News Extra

THORP accident leaves Nuclear Ambitions in disarray
... but it has serious nuclear proliferation implications too

On 15th June The Independent ran a "Business Analysis" story which said that the leak at the Sellafield Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) has left Tony Blair's nuclear ambitions in disarray. Before last month's election, prospects for Britain's nuclear power sector looked good. Downing Street had been gearing up for a highly politically sensitive initiative guaranteeing that extra government money would be poured into it for many years to come. Since then, the entire picture has changed. Just a few days after Mr Blair returned to No 10 for a third term, a story broke that made alarm bells ring in Westminster. BNFL's main plant in Sellafield had discovered one of the most serious nuclear accidents ever. The disaster has highlighted the controversial nature of the nuclear industry, and has provided a powerful opportunity for opponents to raise alarm about its potential danger. For the Government, the disaster has too many unpleasant similarities to the revelation in 1999 that BNFL's safety documents for shipments of mixed oxide to Japan were found to have been falsified. Downing Street wants to sell off the only major generator of profits for the group, its US arm Westinghouse, this year, in a move expected to net more than $1bn. The prospectus is expected to be available to interested parties in the next few weeks.The little-noticed but crucial uranium business, Urenco, could also be on the block for a sale. 

In response Dr David Lowry, an Environmental policy & research consultant, from Stoneleigh, Surrey, says:

The detailed business analysis on the implication of the latest, and perhaps terminal, nuclear accident at the Thorp plutonium separation and radioactive waste production plant at Sellafeld overlooked one important dimension of the leak from Thorp of enough plutonium to make 20 nuclear weapons:  the proliferation or "safeguards" implications, which are the responsibility jointly of both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's international nuclear watchdog,  and Euratom, the EU's executive nuclear body.

Safeguards reports to demonstrate that the quantity  of sensitive nuclear material (such as plutonium) entering the front end of the complex chemical separation plant - ie  Thorp  - is the same as the quantity of material measured at the other back-end, are supposed to be produced by the plant operator for both the UK government (DTI's office of nuclear safeguards) and the two independent safeguards agencies.

If there was a significant discrepancy between the two figures, which must have been the case if twenty bombsworth of plutonium leaked out, this surely should have sent alarm bells ringing at the safeguards agencies. If even one bombsworth of plutonium went missing in say Iran or North Korea, there would rightly be international uproar and opprobrium dumped on those countries.

The problem of potential 'plutonium gone missing' was in fact raised in Parliament in February by former Labour MP Llew Smith (for whom I used to do some research) who was told by the then energy minister  Mike O'Brien that  BNFL “published nuclear material unaccounted for data for 2003-04 on 17 February 2005. Prior to publication, the industry wrote to the European Commission's Safeguards Directorate and the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that the figures to be published were reconciled with safeguards reports made under Commission Regulation 3227/76. This correspondence was conducted through the Safeguards Office in my Department. BNFL and the Safeguards Office are currently in discussion with the European Commission to resolve measurement issues that have been identified in certain aspects of nuclear material accountancy at Sellafield.” (Hansard, 25 February 2005 : Column 888W)

Worryingly, BNFL issued a media statement on 17 February stating "Euratom has accepted all inventories as satisfactory." This is clearly contradicted by Mr O'Brien's ministerial reply admitting to unresolved measurement issues.

I was part of the BNFL stakeholder Dialogue for five years to November last year, working on plutonium and security issues. During the security working group's 18-month long deliberations, BNFL did not bring to our attention the plutonium leakage. (Our 145-page report  was published on the host web site of the BNFL Stakeholder Dialogue ie The UK Environment Council, on 10 December last year.

BNFL proudly announce on the section of their web site dealing with its environmental performance that "During the year we succeeded in reducing, from 14 to 2, the number of times we failed to comply with our UK environmental discharge authorisation limits."

This is a perfect example of BNFL making a factually accurate statement that is totally misleading, in that it does not mention the vast scale of one of those two incidents. Now I wonder about the magnitude of the other one.

In an earlier letter to The Whitehaven News, 3rd March 2005, Dr Lowry had demonstrated there was more to the earlier story than initially perceived.

Sellafield: Problem is "not one of safety, but security"

SIR  Your story "Lost Plutonium fears" (The Whitehaven News, February 24) reports a BNFL spokesperson as saying: "In fact, the International Atomic Energy Authority sets standards on these uncertainties at one per cent of the total Sellafield throughput but the latest figures represent only around 0.5% of this."

Aside from the fact that the IAEA is an Agency not an Authority, the important fact to recognise is not that the percentage uncertainty is less than 0.5 per cent, but the actual quantity of the plutonium - a potent nuclear explosive material- is around 30 kilogrammes.
The IAEAs 'significant quantity' to trigger security concerns of this nuclear material is 8 kgs  so more than three times that (around 10 nuclear bombs worth) are not accounted for.

As a member of the BNFL 'stakeholder dialogue' security working group, whose 140-page report was published on December 10 last year, I should emphasise the present problem is not one of safety, but security, safeguards and materials accountancy.

The final gathering of the BNFL stakeholder dialogue last October - before the dialogue is handed on to the new Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in April  was informed that BNFL has called in its sole commercial competitor, the French nuclear fuel fabricator, Cogéma, to assist in ironing out intractable operational problems with BNFLs own plutonium-mixed oxide (Mox) fuel production plant SMP (Sellafield Mox plant).

This is not a public perception problem, but a complex engineering difficulty. If the Mox plant could be made to work, it may in the long run recover its £350m investment, by being adapted to immobilise a significant proportion of the 100,000 kilogrammes of reprocessed plutonium stockpiled at Sellafield.

The fact that such a large surplus of this potent nuclear explosive remains without a long-term management solution remains an awkward political problem for ministers.
It also puts the present inability of BNFL, Sellafield's operators, to account for 30 kilogrammes into context.