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Asked by to Becky on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Becky Martin answered on 13 Mar 2014:
This is a question that creates further questions!
Firstly you have to consider the scale, or size, of an accident. Other things to think about include the location of an incident (urban or rural? densely or sparsely populated? does it affect agriculture or something else?) and the time at which it happened.
Whilst the likelihood, which is the risk of a nuclear accident happening, is extremely low in the UK, the impact or consequences of an accident would be significant. We use an international system that is known as the INES scale to understand the significance of nuclear incidents and accidents, and to grade the potential impact that they might have upon people and environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale
This system ranks the severity of a nuclear accident from 1-7 depending upon the level of impact that it has.
If we had a relatively large accident in the UK, for instance, of the scale of Fukushima, it could potentially affect our agriculture, transport and health services within about 50km radius of the incident site. We would not be able to eat our own produce if it was grown in local soil or land exposed to radiation, and our water could be contaminated within the affected area – Although the whole of the UK wouldn’t be affected! So your daily life could change quite significantly in the very short term if you lived nearby, because you couldn’t farm the land, food might be come more expensive and you might have to drink bottled water.
However, it is very likely that you would be told to stay inside, and given potassium iodate tablets to prevent uptake of radioactive iodine into your body’s thyroid glands, decontaminated, and finally evacuated somewhere safer – So your life would change, but you’d probably be ok!
However, the UK has never had an accident of this scale ever, and we keep our nuclear power stations away from densely populated places. 🙂
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