Dr. Ciara McMahon:

We studied five scenarios for releases to air. They covered situations where the nuclear power plant has lost its power for some external reason and the differing severity of that loss, whether it loses external power but still has batteries, whether it loses the batteries quickly or slowly and in situations where it loses its power and its cooling, the type of events that occurred at Fukushima. We did not study particularly what caused it to lose its power. The scenarios were taken from a recent study by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission which had brought together information and data on ways in which accidents can occur at this type of nuclear power plants. That data was collected over 25 years so it is state-of-the-art, up-to-date data on what would happen, how much radioactivity could be released, if a power plant were to lose its power and how quickly that happened.

We studied three scenarios for releases to sea, one in which the amount of radioactivity released to sea was equivalent to one year's discharges but over a short period rather than over a year; one in which it lost all of its cooling water, which would contain some radioactivity which would go into the Irish Sea over a short period; and, third, a scenario which was equivalent to the amount of radioactivity released to the Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima accident.