The UK Government's approval, announced today, for a controversial new plutonium fuel facility at the Sellafield nuclear complex will increase the risk of terrorists seizing weapons usable material, Greenpeace has warned.
The group said the decision to give the go-ahead to British Nuclear Fuels' mixed oxide or 'MOX' fuel plant and its associated exports was "dangerously irresponsible and "an affront to the international community". On Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called upon the world to work together to reduce the risks of terror groups obtaining nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Today's move ignores that call and extends the proliferation of plutonium around the world.
Spent nuclear waste fuel shipments from German nuclear power plants to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria are about to resume. This will be the first time waste has been transported from Germany to Sellafield since shipments were stopped in 1998.
Three casks of nuclear waste are rumoured to be due to leave the Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant on 23rd April. They will travel by sea to Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria and then be taken by train to the reprocessing plant at Sellafield.
Greenpeace described today's announcement by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) as "A shocking indictment of Sellafield's continuing safety crisis."
In particular the NII reported today that BNFL has so far failed to fully implement 25 of the 28 Sellafield site safety recommendations the NII made last year, and that it expects full completion to take until the end of 2002.
Greenpeace today attacked the government's newly released strategy on radioactive substances as an outrage.
"This announcement is pure spin" said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Pete Roche, he continued
"The government are saying that they are achieving 'major cuts' in radioactive discharges when in fact what they are doing is failing to meet the commitments they made to the international community to reduce radioactive discharges"
There is currently considerable concern amongst BNFL employees, and most people living in West Cumbria, that ending nuclear reprocessing at Sellafield would mean massive job losses and be devastating to the local area. Stopping nuclear reprocessing is nevertheless essential to protect the environment and the health of future generations, and to end the nuclear proliferation threat caused by separating nuclear weapons-usable plutonium.
BNFL often claims that reprocessing must continue because contracts between them and their customers (the nuclear utilities) are legally binding. In addition, because large quantities of spent nuclear fuel have already been sent to Sellafield, and money has been paid up-front for this spent fuel to be reprocessed, it is sometimes argued that reprocessing this fuel is a commitment that cannot be broken.
The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel was always at the heart of the civilian nuclear enterprise. Separating plutonium and unburned uranium from the fuel matrix was regarded as indispensable. This was because uranium would become scarce, fast breeder reactors (dependent on large amounts of plutonium as a fuel) would come to dominate, and radioactive waste management (RWM) would become easier with the smaller volume of high level waste (HLW) that reprocessing would isolate...
