Could your life be put at risk if this nuclear plant is allowed to expand?

Environmentalists claim it could be responsible for cancer and leukaemia among locals. It has raised fears that emissions from the site could affect the residents of Sussex, just 80 miles away.

Chief reporter David Edwards investigates.

Like a concrete and steel behemoth, it squats on what was once a beauty spot on the north coast of France.

Seven days a week, its orange sodium lamps give the Cap de la Hague an eerie, iridescent quality.

Day and night its chimneys pump out radioactive clouds, while inside workers feed nuclear waste into its insatiable heart.

The plant has long been a source of controversy among locals and residents of the nearby Channel Islands.

They have been constantly chilled by warnings from environmentalists that the seabed surrounding the site has become a nuclear dump.

Even more worryingly, the green lobby claims cases of cancer and leukaemia in people living nearby could be linked to its emissions.

The battle between the islanders and the French nuclear industry has largely been confined to the nearby area since the site opened in the Seventies.

Now the debate is set to spread to the South Coast of England as the plant's owners plan to expand, raising fears that radiation could hit the Sussex coast 80 miles away.

Cogema, the plant's owner, wants to increase the nuclear waste it can process every year from 1,600 to 2,000 tonnes and to increase its storage capacity from 12,000 to 15,000 tonnes.

That compares to the Sellafield plant in Cumbria, which over the past three years has reprocessed an average of 1,200 tonnes annually.

The process involves separating unused uranium and plutonium from spent nuclear fuel that has already been processed in reactors, primarily in Japan and Australia.

The plan has already been approved by the French government, although a public inquiry began in February to look into the scheme.

The inquiry finished last month and a final decision is expected this autumn.

Dr Helen Wallace, a senior scientist with the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, said Sussex residents were likely to see an increased rate of cancer and, in the worst case scenario, a raised incidence of children born with deformities if the expansion went ahead.

Although she stressed that not enough research had been done to establish a definite link between the plant and illnesses in people downwind of the site, she believed there was compelling evidence.

She pointed to how hundreds of millions of litres of nuclear waste were discharged from the plant into the sea every year.

In 1997, a Greenpeace activist with a Geiger counter measured radiation levels at one of the plant's pipelines after it was left exposed during a very low tide.

She found that anyone standing next to it could receive the maximum legal dose of radiation in a few hours. The radioactive substances being emitted from the plant include tritium, iodine 129, caesium 137 and plutonium 239.

Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years - in other words, it would take that long for the radioactivity to decline to half its current level. Even if it was trapped in sediment for generations it could be released harmfully at any time.

Iodine 129 in particular is suspected of causing cancer - and its half-life is 16 million years.

Although no cause-and-effect link could be made between leukaemia and nuclear reprocessing, Dr Wallace said it was known that radiation could cause childhood leukaemia.

A report by the French academic Professor Jean-Francois Viel found a statistical increase in the risk of children getting leukaemia linked to the time they spent on the Cap de la Hague beach or the amount of locally-caught seafood they had eaten.

Dr Wallace said airborne emissions from the site could reach Sussex within five days of being discharged.

She said: "The radiation is already spread across Britain depending on the winds, but if the plant expands then there would be increased discharges of some radioactive substances in the air and into the sea, so we would expect more cancers.

"There is no safe dose of radiation, but we think some cases of cancer in Britain are caused as a result of the discharges."

Dr Wallace said waterborne emissions could also pose a risk to health if, as is common, the current carried them to the Sussex coastline.

She said: "Radioactive substances go straight into the sea and the risk to people in Sussex would come from eating seafood caught in the English Channel, particularly near the plant.

"It means the fish and seafood will build up radioactivity from Cap de la Hague.

"Again, there haven't been enough studies into what dangers these pose and the science is quite uncertain.

"We are not telling people not to eat seafood. We are saying discharges should stop so any seafoo