Sellafield - a radioactive mess that needs sorting

Mike Childs

15 March 2013

The news this week has been full of pictures of the mess that the Japanese tsunami made of the Fukushima nuclear plant. There is no doubt that the parlous state of the reactors still poses considerable risks. But I can't help but wonder why so much attention on Japan when we have a significant nuclear mess in our own backyard.

Last week Friends of the Earth groups in Cumbria published an excellent briefing exposing the unholy mess of nuclear waste stored unsafely at the Sellafield nuclear chemical facility.

Sellafield's original purpose was to create plutonium for nuclear bombs. More recently its purpose has been to separate out uranium from nuclear waste for reuse, and plutonium for fast-breeder nuclear reactors. It doesn't generate electricity.

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has said that Sellafield has "... an extraordinary accumulation of hazardous waste, much of it stored in outdated nuclear facilities."  The cost of managing this is £1.6 billion a year of tax-payers money.

The greatest concern is with liquid high level waste stored in special cooling tanks before it is vitrified in glass.

The briefing states that the liquid waste needs to be "constantly cooled otherwise they would start to boil". It goes on to quote the respected Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology who in a 2004 report stated that "a terrorist attack on the tanks could require the evacuation of an area between Glasgow and Liverpool, and cause around 2 million fatalities." This must make Sellafield site one of the most dangerous nuclear facilities in the World.

Remarkably, despite a series of damning reports over the years criticising the Sellafield operators for failing to manage the nuclear waste legacy safely and for cost overruns and delays, they continue to create further high-level waste through their commercial reprocessing activities.  

The regulator comes in for criticism too. The briefing says that the ONR (Office for Nuclear regulation) "is prepared to give up on a project [building new liquid storage tanks] which five years ago it deemed to be required 'with utmost urgency'".

The mess at Sellafield isn't the result of a tsunami it is due to a failure of governance stretching across decades for which the blame must squarely sit on the shoulders of regulators and governments. 

The over-riding priority must be to rapidly and safely vitrify the high level waste, as well as to safely store the solid waste.

It's time we cleared up our own backyard.