Hah! That sort of thing would never happen in the West with their far superior safety records!
There were hardly any leaks during the whole 6 years that the US had an actual working nuclear reprocessing plant!
It didn't happen for a whole 8 years at the UK's new, much safer THORP plant in Sellafield (AKA Windscale -- the older plant being less safe to the point where the only way to avoid the name Windscale being linked with radioactive leaks was to change it to Sellafield).
COGEMA La Hague tips 1m litres of liquid radioactive waste a day into the ocean by design, so we can hardly count that as an accident.
And Japan's worst commercial nuclear disaster happened at a nuclear reprocessing plant is down to the fact that all the workers were untrained in the oh-so-superior Japanese safety procedures.
And let's face it, if there is a question of safety you can just shut the plant down. Problem solved, safe as houses, like Dounreay in Scotland, with the result of the high levels of safety we can see today:
I think we can all sleep safer in the knowledge that at least the West isn't all dodgy and unsafe about their nuclear reprocessing, unlike those backward idiot Russians... who are so dumb, they make it look like nuclear reprocessing is dangerous or something!
