At around 2.30 am Monday, a large white elephant excreting nuclear bombs was towed in front of the lock gates at the mouth of the Barrow port. The white elephant, mounted on a rigid banner on a raft, symbolises the waste of millions of pounds in taxpayers' money on the proposed expansion of the British nuclear reprocessing industry and its dangerous plutonium trade with Japan. Meanwhile, twelve activists in two inflatables carried banners saying "Stop Plutonium".
At around 3 am police began arresting the activists on the raft and in the inflatable boats. There were some 50 police in full riot gear on the Barrow dock and UK Atomic Energy Agency police officers armed with machine guns were aboard the "Pacific Teal". A British navy frigate was shadowing the vessel MV Greenpeace.
The Pacific Teal is heading for Cherbourg in France where it will be loaded with 32 plutonium fuel (MOX) elements containing 221 kg of plutonium from the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant. In Cherbourg, Cogema's final preparations for the loading of four plutonium fuel casks on to the Teal continued last night (Sunday evening). At about 8 pm local time a convoy of armed police escorted by a helicopter and security personnel including anti-terrorist police escorted three trucks, believed to be carrying plutonium casks, left the COGEMA railyard at Valognes, 30 km from Cherbourg. Passing through local villages and towns the convoy entered the seaside town of Cherbourg and entered the COGEMA dock at about 10 pm.
A second vessel, the Pacific Pintail, remains in Barrow where it will be loaded with eight plutonium fuel elements containing 225 kg of plutonium from Britain Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL)'s Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant. The combined cargo of the two vessels will contain 446 kg of plutonium, enough to build 60 nuclear bombs and more than in India's nuclear weapons programme.
Greenpeace nuclear campaigner MikeTownsley, on board the MV Greenpeace, said: "The white elephant symbolises the folly of the plutonium industry,which has produced dangerous stockpiles of bombs usable-plutonium, cost the taxpayer billions of dollars, and contaminates the environment with radioactivity. Yet when the industry should be concentrating on making this deadly legacy safe for future generations it is embarking on a new and dangerous expansion with these shipments of plutonium fuel."
The industry's plans to burn plutonium in fast-breeder reactors have failed and it is now attempting to justify continued reprocessing at Sellafield by the dangerous and uneconomic practice of selling plutonium fuel (MOX) for use in conventional nuclear power reactors, for which they were never originally designed.
"Britain and France, with the approval of the US government, will be fatally undermining international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons by supplying nuclear weapons-usable plutonium to Japan, which is in one of the most politically volatile regions in the world," said Townsley. "The departure of these ships for Japan leaves the UK government's much vaunted 'ethical foreign policy' in tatters."
Participating in the protest was Korean Federation of Environmental Movements representative Nam-hee Kwon. "These transports threaten the Korean environment as they pass through the East Sea and risk creating further nuclear proliferation in Asia. I am here to show the Korean people's strong will to demand that Japan cancel this peace-breaking shipment."
The two British-flagged vessels are expected to rendezvous at sea, off the French Atlantic coast, and continue together on the 20,000-mile voyage to Japan without naval escort along a still secret route. They are owned by Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited (PNTL) but operated "on government service" to the UK.
Instead of a military escort, the two vessels have recently been fitted with three 30mm cannon each and are expected to protect each other against potential attack.
Plutonium is separated from Japanese nuclear waste fuel by BNFL at Sellafield, and the fuel on board the Pacific Pintail was fabricated at a pilot facility at the plant. BNFL hopes that a successful shipment to Japan will help persuade the UK Government to grant approval for a completed, but not yet operating, large-scale MOX fabrication plant at Sellafield. Currently, the facility has contracts for less than seven percent of its 20-year lifetime capacity, underlining the lack of economic viability of the industry as the income from this throughput would not cover either the plant's construction costs or its decommissioning costs.
In Japan the plutonium fuel will be loaded into conventional nuclear power reactors operated by Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) at Takahama and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) at Fukushima.
These reactors werenever designed to use this type of MOX fuel and it will reduce their operating safety margins. Greenpeace is calling on the UK Government to: immediately ban this transport; reject British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) application to begin operating a massive new MOX production line; and end the separation of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel at Sellafield.
