nuclear-news

Britain looks at dubious technical “fixes” for its radioactive pile at Sellafield

It is the task of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to clean all this up. The plans are to pay the French company Areva, who have proved their technology works, to build a new mixed oxide fuel (MOX) plant.
The other option is to let the US-Japanese GE-Hitachi build a new fast PRISM reactor on the site to burn the plutonium and produce electricity. This is a more elegant engineering option but the reactor is totally unproven and is decades away from completion.

Sellafield: The dangers of Britain’s nuclear dustbin RT, 10 July, 2012“…….Cold war legacy   Behind the razor wire, security guards and public relations campaigns,
Sellafield is home to some of the most radioactive buildings in Europe.
The UK has the largest stockpile of Plutonium anywhere in the world and it’s all stored at Sellafield. Plutonium is used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons and is extremely radioactive with a half-life of 25,000 years.

According to Francis Livons, research director of the Dalton Nuclear
Institute in Manchester, this 113 tonne Plutonium mountain is the
historical consequence of the British nuclear weapons programme in the
1950’s and 60’s and of over 60 years of reprocessing nuclear fuel.
Since the late 1980’s the plant has been plagued by technical failures
and, according to Livons, and a lack of political will to invest in
new technology that works. He also said a vast amount of other nuclear
waste stored at Sellafield “is not in a good state at-all.”
It is the task of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to clean all this up. The plans are to pay the French company Areva, who have proved their technology works, to build a new mixed oxide fuel (MOX) plant.
The other option is to let the US-Japanese GE-Hitachi build a new fast PRISM reactor on the site to burn the plutonium and produce electricity. This is a more elegant engineering option but the reactor is totally unproven and is decades away from completion.

The GE-Hitachi plans have been met with dismay by many locals, despite the prospects of large scale job creation in the area. Martin Fullwood, campaign co-ordinator at CORE has branded the proposals “absolute nonsense”.
Livons admits that the fast reactor plans are extremely ambitious, given that this type of reactor has never been built anywhere in the world before.

Fullwood says Sellfield is “A can of worms” and believes “The NDA are clutching at straws”. However, he concedes that something must be done about the nuclear waste. But Livons says “The NDA is finally beginning to get to grips with what is a really nasty problem that lots of
governments have tried to run away from. Things are finally starting to happen.”
Sellafield is a legacy of cold war decision making and will remain a problem for decades, and will cost the UK taxpayer tens of billions of pounds to clear up. The British public are worried new reactors built in the UK will also be mismanaged. ….
If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. Britain’s post war dreams of being a world leader in nuclear energy lie in radioactive ruins in Sellafield. Douglas Parr, the head scientist at Greenpeace, told RT, “Sellafield is a monument to the huge failings of the British nuclear industry.”
http://www.rt.com/news/sellafield-uk-radioactive-plutonium-843/

July 11, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, Reference, technology, UK, wastes