Late author Sir Terry Pratchett made the astonishing claim in his collection of personal essays, touching on a time he worked as a press officer for nuclear power stations owned by the Central Electricity Generating Board.

According to Sir Terry, a nuclear power plant can be built to the safest possible standards but a simple cock-up by a single hapless worker can cause chaos.

He called this the “Fred Factor”, although this doesn’t mean Fred was the real name of any of the accident-prone workers.

“Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman,” Sir Terry wrote. “He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.”

“…it should be impossible, completely impossible to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory”

Sir Terry Pratchett

“We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry,” he recalled.

“For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory.

“But no-one told Fred.

“So when he was done cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down a lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go ‘bing!’”

It was then down to engineers to figure out how to find the radioactive lumps in “eighty-thousand gallons of c***”.

“Just feeling around is not an option”, he added.

Sewage workers and nuclear workers had a meeting to discuss how to tackle to delicate task, he said.

“And finally they came-up with a masterstroke: all the stuff was pumped out out into tankers and taken up to a coal-fired power station in the Midlands and burned to ash,” Sir Terry wrote.

“The ash was put on a conveyer belt and run under a Geiger counter,” said Sir Terry, who was “impressed” by the ingenuity of the plan, which luckily saw the stray radioactive lumps recovered.

He added: “Contrary to popular belief, nuclear engineers are quite keen to keep the ticking stuff on the inside.”

Eventually, the stress of working as media damage control for various nuclear power plants prompted Sir Terry to write books full time.

He claimed that he wrote an entire third of one of his novels after “one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded”.

Sir Terry clarified: “Well it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no-one died. Trust me on this.”

A Slip of the Keyboard by Sir Terry Pratchett is a collection of his essays and other non-fiction; it is available in bookshops across the UK.

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