The United Kingdom’s Office for Nuclear Regulation said Friday it would prosecute the entity that manages the Sellafield nuclear site for a February 2017 incident in which a worker was contaminated.
The office said little about the event, other than it occurred at a facility designated for work with special nuclear materials and led to “personal contamination to a Sellafield Ltd employee.”
“For legal reasons we are unable to comment further on the details of the case which is now the subject of active court proceedings,” an ONR spokesman said in a press statement.
The office investigated the incident and filed its case in Magistrates Court in Workington, near the Sellafield site in Cumbria.
The case is being handled under a 1974 workplace health and safety law, specifically a section that states: ‘It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.”
In a statement Friday, Sellafield Ltd. said that for legal reasons it also could not comment on an active court proceeding.
Sellafield Ltd. is a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a nondepartmental government body that manages environmental cleanup of the nation’s nuclear facilities. It manages environmental remediation and nuclear reprocessing operations at Sellafield.
The London Guardian reported Friday that the incident involved an equipment-related injury to the employee, which made him vulnerable to internal radiation exposure. While he underwent decontamination, the worker might have received a dose that was threefold greater than the yearly maximum, the newspaper reported.
The potential fine could be significantly larger than the £700,000 ($947,925) penalty assessed during the last such prosecution of Sellafield, according to the Guardian.
