Swiss nuclear regulatory officials are today visiting British Nuclear Fuels Ltd's (BNFL) Sellafield site in north-west England, to check on safety data for nuclear fuel exported to Switzerland.
The visit follows today's reported resignation of BNFL chief executive John Taylor, following the scandal surrounding the falsification of nuclear fuel safety data for plutonium uranium oxide (MOX) fuel sent to Japan and Germany. Switzerland is the only customer continuing to use BNFL MOX fuel.
Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Helen Wallace said, "BNFL's plutonium business is dangerous, polluting and unnecessary whoever is at the helm. A new captain alone cannot save a ship that is heading for the rocks. The Government must chart a new course for BNFL by ending Britain's plutonium trade for good."
The Sellafield crisis is expected to deepen despite Taylor's resignation as the delegation from the Swiss nuclear regulators (HSK) and Swiss nuclear company NOK arrives at Sellafield. In a statement last Friday, NOK said it had decided to check for itself all quality control data on plutonium fuel (MOX) made at Sellafield for the Swiss Beznau reactor. NOK confirmed that "irregularities" had been detected in quality control measurements on MOX sent to Switzerland and stated that "irregularities in the implementation of instructions on quality checks are a serious violation of the confidence of the customer".
A number of MOX fuel pins supplied to Switzerland in 1995 ruptured inside the Beznau reactor in 1997, leaking radioactivity into cooling water. That fuel was returned to Sellafield, but since then the reactor has been loaded with more MOX from BNFL. Unlike the Japanese data, the data for the safety checks on this fuel has not been released.
Sellafield's Japanese and German customers have already rejected BNFL plutonium fuel (MOX) after BNFL admitted that safety checks on the fuel had been faked. Last week German nuclear company Pruessen Elektra took the costly decision to turn off its Unterweser reactor to remove the BNFL MOX fuel loaded in it. The Japanese nuclear company Kansai Electric has refused to load it's BNFL MOX fuel in the Takahama reactor and has demanded its return, under heavily armed guard, to Britain. Switzerland is BNFL's only remaining MOX customer.
Taylor's resignation follows the release of three damning safety reports from the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. In addition to confirming that BNFL had faked safety data on fuel sold overseas, the reports described safety at Sellafield as "only just tolerable" and criticised the storage of highly radioactive liquid wastes at Sellafield (1).
Nuclear reprocessing at Sellafield involves separating nuclear weapons-useable plutonium from nuclear waste fuel. The process continues despite the fact that no one wants to buy the nuclear fuel (MOX) which BNFL makes from the plutonium. Reprocessing adds to the stockpile of nuclear wastes, including plutonium, at Sellafield and involves discharging nuclear wastes directly into the sea and air. Sellafield has been heavily criticised by Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland for the pollution this causes (2).
"BNFL should pull out of reprocessing and the plutonium trade and concentrate instead on responsible storage, management and monitoring of the existing nuclear waste legacy" said Wallace.
