Cumbrian Hotels and the Nuclear Laundry
Radiation Free Lakeland have been sent an anonymous letter. It is from a "Concerned Allerdale Resident" about a "Most Economic Bid" contract awarded to Shortridge Laundry on 22/11/2012.
Nothing wrong with that, Shortridge provide the laundry service for some of our most prestigious Hotels.
What is astounding is that this is a contract with Sellafield to provide laundry services to the Sellafield Site. The letter writer goes on to say "From what I understand, this is laundry from an Active Area at Sellafield. To my knowledge, the Shortridge laundry, which also washes laundry for our local tourist industry (hotels) has no way of monitoring these items or the workers."
For obvious reasons Sellafield has its own laundry and some years ago a scientist called John Taylor was forced out of his job at Windscale for writing an authoritative paper on the dangers of washing various levels of contaminated clothing together. It is known that just one radioactive atom can initiate change to DNA causing radiation linked disease. John Taylor made suggestions for improvements with different levels of laundry dealt with separately. He surely did not mean that the laundry should be outsourced to the same laundry used by tourist businesses! John Taylor's case and that of other scientists was highlighted in articles concerned with a culture of the suppression of information regarding nuclear scandals.
"Rodney Fordham, John Taylor, Ross Hesketh and Trevor Brown are scientists who worked in the British nuclear power program. Each of them expressed doubts about some aspect of nuclear safety, initially through normal internal procedural channels. When they made their criticisms public, or threatened to do so, the nuclear industry attacked them in various ways, such as by criticism of their work, transferral or dismissal".
Reference: Rob Edwards, "A new kind of nuclear victim", New Statesman, 22 July 1983, pp. 8-10.
Radiation Free Lakeland have sent the documents to Tim Farron MP and asked him to investigate how and why this has happened and is happening now- who is responsible?
Refs:
Intellectual Suppression (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1986), pp. 164-181.
http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/86is/archives.html
NRPB Highlighted – Just one radioactive atom can give you cancer
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