We do not know what harm the Sellafield plant has done because our methodology for assessing low level environmental damage is still extremely primitive. While I do not wish to claim expertise – some of my colleagues have much greater expertise than me on this issue – in western society we are still not equipped to evaluate low level, long-term risks. The possibility of something major happening at Sellafield aside, the possibility of damage to people from low level radiation emissions from the plant is a second consideration. It is easy to state background radiation or discharges are currently quantity X and will be X divided by ten next year, or that there is no scientific evidence that exposure to radiation at such a level causes any harm.