Letter: No reactor risk

From Timothy Morris

Your article stating that a jet crash “could kill millions” was scaremongering, and unworthy of your usual standards (29 May, p 8). While you quote the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology’s report as saying “a large plane crashing into a reactor could cause as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl accident”, you provide no evidence of infringements of the restricted areas (RAs) around nuclear facilities by large planes.

RAs are typically 5 kilometres in diameter and 700 metres high, and an infringement would be recorded even if a plane was inside these areas by 30 metres or so. The Ministry of Defence, by your own admission, confirmed only five breaches of the zones by its own aircraft – small fast jets that regularly fly at high speed at an altitude of 50 to 100 metres. Small infringements do sometimes occur due to a split-second miscalculation.

The Civil Aviation Authority’s figures are not broken down by aircraft type or size. But in fact, infringements by large aircraft are unknown: such aircraft proceed on flight plans and are monitored on radar for their entire journey.

You cite two successful prosecutions: one of a balloonist and one of the pilot of a “powered hang-glider”. These are the sort of aircraft that occasionally infringe the RAs, piloted by weekend amateur pilots who occasionally make a mistake. I invite you to reconsider your conclusion that one of these could cause significant damage to a reactor. In fact they would hardly leave a mark.

Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK