Radioactive birds get nuclear power station in a flap

Radioactive birds get nuclear power station in a flap

12.09.05
By Jason Nisse


Deep in the bowels of Sellafield nuclear power plant, there is a freezer packed with an expanding mountain of radioactive gulls.

They are the result of a controversial culling policy operated at Britain's most notorious nuclear site for more than a decade. And no one has a clue what to do with them.

The problem started when seagulls and pigeons would land at Sellafield and then fly on, potentially carrying hazardous radiation.

As a result, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd employed sharpshooters to kill the birds rash enough to land on the premises. Those that are killed are designated low-level nuclear waste and have to be put in a freezer because of contamination worries.

Normally BNFL would dump its low-level waste at a site a few miles up the coast.

But because the seagulls would decay if they were left out in the elements, they were deemed "putrescent" and had to be stored in a large industrial freezer.

A BNFL spokesman could not say exactly how many gulls and pigeons were in the deep freeze but was willing to speculate.

"We are adding to the store all the time so we do not count them. But given the size I'd say it was in the hundreds," he said.

These days, BNFL's subsidiary, British Nuclear Group, manages Sellafield for a new Government body, the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, which is charged with cleaning up Britain's nuclear sites.

BNG is having to decide how it might dispose of the birds as part of the new attitude to nuclear waste. It is planning to build a special landfill site where it could tip the birds, but no decision has yet been made.

WHAT?!? I can't believe what this story is saying.... Has anyone heard of this before???

I think I should stop surfing the net for awhile....

[edit on 23-9-2005 by loam]

Never heard about this before.

Wauw! Great job.
I do not think you should stop surfing the net, you usually find very important information. I am grateful you share it with us, so, please, keep on this way.

This history is just amazing. I wonder what else happens and we´ll never know...

how are the birds more of a contamination risk than the people who shoot and retrieve them? where is the logic in this?

Sellafield is in England. What happens at all the nuclear power plants in other other countries, like the USA? ....The birds fly away? Then they mutate - along with all their resident microbes?

...So nuclear pollution is implicated in bird flu, right? Is that where you're going with this?