I pray fears of a major leak at Sellafield nuclear plant are being taken seriously

Every so often, when we were children, Father would borrow a portable Geiger counter and take us to the beach. While we – my sister and I – played on the sand, he would wander around with the machine. Whenever it neared a clump of seaweed the gadget would click furiously and loudly.

He taught in a secondary school and the device was in their laboratory. We lived at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, just down the coast from Sellafield, Europe’s largest nuclear reprocessing plant.

Back then, we would see ships from Japan regularly dock and unload their radioactive cargo onto special freight trains for transporting to Sellafield. Meanwhile, in the nearby shipyard, they were building submarines powered by nuclear reactors.