It’s difficult to know whether to laugh at or use a long series of very rude words about this story from the UK’s Sizewell A nuclear reactor.

The reactor is currently being decommissioned. On Sunday January 7 2007 one of the contractors went to the site’s laundry room to wash some clothes. He noticed water leaking into the room. It was found that the water was leaking from the pond holding the site’s 5,000 highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods. A 15 feet-long crack in a pipe leading from the pond had leaked up to 40,000 gallons of radioactive water, some of it into the North Sea.

The site’s safety monitoring systems did not detect the drop in the water levels in the pond. A report by the UK’s Nuclear Installation Inspectorate estimated, had the leak not been found, the pond would have been drained in around ten hours exposing the fuel rods to the air.

This could have caused to the rods to catch fire sending radioactivity material into the atmosphere. The report say ‘that there was significant risk that operators and even members of the public could have been harmed if there had not been fortunate and appropriate intervention of a contractor who just happened to be in the right plant area when things went wrong.’

By sheer chance and luck, a potentially serious nuclear accident was avoided. Who knows what might have happened had that contractor not gone to wash his clothes this day? We imagine he certainly had to wash his underwear once he realised where the water he was standing in was coming from.

Can we believe the spin? Will Sizewell A’s operator’s excuses wash? The Nuclear Installation Inspectorate was financially under-resourced meaning it didn’t have the funds to prosecute the reactor’s operators. One thing’s for sure, nuclear power’s reputation certainly isn’t whiter than white.