Government criticised for not funding radon safety

THE country’s nuclear watchdog organisation has criticised the government for failing to provide grants to make buildings safe from cancer-causing radon gas.

The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) said the risk of getting lung cancer through exposure to radon continued to be “an important concern“. It called for money to be made available for householders to install devices to stop the gas seeping into homes in areas with high levels in the soil and bedrock.

Institute chairman Francis Mulligan pointed out that the new Radiological Protection Act brought into law this year provided the legislative basis for a grants scheme for this purpose and he “very much regretted” that the idea was not being put into practice.

The institute also repeated its call for a national storage unit to hold radioactive waste created by hospitals, factories and research facilities. It said, while Ireland produced only small amounts of radioactive waste, international atomic energy conventions and an upcoming EU directive made it necessary to have domestic storage facilities instead of exporting the material for disposal abroad.

Mr Mulligan was commenting on the publication of the Institute’s annual report for 2001 which reveals it was involved in investigating 11 incidents in which people were accidentally exposed to radiation during the year.

The most serious involved a person exposed to a radiation dose which came close to the danger limit while assisting a veterinary surgeon who was taking x-rays of horses on a stud farm.

It had since notified all veterinary surgeons to stress the importance of following strict safety guidelines.

During the year inspectors carried out radon surveys at a further 1,646 schools, just over a quarter of which were found to have one or more rooms with radon concentrations in excess of safety limits.

The worst affected counties were Cork, Galway, Waterford, Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow.

A pilot programme of radon measurement continued in 1,300 workplaces in Ennis, Co Clare, and 1,800 in Tralee, Co Kerry, and the results are being compiled. A further 772 householders asked for their homes to be measured and 2.7% of those had radon levels causing concern.

Some of those homes were built since regulations came in requiring all new houses to have radon barriers and sumps and the institute said the findings highlighted the importance of radon testing in all new homes once they were occupied to determine if the devices were working.

The report noted that Sellafield remained the main source of radioactive material in the Irish Sea and while swimming or consumption of seafood did not pose a significant health risk, the continued emissions were undesirable and were legitimate grounds for objecting to the nuclear power plant.

Inspectors also found traces of radioactive material from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in air samples.