ENVIRONMENTAL pressure group Greenpeace claim that if an emergency exercise scenario carried out yesterday at the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant had happened in real life, Jersey would have been engulfed by a giant contaminated cloud of radiation.

Greenpeace spokesman Shaun Bur-nie said that the exercise carried out by the French authorities and plant operators Areva simulated an armed terrorist attack on the reprocessing plant.

It simulated a release of high-level waste fission which would have produced a radioactive cloud 100 km long by 10 to 15 km wide.

‘In our view, without doubt, the Channel Islands would have been engulfed by this,’ he said.

About 800 pupils from towns around the world’s largest nuclear reprocessing centre were confined to their classrooms as part of the civil defence exercise designed to test the reaction of the emergency services to a ‘catastrophe scenario’ at Cap de la Hague.