deep-sea chamber 2,000 feet off the coast and 65 feet below the sea bed, it has been suggested that particles could be escaping from Dounreay’s chimneys and from radioactive waste dumped in landfill sites.

Geoffrey Minter, a local estate-owner, said: “I have warned that the clean-up operation is a sham and this is a damning condemnation of the so-called clean-up operation being mounted at vast public expense by the UKAEA.”

Colin Punler, a spokesman for Dounreay, said: “The documents published were about gathering people’s views on the whole particles issue. We have written to SEPA apologising for a lack of communication before publication and we are correcting any errors.”

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