[NukeNet] Scotland: Response to nuclear accident exercise like 'Keystone Kops'

[The Roy Process]

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Response to nuclear accident exercise like 'Keystone Kops'
Serious flaws have been exposed in Scotland's arrangements for responding to a nuclear accident, with a secret Scottish Executive memo obtained by the Sunday Herald revealing a series of problems during an emergency exercise at the Torness nuclear power station in 2003.

Critics have compared the mishaps to the Keystone Kops, the group of incompetent policemen from the silent film era. But the Scottish Executive has angrily dismissed the criticisms, insisting Scotland was now better prepared.

An emergency exercise, codenamed Yeti, tested the response to a major leak of radioactivity from the Torness nuclear plant on October 30, 2003. It involved 18 public sector agencies, along with the company that runs the East Lothian plant, British Energy.

After a prolonged investigation, the Executive was forced by the Scottish Information Commissioner, Kevin Dunion, to release an official post-mortem report of the exercise. The document, marked "restricted management", made a series of damning criticisms.

It complained that the original notification of the accident to the Executive was a voicemail, containing no names or contact numbers. It took an hour and 20 minutes for the message to reach the correct Executive staff.

Officials also "found it extremely difficult to obtain any factual information about the incident, the extent of the contamination, and the contingency measures being advised", and there was a delay of nearly five hours until enough information was available to brief ministers and the media.

The memo added that Executive officials had difficulty believing what they were being told by the government's technical adviser, Mike Weightman of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. His reassurance that the contamination was not serious "appeared inconsistent" with advice from the Food Standards Agency, and with plans to close the A1 and the east coast rail line, and evacuate the local population.

Weightman and the Executive also clashed over the wording of a proposed ministerial statement.

The memo revealed a rash of communication problems within the Executive, including an out-of-date directory, a failed telephone connection and a problem accepting encrypted data. None of the fax machines seemed to work, it said, and when a laptop crashed there was "no means of exchanging written information".

Many of the problems were centred on the Scottish Executive Emergency Room (SEER) in St Andrew's House, Edinburgh, which is used to co-ordinate the government's response to emergencies. SEER has played an important role in events including the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 and the heightened terrorist alert that led to the tightening of airport security last August.

David Stevenson, the Glasgow Labour councillor who chairs the Scottish group of nuclear-free local authorities, compared Exercise Yeti to the Keystone Kops. "There needs to be radical improvement to these slapdash emergency planning exercises," he added.

"This raises serious questions about how we would respond in a real accident, emergency or terrorist attack."

Duncan McLaren, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, described the effectiveness of the emergency response as "woeful", adding: "Those seeking election in May must realise that the only way to eliminate the risk from nuclear power stations is not build them in the first place."

A spokesman for the Executive said it was "galling" to be asked about an exercise four years ago. It was "invidious" to suggest that it was relevant to today's situation, he argued.

"The whole point is to learn from them. In fact, we would be worried if they didn't throw up problems," the spokesman said. He added that through ongoing exercises the Executive aimed to "improve the situation and upgrade resilience". 

10:17pm Saturday 7th April 2007


By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor



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