- Date released
- 20 April 2023
- Request number
- 202303058
- Release of information under
- Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA)
Information requested
My request is to ask for copies of all documentation (If any) held by The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) in relation to the 1986 incident at Chernobyl.
Information released
We confirm that under s.1 of the FOIA, we hold some information relevant to your request. However, it has been estimated that to locate, retrieve and extract the information for release will involve a cost in excess of the £600 (or 24 hours) limit set by the government for dealing with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Therefore, we are refusing your request under s.12 of the FOIA, which applies to requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit.
Upon looking into the feasibility of compliance with your request, it became evident that the request itself was very broad and covers a wide range of historical information. In the first instance, we contacted our document management team, and they identified a large number of paper documents with “Chernobyl” in the title - the vast majority of which were held in our off-site archive unit, and a small minority held electronically.
Due to the way the historic information is held in our paper based archives, i.e., without a detailed naming convention or descriptions that make the documents easily identifiable or searchable, it was proving very difficult to gauge what exactly was contained under each title in terms of content or volume and it was therefore necessary to recall the information from the archives to manually inspect them. Upon receipt, there were three large boxes which we estimate contain upwards of 7000 individual pages (noting that many of these individual pages are double sided and therefore this number is likely to be much higher), of varying natures, spanning a large number of years (1986-2005), and with many considerations to GDPR.
We anticipate that the actual process of our technical teams extracting any data relevant to the request would take a disproportionate amount of time. It takes the average person two minutes to read a single page of A4 paper, or longer where the information is highly technical, which equates to an approximately 230+ hours for this activity alone (and more where pages are double sided). This time does not account for extracting any relevant data, the monetary costs of retrieval from our archives or the time already spent on this and is simply based on the reading exercise alone. Whilst we understand we are unable to factor the scanning-in of documents, redacting personal or sensitive data, and carrying out public interest tests, we believe this would also be a very burdensome and time-consuming task, and one that should be considered.
As such, we have determined that to simply understand how practicable it would be to retrieve the information would take in excess of the “appropriate limit” set out in the FOIA. We appreciate that this is not the response you were hoping to receive, however we hope that the above sheds some light on the volume and complexity of the operation.
Whilst we understand that public authorities have an obligation under s.16 to provide advice and assistance to a requester where they have been unable to meet the request, the ICO stipules that our duty only extends ‘so far as it would be reasonable to expect’ us to do so. On this occasion, as your request is so broad coupled with how historic information is stored, we have regrettably been unable to identify any obvious alternative ways that you could narrow or refine your request to bring it within the scope of the scheme.
Further information
By way of assistance, we suggest you review the following weblink that contains a significant amount of information available about The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident | IAEA. Following a review of this information, should you wish to clarify your original request, please contact us via the email address contact@onr.gov.uk, quoting reference FOI202303058. Please note that any reformulated request will be treated as a new FOI request and s.12 may still be engaged.
Exemptions applied
s.12
PIT (Public Interest Test) if applicable
N/A