[Palladin]

Never believe them when they say "We're from the government and we're here to help you."

Especially if they're wearing white suits and carrying Geiger counters.

[burzum]

Environmental surveys are part of every nuclear plant. They do them because it is probably a 5th generation "what if?" clause and because the public expects them to do it, not because they had a massive radioactive discharge.

The logic is something like this: What if our radioactive discharge procedures and logs were wrong (which were reviewed independently by probably more than 10 people), the plant operation logs were wrong (reviewed again), procedures for preventing inadvertent discharges were performed incorrectly (and the logs were wrong), the local radiation meters failed, and the local surveys were performed incorrectly, could it be possible to contaminate the countryside? I guess we had better check!