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Britain’s rather horrible plutonium and Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) dilemma

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4   
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “BRITAIN’S PLUTONIUM MOUNTAIN”  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/19_02_13_fo4_britainsplutoniummountain.pdf
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 19th February 2013 2000 – 2040
REPEAT: Sunday 24th February 2013 1700 – 1740
REPORTER: Rob Broomby
PRODUCER: Ian Muir-Cochrane
EDITOR: David Ross
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 13VQ5159LH0
highly-recommended“……….The Government wants to try and turn plutonium  into a fuel which can be used
in nuclear power stations. The favoured option is to make what’s called Mixed Oxide fuel or
MOX. It will involve building an expensive new factory to transform the plutonium into a
usable form. ….
BROOMBY: But it has been tried before and it didn’t work out well.
Back in 1993, British Nuclear Fuels – then a state-owned commercial company which ran
Sellafield – got approval to build a massive MOX fuel plant, not unlike the one that’s proposed
today. The new factory was supposed to start work in 1997 and cost £265 million. By 2001 the
cost had reached £473 million. By then the Government had changed, Tony Blair was in
power and his Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, was having doubts on both
environmental and economic grounds. He tried to block the scheme…..
Michael Meacher had been outgunned by Downing Street. His
warnings were ignored and the MOX plant began operating. But Victoria Baghdjian, the UK
editor of Platts Nuclear Publications, says problems emerged almost immediately.
BAGHDJIAN: It started operation in 2001 and it was hoped that it
would deal with some of the plutonium stocks in the UK by making them into MOX fuel, to
supply European customers particularly in Switzerland and Germany. Now the plant
experienced problems from the very beginning really; they did not make their first fuel
assembly until 2005. And they actually had to subcontract their first orders for a customer in Europe to their competitor…..
BROOMBY: In 2004, Michael Meacher -who’d been sacked as a
minister the year before –asked the National Audit Office to investigate what had happened at
BNFL. File on 4 has now seen the response. It reveals that the cost of the MOX plant had
risen again. Remedial work had been needed due to a complex plant design.
READER IN STUDIO: This remedial work contributed approximately half of
the increase in estimated capital costs from the original £265 million to the latest figure of
£490 million.
BROOMBY: Closing the MOX facility was already being discussed,
but there was no going back.
READER IN STUDIO: It would be more expensive to close the plant
immediately than to continue operating.
BROOMBY: But news of the failure spread. US diplomatic cables
revealed by WikiLeaks quoted Government officials saying the MOX plant was:
READER IN STUDIO: One of the most embarrassing failures in British
industrial history…. the plant continues to drain resources and is a black mark for the entire
industry
BROOMBY: In the end, events on the other side of the world forced
the MOX plant to close……
BROOMBY: The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan nearly two
years ago prompted a reappraisal of all nuclear activity there. They cancelled their contracts
with Britain to have Japanese plutonium – still sitting at Sellafield – turned into MOX fuel.
Victoria Baghdjian again.
BAGHDJIAN: It was only after Fukushima, when they lost those
Japanese contracts, so then the MOX plant was left really without new business, so I think that
was perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the plant at Sellafield.
BROOMBY: The business case for the plant which was supposed to
earn hundreds of millions had evaporated overnight. File on 4 has learned that the final cost to
the taxpayer was £1.4 billion. For Michael Meacher it’s a warning for the future.
MEACHER: It was meant to produce 120 tons a year over a ten year
period, so we’re talking about 1,200 tons in that period. It actually produced – almost
unbelievably – thirteen tons, about 1% of what it was expected to produce. And the costs were
much greater than had ever been estimated, to produce 1% of what it was expected to produce.
This must be the biggest white elephant in modern times.
BROOMBY: And yet the MOX route is the present Government’s
favoured solution to dealing with the plutonium stockpile we’ve ended up with.
MEACHER: I find it utterly astonishing. I keep on asking to have a
serious objective independent and transparent analysis of what went wrong the first time, and
to ask the obvious question – can we be certain that none of this is going to happen again, that
it’s not going to be double or treble the original cost, and that it is going to produce what it says
it is intended to produce, not just 1%. The important thing is that we don’t disregard what has
happened.
BROOMBY: But despite all the problems, Government policy is still
to try and turn the plutonium into a usable fuel and the favoured option remains MOX.
Building a new MOX plant will cost a staggering £5 to £6 billion. And following on from the
dramatic failure of the old plant, it will be a bitter pill to swallow………
BROOMBY: But that’s not the only problem. Of all the nuclear
power stations in Britain, only one at Sizewell in Suffolk is even capable of using MOX fuel,
but it hasn’t been licensed by regulators to do so, and so it can’t. So it would fall to those
building new nuclear power stations to use it, but they’re reluctant. EDF, the French owned
utility, which has the most advanced plans to build new reactors in the UK, has said no to
MOX for now. Horizon is a company with plans to build a nuclear power station at Wylfa on
the Isle of Anglesey. It won’t be ready until the mid-2020s. Even then the Chief Operating Officer, Alan Raymant, says they are reluctant to use MOX…….
BROOMBY: So in the absence of a certain market for the fuel and
with the doubts and cost overruns emerging in America, why is MOX still the Government’s
preferred scheme for getting rid of the plutonium? The NDA’s Adrian Simper says they are
aware of the risks.
You can see in a time of austerity why taxpayers might well be nervous, buying into something
which is already hugely expensive, maybe even more expensive still……
BROOMBY: The one thing that’s been traditionally put on the plus
side for MOX is that you’ve got some fuel to sell at the end of the day. However, as of now
you don’t have anyone to sell it to who is interested, do you?
SIMPER: We don’t today and we don’t have any reactors that we
could sell it to, and ….
BROOMBY: Bit of a problem, isn’t it?……
BROOMBY: But we know as of now that none of the present reactors
we have are capable of using it, and we’ve spoken to Horizon about the reactor they’re hoping
to build on the isle of Anglesey and they’ve said no for the foreseeable future……..
BROOMBY: Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee
cross-questioned the Secretary of State on the matter in January. One of the inquisitors was the
Conservative MP, Dr Philip Lee. He is passionately pro-nuclear but he thinks MOX is a
mistake.
LEE: My concern is, is the history of MOX in this country is
not a great one. We spent a lot of money. I look abroad to the United States of America and I
see a MOX plant being built which is significantly over budget, yet to be completed, and I
worry that the approach that we might take is that we may embark upon another nuclear project
and it will end up being a bit of a disaster and will give the whole of the wider nuclear industry
a bad name.
BROOMBY: Why do you think ministers and experts have been so
wedded to the MOX idea?
LEE: I have no idea. I mean, I have challenged this, I have
asked the question. If there’s something I am not understanding, I’d like to know. All I know
is that MOX fuel, there’s not a huge demand for it and the MOX plant we had cost a vast
amount of money and we didn’t process very much plutonium in the time that it was running.
BROOMBY: Do you think then it’s time for the Government to
change its mind about this?- 16 –
LEE: I’ve certainly been lobbying for there to be a change of
mind and I’m sort of waiting for this moment when somebody gives me the reason why we are
wedded to this belief that MOX is the way forward.
BROOMBY: Again, more questions for Government ministers. All
the technical options the NDA is considering to tackle the problem try to make electricity out
of the plutonium. It’s a process which leaves you with radioactive waste that has to go
somewhere. Which raises the question – why not simply declare the plutonium as waste in the
first place and prepare it for dumping underground?……
BROOMBY: Professor Gordon Mackerron is the former chairman of
the Government appointed Committee on Radioactive Waste Management. In 2006 they
recommended the deep underground disposal of all nuclear waste to keep it away from humans
for the centuries to come. That became government policy. Now he says it’s a solution that
could also be used for plutonium.
MCKERRON: It’s fair to say that at least a major part of the reason why
we recommended a repository is that that seemed to us to be the best protection to the far
distant future generations who will have had no benefit from nuclear power and who might
suffer some serious risk of radioactive contamination in the future. But on the other hand, you
have to worry about this generation too and putting material at least a bit underground in the
relatively near future helps to protect this generation, which of course has to be balanced
against the interests of far future generations. The signal that the UK sends about how it wants
to manage the largest civilian plutonium stockpile in the world is very important in
proliferation terms. If we were to decide simply to immobilise it and then manage it safely,
that sends a much better message to the world, including countries like Iran, about the uses of
nuclear materials and putting them beyond the possibility that they might be used in weapons……

June 4, 2013 - Posted by | - plutonium, Reference, reprocessing, UK

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