Last Wednesday's county council decision saw the authority's cabinet vote against progressing to the next stage of a process that would have seen studies take place in search of a suitable location for an underground nuclear dump.

BBC: Sellafield clean-up cost reaches ?67.5bn, says report

But Scott Zeger, the head of the department of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who performed the statistical analysis in the study, points out that clustered sampling is the rule rather than the exception in public-health studies, and that the patterns of deaths caused by epidemics are also very variable by location.

ECONOMIST: The Iraqi war