Fifteen years ago, Greenpeace activists went to the radioactive waste repository at Drigg, near the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, UK. What they found was shocking…

Radioactive material, that shouldn’t have been dumped in easily accessible trenches, was ‘either intentionally thrown in or somehow slipped through the net of monitoring carried out by British Nuclear Fuels’.

Fifteen years later and what do we find?

Two cans of radioactive material have disappeared at Sellafield. The cans, about the size of Thermos flasks, contain old radioactive solid material from historic work.

They are said to be "missing" from a sealed cave but might just have been moved to a different place. Operators Sellafield Ltd said there was "no cause for concern".

A route stock take showed the cans were not in their "expected location" but a search was taking place and it was still to be confirmed that they were missing from the cave system.

‘No cause for concern’? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Wherever those two flasks are, it’s clear that Sellafield’s procedures for storing and tracking the dangerous nuclear waste it’s supposed to be storing safely are woefully inadequate. Just as they were 15 years ago.

This shouldn’t even be possible let alone tolerated. The nuclear industry is uniquely dangerous and complex and yet its owners and operators seem to want to run it along the lines of any other business.

As nuclear engineer John Large says in the video, ‘they don’t really know what’s going on.’ And you see it all over the world not just at Sellafield. Sub-standard welding in the construction of state of the art reactors. Faulty steel being used in the construction of Mixed-Oxide (MOX) reprocessing plants. Hugely complex arrangements between hundreds if not thousands of contractors, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, sub-sub-sub… which leads to extremely poor levels of communication and accountability…

Public trust is hugely important to the nuclear industry. Why does the nuclear industry continually betray it?