Newbury Magistrates Court - AWE plead GUILTY & are fined £22,000
The following fines were imposed :

Hunting BRAE Ltd, as the site licensee :
o4,000 for contravention of Section 4 of the Nuclear Installations Act 1965 and
o4,000 for contravening Regulation 6(1) of the ionising Radiation Regulations 1985. AWE plc :
o14,000 for contravention of Section 2(1) of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974.

The costs of o7,500 were divided equally between them. AWE plead GUILTY to endangering the lives of their workers in the nuclear weapons production facility at AWE Aldermaston.

The accident ocurred in December 1997 when a Post Operative Clearout of the vacuum filter sustem of a disused glove-box was being peformed. The engineer, standing on a step-ladder, found he had the wrong equipment to remove and cap the filter. The filter was already loose and he was able to remove it from the contaminated side when a piece of plutonium, weighing between one & four grams ROLLED OUT AND DISAPPEARED. The alarms sounded and the building was evacuated, but not before the two workers were contaminated because the air flow through the laboratory took the Plutonium (dust?) towards the men.

These glove-boxes are all different and the filters are not all in the same place.

The Health & Safety Executive accused AWE of "alarming widespread mismanagement & complacency" in their attitude to safety of the two workers who ingested plutonium which can cause DNA damage and cancer. After an almost identical accident on 13th February 1997, A Health Physicist recommended that unprotected workers should be 5 metres from any source of contamination but her advice was ignored and the "3 metre rule" continued. There was "complete confusion" as to who was responsible for establishing an exclusion zone around any particular facility, the distance of which would depend on the calculation of risk factors. Instructions to workers were generic, and not detailed for a specific task. "Workers were not briefed on all the boxes being different" and "a specific lack of detail, planning and supervision was the root cause of the incident."
"The controls were inadequate because the risk assessment was not good".
"AWE has beaurocratic, rather than effective documentation".

The Facility Manager was seconded (from AEA Technology) to Hunting BRAE to ensure a trained risk assessor carriied out anassessment - but they did not.

"The contamination of workers with deadly plutonium is a very serious offence and one which AWE have not been able to defend. Meanwhile they continue to emit plutonium, tritium and other lethal materials into the air through the stack and into the local streams, sewage treatment works and the River Thames. These emissions must be brought down to zero as soon as possible. The government has acted under international pressure to demand that BNFL Sellafield stop polluting the Irish Sea. We want to see the same commitment to putting a stop to radioactive waste dispersal in Berkshire." said a spokesperson from the Nuclear Awareness Group based in Reading

Di McDonald (nipdimac@gn.apc.org)