The troubled plutonium and uranium reprocessing plant at Sellafield may have to shut down.
The Sellafield mixed oxide plant (SMP) cost the taxpayer £472 million and was intended to turn plutonium and uranium recovered from used nuclear fuel into usable fuel for overseas nuclear reactors.
In the 'funny if it weren't so scary' category we have the advert which ran last week in the Whitehaven News, the local paper for west Cumbria where Sellafield is to be found. As reported in the Guardian at the weekend, LLW Repository Ltd - the company which has recently taken over managing the site - have found there are significant holes in records detailing what radioactive waste was dumped in the repository at nearby Drigg; so they're appealing for people who worked at Sellafield in the 60s, 70s and 80s to rack their brains and fill in the gaps.
A Greenpeace briefing on the government's internal audit ("Response to the Business and Enterprise Committee Funding the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority") and follow up report ("NDA Budgetting Shortfall 2007-08: Lesson Learned"). These reports expose massive cost overruns, amateurish bureaucratic cock-ups and complete chaos within the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority - the organisation charged with cleaning up the UK's lethal radioactive legacy.
Posted by jamie — 24 July 2008 at 2:55pm
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Well, what do you know? Another news story has
broken which demonstrates that the UK's nuclear industry is not the
robust, well-managed machine our ministers would have us believe. The
government has sneaked out a report assessing the working practices of the
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is managing the clean-up of
existing power stations and waste. They were clearly hoping no one would notice
as there's no doubt that many people have been caught with their pants
anklewards.
Posted by jamie — 12 June 2008 at 3:01pm
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We've known for quite some time that the
government's preferred solution to that nagging problem of all the nuclear
waste currently lying around the place is to dump it in a
big hole in the ground. Nice. However, they've had trouble finding anywhere
in the country which has been willing to live with this waste bubbling away
beneath their feet but now they've come up with the perfect solution: bribery!
Posted by jossc — 29 May 2008 at 11:32am
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Sellafield: major ongoing problems have been hidden from the public
Yesterday, Gordon Brown
felt compelled to go on the record to announce that the UK needs to not
only maintain but to increase
its nuclear power capacity. And yet the nuclear industry is not exactly
hale and hearty because, let's face it, it's been a terrible week for the poor dears.
