BNFL's plan to dump 75,000 tonnes of high-level waste in Australia <www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/pangea.html>.
Jim Green
April 2000
These articles discuss some of the scandals surrounding British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. These scandals are of relevance in Australia for several reasons:
Jim Green
April 5, 2000.
The future of the Sellafield plant, operated by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) in northern England, is in jeopardy following safety lapses, cover-ups, an act of sabotage by a BNFL employee, economic problems, and growing public and governmental opposition in Europe and Scandinavia. Sellafield manufactures nuclear fuel rods, reprocesses irradiated (spent) nuclear fuel from nine countries and treats and stores radioactive wastes.
Last year, a scandal erupted when it was revealed that BNFL staff had failed to carry out safety checks on plutonium/uranium reactor fuel (MOX) which was sent to Japan. Japan's ministry of international trade and industry and the Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) have demanded that Britain take back the MOX shipment which had not been properly checked. BNFL and KEPCO have yet to resolve whether the MOX will be returned or what compensation will be paid by BNFL. Japan has banned all shipments from Sellafield, and the future of BNFL’s contracts with Japan, the company’s largest customer, are in doubt.
BNFL claimed the falsification of data was a quality control issue not a safety issue. However the March 7 Independent cites BNFL sources stating that management allowed substandard MOX pellets to be certified as safe, although they would have failed a standard safety check, in order to boost production of MOX.
On March 7, the chief of the British Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) admitted that he was not told of changes to the way BNFL checks the specification of MOX pellets, and that he first learnt of the changes in the Independent. The scandal surrounding the failure to carry out MOX safety checks was also a secret until exposed by The Independent in September.
According to KEPCO, BNFL has also admitted that two MOX fuel rods were rejected during the manufacturing process because they contained screws and pieces of concrete.
A NII report completed in February concluded that Sellafield suffered from “systematic management failures”. The report led to the resignation of BNFL’s chief executive, John Taylor, who will depart with an expected pay?out of about 300,000 pounds. No such luck for five other BNFL employees who have been sacked as a result of the MOX scandal.
Political fall-out spreads
In February it was revealed that the falsification of MOX safety data had been taking place for at least three years. MOX sent to Germany in 1996, and Switzerland in 1997, is known to have been subject to falsified safety checks. A German reactor using suspect MOX fuel has been shut down.
Switzerland, Sweden and Germany have joined Japan in suspending irradiated fuel reprocessing and/or MOX contracts with BNFL. Following a BNFL press release which claimed that Germany had agreed to lift its ban on importing reprocessed nuclear fuel from Sellafield, the German environment ministry said it had done no such thing and accused BNFL of lying. “BNFL's press release is as reliable as its forged test results,” the ministry said.
British Energy, the privatised nuclear power utility which accounts for a third of Sellafield's reprocessing contracts, is considering shifting from reprocessing to waste storage and plans to renegotiate its contracts with BNFL. It is far more expensive for British Energy to reprocess irradiated fuel than to store it, and it has no use for the recovered plutonium and uranium.
A coalition of more than 40 environmental and anti-nuclear groups in the United States is demanding that the US government suspend nuclear waste reprocessing contracts with BNFL and bar the company from competing for US business in future. The immediate target of the group is BNFL's contract for a reprocessing plant in Idaho, which is currently on the desk of the US energy secretary, Bill Richardson. BNFL has at least five US contracts, worth about 6.2 billion pounds, to clean up nuclear weapons plants in the US. Richardson recently said that “business as usual is over with BNFL”.
A disaffected BNFL employee - whose identity has not yet been discovered - disabled arms on several robots in February. The robots are used to seal high-level liquid waste in molten glass, before cooling and burial in concrete for storage. The vitrification plant was closed for three days. British atomic police are fingerprinting suspects, and the unions are also attempting to find the culprit.
Ireland and Denmark have stepped up pressure for the complete closure of the Sellafield plant because of their long-standing concerns over radiation emissions from the plant. The Irish energy minister met his Danish counterpart on March 27 to formulate legal moves to ban waste discharges from Sellafield. They will put their demands to Scandinavian countries at a conference in Copenhagen in June. Five Scandinavian countries have demanded that Britain stop all radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea from Sellafield.
A report in the March 30 Guardian says, “The children of women who have worked in nuclear installations, according to a study by the National Radiological Protection Board, are 11 times more likely to contract cancer than the children of workers in non-radioactive industries. You can tell how close to Sellafield children live by the amount of plutonium in their teeth.”
Privatisation
The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate has admitted that its capacity to carry out routine inspections at BNFL nuclear facilities has been undermined by the extra requirements of preparation for privatisation of the company. It identified preparation for privatisation as a key reason for the “systematic management failures” at Sellafield.
The NII has given BNFL until mid April to develop a strategy to improve safety or risk the closure of some or all of its operations.
The Blair government wanted to privatise 49% of BNFL before the next election, which could take place during or before May 2002. While the push to privatise BNFL will continue, the British government announced on March 30 that privatisation will not occur before late 2002 at the earliest.
What future for BNFL?
Some of the commentary on BNFL in the British press reads like an obituary. A report in the March 30 Guardian states, “Analysts have been puzzling over why the industry should be collapsing so quickly. But the question we should surely be asking is how it has survived so long. ... The nuclear industry has been sustained only by government subsidies and opaque accounting.”
However, rumours of the industry’s death are premature. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in parliament on March 30 that he is “quite sure” that “BNFL can go back on a sound and secure footing for the future.”
Notwithstanding strong support from Blair and others in the British government, and even stronger support from the British Conservative Party (which condemned the deferral of privatisation plans), the future of Sellafield remains uncertain.
Public and political opposition, combined with poor economic prospects, are likely to result in a major downgrading or cessation of BNFL’s MOX production facilities (a pilot plant and a 300 million pound plant which has yet to begin operating) and the 1.8 billion pound Thorp reprocessing plant, which began operating in the mid 1990s.
The Thorp reprocessing plant and the yet-to-be-used MOX plant were built before BNFL had obtained a licence to operate them. According to the March 30 Guardian, BNFL calculated that, after spending 2.1 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money, the government would not reject its schemes. “When governments breed white elephants,” the Guardian’s reporter George Monbiot said, “the public gets trampled.”
BNFL has 10,500 employees - about 6,000 of them working at Sellafield - and an annual turnover of about two billion pounds. Major staff cuts are likely in the coming years, whether resulting from government directions to scale-back BNFL’s operations, the failure to secure business, or rationalisations associated with the planned privatisation.
An alternative future for BNFL and Sellafield is possible. A petition tabled in the British House of Commons calls on the Blair government to direct BNFL to become “a world leader in nuclear clean-up, decommissioning, waste management and plutonium immobilisation technologies”, and to renegotiate current contracts for reprocessing irradiated fuel into contracts for dry storage.
Nuclear weapons
A key issue is weapons proliferation. Reprocessing increases both the quantity of weapons-usable plutonium and the opportunities for stealing it. The MOX industry is heavily reliant on reprocessing to produce plutonium.
If the UK were to end domestic reprocessing and MOX production, it would then be in a position to pressure France (the other major European reprocessor) to do the same, and also to work towards an international fissile materials cut-off treaty. Britain has already accumulated enough nuclear waste to build 5,000 bombs according to a report in the March 30 Guardian.
The British government announced on March 29 that the 2.2 billion pound contract to produce Britain's Trident nuclear warheads at Aldermaston, awarded to a BNFL-led consortium in December, would go ahead as planned despite the recent scandals. The ministry of defence had faced calls to delay its decision until the department of trade and industry published its inquiry into Sellafield on 15 April. A report in the March 30 Independent said, “The decision to give the go-ahead was seen at Westminster as a move to reassure BNFL's overseas customers that it has the confidence of the Government to handle its nuclear weapons, including the warheads for Trident missiles.“
On March 26 , the Observer revealed the contents of internal government documents which state that BNFL wants to get rid of 1,400 out of the 4,300 staff at the Aldermaston plant. Local MPs, residents, trade unions and anti-nuclear groups believe the job losses will compromise safety at Aldermaston.
The Observer quoted from the minutes of a March 5 board meeting of the British environment agency, which said, “Recently there have been a number of incidents at BNFL sites which have led the Agency to question seriously the competence of BNFL's management of radioactive waste and its commitment to environmental protection.”
For the last seven years, Aldermaston has been run by the Anglo-American consortium Hunting Brae, which has cut 2,000 jobs since 1993. The British environment agency recently prosecuted the plant operators for illegal radioactive discharges into the river Thames.
Jim Green
April 12, 2000
The problems facing
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd continue to mount on a weekly basis.
On April 2 it was
revealed that four workers at BNFL’s Sellafield plant in north-west England
were sacked for forging entry passes.
The workers had been given limited clearance to enter specific low-risk parts of the plant on foot, but altered them to gain car access to more sensitive areas. BNFL management claimed the men had forged passes simply because they wanted to get their cars into the plant. However, that rationale was disputed by some BNFL employees who said the men already had parking spaces by the main gate, from which regular buses ferry employees around the site.
BNFL has also had to deal with a critical report from the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency which was leaked to Greenpeace. “Figures in the report show that ending nuclear reprocessing would significantly reduce discharges of nuclear waste into the North-East Atlantic region, and cut doses of radiation to the public”, Greenpeace said.
Greenpeace UK’s senior scientist, Helen Wallace, said Sellafield discharges eight million litres of nuclear waste daily into the Irish sea, and the seabed in the vicinity of the plant is so radioactive it should be classified as nuclear waste. Wallace said health data showed excess levels of leukaemia among children near Sellafield and around a similar nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague in France.
BNFL claims that reprocessing is energy-efficient “recycling” of nuclear waste. However, a critique of the NEA report by Gordon MacKerron, head of the Energy Unit at the University of Sussex, concluded that very little recycling actually takes place because using plutonium extracted from nuclear waste to make new fuel is uneconomic.
“The NEA's own figures show an 80 percent higher dose from so-called recycling than storage. In fact the difference is even higher, because very little recycling actually takes place, or is ever likely to”, MacKerron said.
Jim Green
April 19, 2000
British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), already punch-drunk from a series of scandals in recent months, faced another crisis on April 13 after a large number of confidential memos were leaked.
One incident revealed by the leaked memos concerned Mildred Fox, an Irish MP who had written to the British government calling for BNFL’s Sellafield plant to be closed because of radioactive emissions into the Irish Sea. Fox was told that her fears were “unfounded” - but she was not told that BNFL’s draft reply was included almost verbatim in the letter sent to her in the name of the British energy minister. Moreover the energy minister’s letter contained a paragraph lifted from a BNFL brochure.
A BNFL manager noted in one of the leaked memos, “In reply to an Irish (MP), we believe that it is important to be assertive and not to be appearing to justify or apologise for the UK nuclear industry.” Fox told the Channel 4 programme Dispatches, “I find it very offensive and condescending. You can get technical information (from BNFL) but you don't advise a minister on how to reply to a particular race of people”.
The leaked memos also reveal BNFL’s plan to “stuff” Michael Meacher, the British environment minister. Labour backbench MPs were to be urged to lobby against Meacher’s plans for a public inquiry into discharges into the sea from Sellafield. A memo from BNFL’s public relations director, Rupert Wilcox-Baker, suggests that MPs be asked “to stuff Meacher and the public inquiry”.
Another memo revealed that BNFL and a government department were considering asking Jewish community leaders to try to influence Rudi Vis, a Labour backbencher. Vis, described as “aggressive and old Labour” in a BNFL memo, ran a successful campaign to stop trains carrying nuclear waste from parking overnight in residential areas in north London.
BNFL staff also deliberately “buried” information about plans to increase the speed of trains carrying nuclear waste through populated areas from 45 to 60 miles per hour. BNFL, in consultation with the department of trade and industry, drew up a public statement in case the media and campaigners started to ask questions. The only reference to the plan to increase train speed was the comment that “there will be some operational differences” to the trains.
Another leaked memo reveals that the department of trade and industry encouraged BNFL to keep quiet about its failure to comply with reporting requirements on accidents.
This list of Guardian Observer article headlines gives an idea of the range of problems facing BNFL in the past 1-2 years.. To go to the Guardian / Observer nuclear site, click here.
WISE News Communique
#559
December 7, 2001
<www.antenna.nl/wise>
The UK's response to critics of the Sellafield MOX Plant, aging nuclear reactors and plans for new reactors is becoming apparent. Following revelations that BNFL is technically bankrupt, the government announced that a new Liabilities Management Authority is to take over its liabilities, including Sellafield and the Magnox reactors. Critics who divulge details of nuclear security, nuclear transports or uranium enrichment will risk up to 7 years in jail under a new law. In short, it is full steam ahead for this Titanic of an industry, and the question is, which iceberg will it hit first...
(559.5347) WISE Amsterdam - Faced with revelations that one of its leading players is bankrupt, with installations described as the most dangerous in Western Europe which enable terrorists to hold the world to ransom, any normal industry would be on its knees. However, the UK's nuclear industry is not a normal industry.
Liabilities Management Authority
An internal review of BNFL's waste management strategy indicated that existing intermediate-level waste urgently needs to be removed from its existing, aging storage, and must be treated and re-packaged. However, as soon as BNFL endorsed this new strategy on 28 November, its liabilities rose by 1.9 billion pounds (US$2.65 billion), making the company technically bankrupt since its liabilities now exceed its assets by 1.7 billion pounds (US$2.37 billion).
It was soon clear that state-owned BNFL would not simply be allowed to go bankrupt, as might happen to a private-sector utility. The same day, Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, announced that a Liabilities Management Authority (LMA) is to take over the liabilities of both BNFL and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Because of the principle that assets and their associated liabilities should be kept together, the new authority will take over entire sites such as Sellafield and the Magnox reactors. The management of these sites will then be contracted out. The previous site owners (BNFL or UKAEA) will initially get the contracts to manage the sites and the clean-up operations.
Sellafield MOX Plant
One of the installations to be transferred to the LMA is the Sellafield MOX Plant. This means that the same installation whose start-up the Government considered "justified" on 3 October (see WISE News Communique 555.5319, "UK: Sellafield MOX Plant gets go-ahead") will now be taken away from BNFL as a "liability"! Patricia Hewitt explained that "it is important that Sellafield continues to be managed as a single, unified site". Nevertheless, it seems crazy that the Government considers the start-up to be economically justified as required under Article 6 of Euratom directive 96/29, and yet includes the plant amongst BNFL's liabilities.
Meanwhile, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has given its ruling in the case that the Irish government brought against the UK (see WISE News Communique 557.5338, "Irish challenges to Sellafield MOX Plant"). The UK government wanted to stop proceedings by claiming that the matter was outside the tribunal's jurisdiction. The judges unanimously rejected this argument, saying that the dispute is valid under UN rules. Hearings will therefore go ahead, and are expected to begin in early 2002.
The Irish government had requested that the tribunal issue "provisional measures" - a form of injunction - to prevent the plant starting up and stop any related transports by ship. The tribunal refused to do this. Instead, they ordered the UK and Ireland to negotiate over the matter and report back to the tribunal by 17 December. In the meantime, they called upon the countries to do nothing "which might aggravate the dispute". BNFL interpreted this as meaning that they can still start the MOX plant on 20 December as planned, though Greenpeace disagrees.
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have appealed against the High Court's 15 November ruling in favor of the UK government (see WISE News Communique 558, "In Brief"). The appeal court's judgement is expected on 7 November, just after this News Communique goes to press.
Sellafield also succeeded in uniting all factions in Northern Ireland, where a 4 December motion in the Northern Ireland Assembly calling for the closure of the entire Sellafield site was passed unanimously. Northern Ireland's environment minister, Sam Foster, said the UK government had not consulted him on the decision to press ahead with the MOX plant.
Magnox: dangerous and uneconomic
The Liabilities Management Authority is also to take over the Magnox nuclear power plants. Greenpeace described these reactors as the oldest operating commercial reactors in the world. However, their economic performance is so bad that it is questionable whether they deserve to be called "commercial". This is mainly because of the huge quantities of nuclear waste they produce. This waste is reprocessed in Sellafield's B205 Magnox plant, which is responsible for a large proportion of Sellafield's radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea.
In a 1999 report, the Austrian Ecology Institute ranked the Magnox reactors as the most dangerous reactors in Western Europe. This recently caused controversy since they ranked these reactors more dangerous than Temelin. The report used a very basic ratings system, and Magnox reactors scored badly because of their age and lack of a containment building. (See also Section 4.2, "Whose safety standards?" in WISE News Communique 493/4, "Agenda 2000: Will it increase nuclear safety in Eastern Europe?)
A recent example of the problems of these old reactors was a recent report on Oldbury, which was leaked to the BBC. Oldbury has several problems, including severe radiolytic corrosion of the graphite core (see WISE News Communique 543.5246, " Implications of BNFL abandoning Magrox fuel"). However according to the BBC, the leaked report went one stage further, saying some parts of the core may have already failed. If this is true, cooling channels might be blocked, preventing control rods from shutting the reactor down in an emergency (see WISE News Communique 539.5224, " Wylfa - BNFL deny plan to use 'glowboys'".)
Using "anti-terrorist" measures to suppress protest
The terrorist attacks of 11 September have increased still further the risk of nuclear installations, but they also give a convenient excuse to suppress protest. The UK's Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill proposes a jail term of up to 7 years for anyone who discloses information which might "prejudice the security of any nuclear site or any nuclear material". This includes not just nuclear sites and material in the UK, but also "nuclear material anywhere in the world which is being transported to or from a nuclear site or on board a British ship".
Greenpeace UK said they were willing to risk imprisonment to keep the public informed about the dangers of nuclear waste transport, and published timetables of UK nuclear waste trains on their web site. The web site also includes a "nuclear ship spotter's guide" with photos of BNFL ships used for nuclear transports.
Under the proposed legislation, disclosing any information about uranium enrichment, or "any information or thing which is, or is likely to be, used in connection with the enrichment of uranium" may also result in up to 7 years in jail. Pakistan obtained uranium enrichment technology from Urenco Netherlands by means of espionage, and Iraq obtained uranium enrichment equipment from Urenco Germany by theft and smuggling (see WISE News Communique 499/500.4932, "Uranium enrichment: No capacity growth in 20 years"). Clearly the UK government intends to prevent a similar incident at Urenco's UK plant at Capenhurst - a plant that, coincidentally, is also to be taken over by the Liabilities Management Authority.
Which iceberg will the nuclear "Titanic" hit first?
Despite all these problems - huge liabilities, dangerous, uneconomic installations, and new security fears following 11 September - the UK nuclear industry continues full steam ahead. Plans for building new reactors (see WISE News Communique 553.5305, "UK: Energy review to be pre-empted by Scottish reactor plan?") have certainly not been scrapped in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. The question is, which iceberg will this nuclear "Titanic" hit first: a major accident, a terrorist attack, or a government that is responsible enough to refuse yet another request for a financial bailout. We can only hope that it is the last of these three.
Sources:
- Hansard, 28 November
2001
- Web site www.greenpeace.org.uk
- ENS, 4 December
2001
- BBC, 27 and 28 November
and 4 December 2001
- sterreichisches
kologie Institut, press release 28 November 2001
- Greenpeace UK press
release, 19 November 2001
- Reuters, 6 December
2001