Security scares at Sellafield raise fears of a disaster “worse than Chernobyl”, campaigners warn.

The Sun on Sunday can reveal there have been 25 safety breaches logged at the massive nuclear waste plant in the past two years.

The 6km razor-wired compound stores a 140 tonne plutonium stockpile and handles radioactive waste generated by the UK’s working reactors. The clean-up site in Cumbria has been dubbed the most hazardous place in Europe. Nuclear bosses insist safety is an “overriding priority”.

Incidents logged at Sellafield include radiation leaking from a water pipe and a nuclear waste container that was not welded completely shut. Other alerts were triggered when potentially harmful uranium powder was spilled and acid was discovered leaking from a bust pipe.

Janine Smith, from the campaign group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, said locals lived in fear of a serious incident, according to The Sun. She said: “One safety breach is one too many. There just shouldn’t be any. Just one error could be catastrophic. It’s not like making a mistake inside a chocolate factory. The buildings at Sellafield are all so close together that if something was to happen at that site it would be a disaster. We just keep our fingers crossed, and everything else, that we don’t ever have to witness a nuclear disaster in this country. It could be worse than Chernobyl”.

According to the logs, the bomb squad was called in October 2017 when potentially unstable chemicals sparked an emergency scare.

A month later, in a separate incident, a worker was found to have been exposed to a low level of radiation.