About a litre a day was wrongly transferred for five days until an accounting check on uranium revealed the problem. The HEU liquid resulted in the site's radioactive limit for the fast reactor holding tank's being exceeded. The liquid cannot be recovered. While Dounreay's accounting systems seems to have worked better on this occasion than in the 1991 D1203 incident, a second case of unintentional transfers of HEU between different sections of plants in less than a year must be a cause for concern for both the operators, AEA Technology, and the UK regulatory authorities. Plutonium and uranium has been found in urine samples of two workers at Dounreay, AEA Technology announced last month.
Investigations are underway into both cases of contamination.
Radioactive contamination of the nearby Sandside Bay shore had fallen and there were 13 metallic particles with caesium-137 found on the Dounreay shore. No further examples of the algae growth contaminated with strontium-90, found in 1989 and 1990, were found in 1991. Sixty-one spots of contamination were found in loading bay areas of the site. A public planning inquiry has started into a proposal from Scottish Nuclear, which operates Scotland's nuclear power stations, to build a dry storage facility for spent fuel at the Torness power station, south-east of Edinburgh. Up to 1,200 tonnes of spent fuel would be kept in the UK 54 million store for up to 50-100 years, rather than being transported to Sellafield for reprocessing.