17. Nuclear News
Bush bans reprocessing
In a surprising move earlier this year President Bush came out against the reprocessing of spent nuclear
fuel. He argued that “Enrichment
and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes”, clearly linking this policy to his
‘war on terror’. He says “The
nations of the world must do all we can to secure and eliminate nuclear
[and chemical and biological] and radiological materials”.
However Bush prefaced his new policy with the qualifier. “The world’s leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have
reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors, so
long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing”, so there
will still be trade in these materials- and the potential for proliferation
of weapons making capacity.
The US backed off reprocessing, and the Fast Breeder
Reactor, many years ago, but there has been pressure to reconsider given
the Bush decision to relook at the nuclear
option. Separating out the plutonium from spent fuel is sometimes seen
as one way to reduce the amount of high level (very
radioactive) waste that needs to be stored- even though of course
reprocessing does create a lot of extra low and intermediate level waste
which also has to be stored.
But evidently worries about the risks having lots of plutonium in circulation
have led Bush to argue that the 40 members of the nuclear suppliers
group should refuse to sell enrichment and reprocessing equipment and
technology to other states without an established nuclear power programme.
The UK and France are the only countries with major
reprocessing operations. The UK’s reprocessing operation at Sellafield
produces plutonium that is used to make Mixed Oxide Fuel for sale around
the world- although it has proven to be hard to find markets as it is
expensive and there is plenty of cheap uranium available.
BNFL has indicated that it may abandon reprocessing by 2010. Certainly British Energy, the UK’s main nuclear
plant operator, is not keen on paying the extra cost of reprocessing
its spent fuel- it would prefer the cheaper option of dry storage of
spent fuel rods, which is the approach adopted by most other countries.
Whatever happens with regard to reprocessing in the UK, we will be faced
with a legacy of high, low and intermediate waste- much of the
later two types having been created by reprocessing.
In addition, decomissioning
old nuclear facilities will create more.
Currently, the government is setting up a Nuclear Decommisioning Authority to deal
with this problem- it will in effect take over much of BNFL’s
responsibilities in this area, although in practice it seems that a
revamped BNFL will actually do the work.
It is interesting in this context that a government minister,
Lord Davies of Oldham, told the Lords during passage of the Energy Bill
through parliament that
“We consider a great deal of the activity of
the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, particularly at Thorp and Sellafield Mox Plant, to be loss-making”.
British Energy (BE), which was privatised in 1996,
is also now struggling to survive despite government support, so things
do not look good for the UK nuclear industry, and recriminations are
now beginning to emerge. During hearings following on from a National
Audit Office review which had concluded that BE had at least initially
only been monitored with a ‘light touch’,
members of the influential House of Commons Public Accounts Committee
denounced BE for “deceiving” and “misleading”
shareholders. They also accused DTI officials of “incredible incompetence” over their handling of BE’s collapse. And
to round things off, Sir Robin Young, permanent secretary at the DTI,
had conceded that “British Energy,
‘in the light of experience’ should not have privatised” (FT 12/2/04). Brian Wilson, until recently Labours Energy
Minister, seemed to agree in
an Observer article (Feb15), laying much of the blame for the mess on
the Conservatives. But even they have, it seems, changed policy.
Tory environment spokesman Caroline Spelman
commented during the Environment debate (see Reviews)
‘until an
adequate environmental solution is found to the problems of waste
from nuclear energy, nuclear power is not an option that can enthusiastically
be embraced. So far, such a solution has not been found.’
Phasing out BNFL
Work is underway to decommission the Windscale Pile No. 1- the plant that suffered a fire in 1957. In response to a Parliamentary Question in Dec,
Stephen Timms noted that ‘The Pile One reactor is considered by international experts to be one
of the most challenging decommissioning
tasks in the nuclear industry’.
Timms reported that Phase
One decommissioning involved
clearing up and sealing the air and water ducts
and was completed in 1999, at a cost of £14m.
Phase Two involves removal of hazardous materials and treating
and packaging the resultant wastes, and to date the costs had been approximately
£30 m. He added that one of the
key challenges was ‘limited knowledge of the extent of damage to the
fire-affected core’. We wish
the clean-up crews well.
However, the fate of the rest of Sellafield
is still far from clear. THORP,
the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield,
and the Sellafield MOX plutonium fuel plant
were, rather oddly, both excluded from consideration in the governments
recent strategy review of BNFL. The ostensible reason given by the Energy
Minister, Stephen Timms, was that they would both pass to the Nuclear Decommissioning
Authority when it is established in 2005, so that it ‘was not appropriate for them to be considered
as part of the review’. In
a letter to the Guardian, (17/12/03), Dr David Lowry said that this was ‘akin to conducting a review of Transport for London, but excluding consideration
of buses and underground trains’.
Taking
in Waste
The UK does not allow the import of radioactive waste, but we do take in spent fuel for reprocessing-and
that creates wastes as well as plutonium. Under the terms of some of the reprocessing contracts,
if countries will accept the plutonium back in the form of MOX, then
we will deal with the extra wastes. It’s called
‘intermediate level waste substitution’.
Asked about the scale of this Energy Minister Stephen Timms
commented:
‘The NAC International report estimates that
the volume of overseas intermediate level radioactive waste (ILW)
retained in the UK as a result of ILW substitution would be about
1.4% of the UK’s total ILW. This amounts to approximately 3,00m
3 . This would be partially offset by a reduction in high level waste
that would otherwise be retained in the UK of about 50m 3 .’
This idea was not well received by everyone. Speaking during the House of Commons debate
on the environment in Feb (see Reviews), Lib Dem MP Norman Baker criticised
the latest Consultation paper on proposals for intermediate level radioactive
waste substitution.
‘The thrust of that supposedly independent paper is that we should not
necessarily return to the countries whence it came all the waste generated
from reprocessing. Why? Presumably
it is because that suggestion would enable prices to be cut and business
in that doubtful area to be propped up.
The fact is that we have more than 75,000 cu m of intermediate-level
waste lying around in this country, with no clear idea or strategy
on how to deal with it. Nirex has no solution. Its last suggestion was pulled and
it has not come back with another proposal since, but it now seems to want more of the stuff. The projections
already suggest that we will have 107,000 cu m of intermediate-level
waste by 2010, and 143,000 cu m by 2030. It seems that we want more
waste from other countries to add to that stockpile. However, the
author of that report- NAC International- makes some of its money
by carrying out work for BNFL. A parliamentary answer that I received
yesterday confirmed both that that financial arrangement exists and
that the DTI was aware of it before it commissioned NAC to write the
report. That is simply not acceptable. That paper is discredited and
the DTI should now withdraw it.’
Lovelock – ‘go nuclear’
Renewables can’t hack it,
so, to deal with climate change, we have to have nuclear power,
says James Lovelock (Independent 24th May ): it is ‘the safest of all energy sources’. Friends of the Earth replied,‘Climate change and radioactive waste both pose deadly
long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects
of both, not to choose between
them.’
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