It was an ordinary Sunday morning,... but radioactive water was seeping into the laundry room

Yes it was... One of the contractors working on the decommissioning of the Sizewell A nuclear power station in Suffolk in the U.K..decided to wash out some dirty clothes and while he was in the laundry room he spotted something out of the ordinary: radioactive cooling waster which was leaking out of the pond which holds the reactor's extremely radioactive spent nuclear fuel... No... none of the alarms had gone off and Yes..by the time the next patrol came round, the pond level would have gone down enough to expose the nuclear fuel rods. Potentially, they could have overheated, caught fire and sent a plume of radioactive contamination along the coastline.. or which ever way the wind blew.  Does the scenario sound horribly familiar?
This is very well reported in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-waste-nuclearpower  but the episode took place on January 7, 2007 and when was it reported? June 11, 2009.  Why the gap, when it was so significant?
     This report  from the HM Nuclear Installation Inspectorate was obtained under the freedom of information act by John Large, when he was compiling a dossier for the local "Shutdown Sizewell Campaign, otherwise would we have found out?
     The U.K is ringed with nuclear power plants and this government would still like more.  This is a link to a dynamic map, to show what would happen if there was an accident at a nuclear power plant in Britain, it's from No 2 Nuclear Power and you can make the wind blow in different directions. http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/Chernobyl-UK.php
    I don't suppose the leaking water looked different to any other leaking water, but the contractor knew it was...what if he hadn't.  Would you know? Why did it take an independent nuclear consultant to ferret this out?  Luckily there are a few.
     Do you feel confident that we won't ever be in a similar situation to Japan?  We don't have earthquakes of that ferocity, but even if less people would develop cancer some years later, if that cancer is the one which affects you, it probably doesn't make too much difference how many other people are suffering in the same way, except for the NHS resources to treat you.