Nuclear plant closed after radioactive flood

"Nuclear fuel reprocessing at the UK's Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield in Cumbria has been halted indefinitely after a critical failure in the plant's pipe work. The leak led to 83 cubic metres of a highly radioactive liquor flooding the floor of a vast - but permanently unmanned - processing area.

THORP is designed to extract plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel from around the world so a proportion of it can be reused in power stations. The leaked material comes from near the "front end" of the plant's process and is very highly radioactive. The leaked liquor contained 20 tonnes of plutonium and uranium dissolved in nitric acid."

www.newscientist.com...

This would seem to be a catastrophy waiting to happen. 20 tonnes of PU disolved in nitric acid is a lot of "leakage". I think I would call it a flood of death waiting to attack mankind.

It (the article) also said it was contained in Stainless steel and behind 3 meters of solid(most likely re-inforced) concrete. The only people who were in danger were the workers, and this was also not a Nuke Plant but a reprossessing facility, where spent fuel gets reproccessed into usable fuel(but is also highly radioactive)