Britain could face a major disaster if it goes ahead with plans to reopen an out-of-date nuclear power plant in Scotland where hundreds of flaws have been detected over the past years.
Experts warned on Sunday that reopening Hunterston B, located in North Ayrshire in southwest Scotland, would spark a disaster of a huge magnitude as an investigation into the structure has shown there are certain safety risks.
Hunterston B, built in 1976 to respond to UK’s rising energy demands at the time, was closed last year after more than 350 cracks were discovered in one of reactor’s graphite core. A detailed investigation that followed detected some 200 more cracks in another reactor.
However, officials have ignored calls for a full closure of the facility, saying the two reactors will return to service at the end of this month.
Experts believe a radiation from the power plant could contaminate two major Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and force massive evacuations.
They say the current state of the reactors has increased the risk of accidents and radioactive radiation could be a major risk during incidents like earthquakes.
“Although the probability of such an accident remains low, the consequences could be so severe, in other words the radioactive contamination and evacuation of both Glasgow and Edinburgh, that the risk should not be taken,” said two nuclear researchers in an interview with the Sun newspaper.
Hunterston B should have been closed down in 2016 after 40 years in service but the government managed to get an extension until 2023 amid a growing demand for energy in the UK and its inability to switch to renewable sources of energy.
The UK has been lagging behind in its plans to build new and modern nuclear power plants to secure supplies and to cut carbon emissions.
Plans for building two such plants by Japanese giants Toshiba and Hitachi were cancelled this year.
Environment activists have been pressuring the government to switch to renewables, saying cost of wind, solar and batteries are dropping rapidly making them more reliable than before.