Archived press release

Georgia nukes contract: tip of the radioactive iceberg

22 April 1998

FOE Warns on UK's Foreign Nuclear Waste Deals

Friends of the Earth has evidence that the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology - the key US Government body making decisions about the nuclear industry - has been advised by top US nuclear scientists that the world's nuclear materials should be concentrated at a small number of sites, including Sellafield (also Yucca Mountain in the US, and a site each in East Asia and Eastern Europe).

Although Labour fought the General Election promising not to build new nuclear power stations, discussions took place with the nuclear industry while the Party was in opposition about the use of both Sellafield and Dounreay for radioactive waste reprocessing. FOE believes that Labour intends to allow the expansion of foreign waste treatment and management at both sites. Yet FOE research has shown that Britian's commericial foreign nuclear clients are increasingly unlikely to want plutonium for Fast Breeder Reactors from Dounreay, or Mixed Oxide Fuel produced by reprocessing at Sellafield.

Energy Minister John Battle has admitted that, since 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has imported almost 4 tonnes of spent fuel for reprocessing [1]. Recent shipments to Dounreay include almost 13kg of high enriched uranium from France, and radioactive sodium from Germany [2]. Plans have been put forward to convert a research laboratory at Dounreay into a small reprocessing facility to allow the import of spent reactor fuel from Holland, and discussions are continuing over the import of 1300 spent fuel rods from Australia. Dounreay has repeatedly been shown to have an appalling record of mismanaging waste already on site, and tax-payers face a bill of at least £350 million to clear the notorious waste shaft at the site, which exploded twenty years ago.

Friends of the Earth is warning that the level of nuclear waste stored at Sellafield is set to rise dramatically because of British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL)'s existing foreign reprocessing contracts. In 1994 (the year that the THORP reprocessing plant began operating) there were 40,000 tonnes of Intermediate Level Waste (ILW) in store at Sellafield. Current Government estimates are that the level of ILW in the UK (about 80% at Sellafield) will rise

to 136,000 cubic metres in 2010 [3]. Figures provided by BNFL to the Government's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee show that this amount would rise to 256,000 cubic metres if BNFL succeeds in getting new contracts and reprocesses all overseas spent fuel identified in the 1996/7 Business Plan for the THORP plant. By 1995,foreign reprocessing contracts took up 54% of THORP's operating capacity, as follows:Japan 28%, Germany 17%, Switzerland 4%, Spain 2%, Italy 1%, Netherlands 1%, Sweden 1%.

An example of foreign reprocessing released to FOE: 16,000 fuel rods from the Japanese Tokai gas reactor will be shipped to the UK by September 1998. Shipments will continue for 42 months, at the rate of one every six months. The most likely transport route is by ship to Barrow docks (the BNFL private berth), then the final 30 miles by rail up the coast to Sellafield. Transport problems with nuclear waste include a the failure of three safety tests on the nuclear waste transport flask NTL-11 earlier this year (Observer, 22 March 1998).

No satisfactory solution exists for the disposal of radioactive waste in the UK. Plans by NIREX to build a “Rock Characterisation Facility” at Sellafield - the first step towards a deep underground dump - were rejected by former Environment Secretary John Gummer before the last General Election. Although High Level Waste (HLW) created by foreign reprocessing contracts is supposed to be re-exported to the country of origin, along with the plutonium extracted, in fact strong civil protests are expected in most of the countries affected. 30,000 military police were used in Germany in March 1998 when HLW was returned from France after reprocessing.

Commenting, FOE Nuclear Campaigner Dr Dominick Jenkins said:

“It is time for the Government to come clean about its plans to allow Britain's nuclear industry to make this country the radioactive waste dump of the world. The industry has no commercial future, because the world's remaining commercial nuclear industries do not want reprocessing. The British nuclear industry has no solution to the management of the radioactive waste it already has, let alone the waste that it is now trying to create. Sellafield and Dounreay can only stagger on if they take in the rest of the world's radioactive washing. Far from helping to solve the problems of nuclear weapon proliferation, nuclear reprocessing - which creates more plutonium that could be turned into nuclear warheads - just makes the problem worse. If New Labour falls for this piece of nuclear spin, the Georgia contract will only be the first embarrassment of many”.

Notes to Editors

[1] Hansard Written Answers, February 1998, col 91
[2] RWMAC “The Import of and Export of Radioactive Waste”: September 1997, p45
[3] Hansard Written Answers, 10 February 1998 col 122 and 25 March 1998 col 155.

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