Dr. Ciara McMahon:

The closest nuclear facility is over 100 km away from our coast so drinking water is not as big an issue as it would otherwise be. Radioactive particles are suspended in the air. Some would fall in the form of dust and settle on open reservoirs. If there was rainfall, it would wash more of it into the reservoirs but it would be diluted in a large volume of water. Water treatment also removes a certain percentage of radioactivity and there have been European studies into this. Drinking water would not be an issue but food would. If the worst accident happened and was accompanied by the worst weather and no action was taken, there would be an increase in cancers. Those concerns do not exist for drinking water but we test our plans so that we can confirm what our models show us are happening on the ground. In our laboratory, we test water samples for radioactivity all the time. All drinking water has radioactivity in it naturally and this would increase in the event of an accident but it would not be high enough to be a health concern.