- Sellafield's owner British Nuclear Fuels has admitted
that a Hercules military aircraft came within a few hundred feet of its
vulnerable power plant near Annan and not at the West Cumbrian site as
previously thought.
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- In December, the large RAF transport plane breached the
no-fly zone around the aging Chapelcross nuclear power station - just 15
miles north of Carlisle - but the incident has only just been confirmed.
An investigation is still being carried out.
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- In March, the Sunday Express claimed a "world exclusive"
for its report under the headline: "A second from nuclear disaster".
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- It claimed a jet came within 100ft of crashing into a
cooling tower at Calder Hall, Sellafield's defunct nuclear power station.
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- But now the revelation about the Chapelcross incident
seems to have cleared up the mystery which surrounded the Sunday Express
report, which was categorically denied by BNFL and the Government. It appears
the report simply confused the location of the incident, mistaking Chapelcross
for Calder Hall. A BNFL spokesman confirmed that an incident had taken
place at Chapelcross.
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- Following the September 11 terror attacks on New York
and Washington in 2001, the Government doubled the restricted air space
around nuclear installations to a radius of 2.3 miles.
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- Since then, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has investigated
32 complaints that restricted areas have been infringed. They insist there
was never any danger of a crash.
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- But Welsh Labour MP Llew Smith, who has been researching
nuclear near misses, said: "The consequences should a crash occur,
would be an unimaginable catastrophe."
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- The MoD also disclosed that the no-fly zones over three
other nuclear plants in the UK had been breached five times in the past
three years.
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- http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/viewarticle.asp?id=95544
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