A shipment of mixed uranium and plutonium oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel travelling from Japan to England has generated a storm of protest because of the safety risks it poses and the additional risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Two ships, the Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Teal, left Takahama in Japan on July 4 and are scheduled to arrive at the Sellafield nuclear site operated by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) in northern England in early August.

An anti-nuclear flotilla organised by Greenpeace, comprising more than 10 yachts and about 80 people from several countries, drew media attention to the MOX shipment and slowed it down as they passed through the Tasman Sea in mid-July.

The shipment is opposed by many governments worldwide. For example, the 78 governments represented at the Africa Caribbean and Pacific Summit denounced the shipments in a July 19 declaration and called for the immediate cessation of all nuclear shipments through their waters. These states are primarily concerned about the risk of accidents involving nuclear shipments, and inadequate liability and compensation arrangements in the event of accidents.

The MOX being shipped to Sellafield is the very same MOX that was shipped in the opposite direction in 1999. The plutonium in the MOX was produced in power reactors in Japan as a by-product of electricity generation, it was separated from spent reactor fuel in European reprocessing plants and then converted into MOX fuel pellets. A scandal erupted as the MOX shipment was approaching Japan in 1999, when it was revealed that BNFL had failed to properly carry out safety checks on the MOX and had falsified safety records. Hence the return of the MOX to Sellafield, with BNFL also agreeing to pay many millions of dollars in compensation to the Japanese nuclear utility Kansai Electric.

That scandal is one reason for the controversy surrounding the current shipment, but there are many others. The shipment poses significant environmental and public health risks. The two ships are described as “floating terrorist targets” by Greenpeace. George Monbiot described them  as “a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator” in the June 11 UK Guardian.

The safety risks arise not only from the nuclear shipments themselves but also from the web in which MOX is embroiled:
- shipments of highly-radioactive spent fuel from Japan to Europe;
- reprocessing plants in the UK and France, which account for over 97% per cent of all the radioactive discharges from all nuclear facilities in Europe according to Greenpeace, and are the subject of huge controversy including opposition from a number of European governments; and
- the shipment of not only MOX but also separated plutonium dioxide and high-level radioactive wastes from Europe to Japan following reprocessing.

To date, not a single gram of plutonium returned from Europe to Japan - whether in the form of plutonium dioxide (slated for use in ‘fast breeder’ power reactors) or MOX - has been used to generate electricity. In other words, the huge expense, the safety risks, the weapons proliferation risks, and the international political controversy, have all been for nothing.

If and when MOX is used in power reactors in Japan, it will be more dangerous than conventional uranium fuel, adding yet another unnecessary safety hazard. If and when MOX is used in power reactors in Japan, it will generate highly-radioactive spent fuel and nuclear corporations will be faced with the same problem they began with - mounting stockpiles of radioactive waste, for which no long-term storage or disposal options exist.

The plutonium fuel ‘cycle’ - more a circus than a fuel cycle to date - makes no economic sense whatsoever. That point is now being made by some nuclear power corporations, such as British Energy, which are attempting to extract themselves from reprocessing contracts. It is several times more expensive to produce MOX than conventional uranium fuel.

Weapons proliferation

Shipments of spent fuel and high-level wastes arising from reprocessing contain an extremely high inventory of radioactivity and pose significant environmental and public health risks. Plutonium shipments (both separated plutonium and MOX) are less radioactive but pose a much greater risk of contributing to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Separated plutonium poses the greatest risk in relation to weapons proliferation, but MOX is not much better - plutonium can fairly easily be extracted from MOX for use in weapons. The proliferation risks are far greater for MOX and for separated plutonium than for conventional uranium fuel which does not contain plutonium and could not be used for nuclear weapons.

The MOX shipment currently travelling to the UK contains about 250 kilograms of plutonium, enough for about 50 nuclear weapons. Many more shipments are planned.

In addition to the risk of the plutonium being used in nuclear fission weapons, all radioactive materials can be used in ‘dirty’ radiation bombs (which use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive substances).

Japan’s growing stockpile of plutonium - which currently exceeds five tonnes, plus a much greater volume of Japanese-origin plutonium in Europe - has been a source of considerable tension with north-east Asian states such as South Korea and China. All the more so when senior Japanese politicians talk up the prospect of Japan developing a nuclear weapons capability, as they do from time to time. This nuclear sabre-rattling would ring hollow without the plutonium stockpiles derived from the ostensibly ‘peaceful’ plutonium fuel cycle.

Confidential documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that, since the early 1990s, the US government has been warned by its embassy in Tokyo that Japan's plutonium program heightens the risk of weapons proliferation in north-east Asia. A cable from an embassy official to then US secretary of state Warren Christopher in 1993 posed the questions: "Can Japan expect that if it embarks on a massive plutonium recycling program that Korea and other nations would not press ahead with reprocessing programs? Would not the perception of Japan being awash in plutonium and possessing leading edge rocket technology create anxiety in the region?"

MOX madness

Providing a pretence of a ‘solution’ to radioactive waste problems is a significant driving force behind the growth of a ‘civilian’ plutonium fuel cycle. The primary interest of nuclear power corporations, including those in Japan, is to dump spent reactor fuel somewhere else, on someone else, rather than managing it themselves. Reprocessing plants serve this purpose by serving as de facto storage sites.

Also driving the attempt to expand the plutonium fuel cycle are corporations such as BNFL and Cogema with a direct interest in the expansion of reprocessing and/or MOX production. BNFL wants to protect and expand both its reprocessing operations and its recently-approved MOX production plant at Sellafield.

George Monbiot attempted to explain BNFL’s ‘logic’ in the June 11 UK Guardian: “It must defend those markets [for MOX] in order to justify the government's decision in October to allow the MOX plant at Sellafield in Cumbria to open. The MOX plant opened in order to make sense of the reprocessing operations at Sellafield, which extract plutonium and uranium from nuclear waste. The reprocessing was permitted in order to provide a reason for Sellafield's continued existence. Sellafield exists in order to keep the British nuclear power programme running.

“The British nuclear power programme exists because - well, it exists because it exists. There may once have been a reason, but if so it has been lost in the mists of time. Britain's nuclear policy, in other words, is like the old woman who swallowed a fly. Every solution is worse than the problem it was supposed to address. Every new justification ratchets up the probability of a major nuclear accident or breach of security. Yet the programme's institutional momentum carries all before it.”

Australia’s complicity

Apart from the Japanese government, the Australian government is possibly the only government in the Asia Pacific region to support shipments of MOX, plutonium and high-level waste through the region.

Thousands of tonnes of Australian-origin natural uranium, enriched uranium, depleted uranium and plutonium are held by Japan (whether currently in Japan or in Europe).

Australian governments have some control over this ‘Australian Obligated Nuclear Material’. Japan needs permission from Australia before it can conduct nuclear transfers - or processes such as reprocessing - involving AONM. At least some, perhaps all, of the shipments of plutonium, MOX and high-level waste between Japan and Europe have contained AONM.

Successive Australian governments have granted permission for plutonium separation and shipments, in large part because of the commercial interests of uranium mining companies operating in Australia. This was hinted at by the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1998 when it announced the government's extension of approval for plutonium transfers: "The European Union is an important provider of nuclear fuel services for countries purchasing Australian uranium and Japan is a major market for Australian uranium exports."

In 1992, the Labor government consented to a shipment of plutonium from France to Japan. The government claimed that Japan would only receive enough separated plutonium for use in its fast breeder program - which has never progressed beyond the experimental stage and has been dogged by serious accidents.

Foreign minister Gareth Evans said in 1992 that the government "would not support the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan or any other non-nuclear weapon state." But successive governments, Labor and Coalition, have continued to endorse plutonium and MOX transfers even as Japan’s plutonium stockpile mounts.

According to Greenpeace, "This [MOX] trade places a special burden on the South Pacific region which, thanks to Australia's pro-nuclear lobbying and secret dealings will be viewed as the path of least resistance for most of the cargoes to travel through. The secretive nature of the Japanese plutonium trade - consented to in closed negotiations by Australian officials (as well as Canberra's complicity in keeping the route secret from the regional community) - exemplifies the undemocratic way in which the Australian government engages in nuclear matters."

Australian governments have lobbied members of the Pacific Islands Forum (formerly the South Pacific Forum) - the sixteen-member grouping that includes Australia, New Zealand and smaller states - in an attempt to weaken their opposition to nuclear shipments.

In addition to the commercial interests of uranium mining companies, successive Australian governments have supported nuclear shipments between Europe and Japan because of the US-Australian military-nuclear alliance. A ban on shipments of ‘civilian’ plutonium and radioactive wastes could strengthen opposition to US nuclear-armed warships in the region.

Yet another reason for the behaviour of successive Australian governments is that they have sent several shipments of spent fuel from the reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney to the US and Europe for storage or processing. Many more such shipments are planned in the coming years and decades, in addition to return shipments of wastes arising from the processing of the spent fuel. A leaked memo from the Australian delegation to the 1993 South Pacific Forum meeting explicitly linked Australia's support for nuclear shipments passing through the region with the government’s plans to export spent fuel from Lucas Heights.

The world now faces two imminent nuclear threats. The first is the stand-off between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers vacillating on the brink of war. The second arises from a commercial deal between the United Kingdom and Japan.

At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of Takahama to collect enough plutonium to make 17 atomic bombs. Although the transport of nuclear material within Japan has been halted during the World Cup, as there are not enough police to guarantee its safety, the power behind this shipment permits no such considerations. The plutonium will be transported 18,000 miles through some of the roughest and most dangerous seas on earth back to Britain, where it will be repacked and returned to Japan.

The security of the shipment has been described by the definitive defence briefing, Jane's Foreign Report, as "totally inadequate". Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters carrying the material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator. And they are doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with a politics which is as mad and dangerous as their mission.

The cargo they will collect is a consignment of mixed plutonium and uranium oxides - Mox for short - which was delivered by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd to Japan, where it was to have been used as reactor fuel. The Japanese discovered that BNFL had falsified its records, and demanded that the company retrieve it.

BNFL, which is a state-owned company, must comply if it is not to lose future markets for its Mox fuel. It must defend those markets in order to justify the government's decision in October to allow the Mox plant at Sellafield in Cumbria to open. The Mox plant opened in order to make sense of the reprocessing operations at Sellafield, which extract plutonium and uranium from nuclear waste. The reprocessing was permitted in order to provide a reason for Sellafield's continued existence. Sellafield exists in order to keep the British nuclear power programme running. The British nuclear power programme exists because - well, it exists because it exists. There may once have been a reason, but if so it has been lost in the mists of time.

Britain's nuclear policy, in other words, is like the old woman who swallowed a fly. Every solution is worse than the problem it was supposed to address. Every new justification ratchets up the probability of a major nuclear accident or breach of security. Yet the programme's institutional momentum carries all before it.

This programme can sustain itself only until the public grasps the two unavoidable facts of nuclear power. The first is that there is, as yet, no safe means of disposing of the wastes it produces. The second is that even if one were found, the monitoring and safe management of these wastes requires 250,000 years of political and economic stability. No government on earth can guarantee five.

It is the British government's attempts to prevent us from grasping these truths which now expose the world to the threat of both nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Reprocessing has bequeathed to the UK the biggest plutonium stockpile in the world: 60 tonnes of our own, and 10 tonnes of other people's. The entire stock, as the government's security review board discovered in January, is stored at Sellafield in buildings scarcely more robust than garden sheds. Thirteen kilogrammes of plutonium is enough to make an atom bomb.

Turning this plutonium into Mox is presented as the solution to proliferation. Unhappily, it introduces four further problems. The first is that the Mox process generates still more nuclear waste. The second is that, like every other aspect of the nuclear industry, it costs far more to produce, when all expenses are taken into account, than it can ever recoup. The third is that hardly anyone wants to buy it, as most nuclear power stations use the safer and much cheaper low-enriched uranium. The fourth is that the only certain market is on the other side of the world.

Japan has its own warped institutional reasons for engaging in this trade. Its fast-breeder programme, which was to have used the plutonium extracted from the waste it sent to Sellafield for reprocessing, collapsed after an accident in 1995. But it remains contractually bound to BNFL to reimport its plutonium. So it has asked the company to turn it into Mox, which it can use (at considerable hazard) in its light water reactors.

The dirty bombs BNFL is about to launch on the high seas will be, it hopes, among the first of many. To avoid creating the impression that this freight might possibly be dangerous, Japan has insisted that the ships have no military escort. They have weapons on board, but neither the radar-guided anti-missile defences nor the speed required to evade an attack by a fast boat.

To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to attack the USS Cole, equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the freighters. The Mox fuel is stored in containers which can resist temperatures of 800C for 30 minutes. Fires on ships, as the Ecologist magazine has pointed out, can burn for 24 hours at 1,000C.

Stealing the material is a matter of overwhelming the 26 British policemen on board and blowing the hatches off, a task well within the capabilities of several terrorist groups and all of the world's aspirant nuclear states. The plutonium and uranium can be separated with chemical processes less taxing than the manufacture of designer drugs.

So the UK and Japan are investing billions in security, and billions in insecurity. Neither government dares challenge the nuclear monster it has created. Using taxpayers' money to charm, cajole and threaten both the government and the taxpayer, this self-serving, self-reproducing industry, which makes nothing which could not be made more cheaply elsewhere, has secured such resources, such concessions, such flat contradictions of policy that we have ended up sponsoring the major threat to our own security.

When power resides with private companies, the British government will nest with them and raise their young. When it resides with a state-owned monster which would not have looked out of place in Brezhnev's Russia, the same government will happily mate with that monster. One moment it will warn of such threats to our security that the police must have access to our email accounts, protesters must be classified as terrorists and Afghanistan must be bombed; the next it will dismiss such concerns as nonsense in order to ship plutonium round the world in civilian freighters.

The nuclear industry must be destroyed before it destroys us. We must, in other words, wrench political power away from nuclear power.

London - On the sixteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, two armed British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) freighters left Barrow-in-Furness in northern England this morning, setting the clock ticking on the most controversial nuclear shipment in history.

Escorted from the harbour by police inflatables, the vessels are bound for Japan. On their return voyage from Japan to Sellafield, England, they plan to transport enough plutonium to build 50 nuclear bombs. The return of the material, a mixture of plutonium-uranium oxide (MOX), to the UK would be in defiance of both international and UK law.

As Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Shaun Burnie said, "They could not have chosen a more fitting date to remind the international community of the arrogance and dangerous risk-taking of the nuclear industry”.

Greenpeace has written to the UK government and to BNFL this week to outline its case that the transport from Japan would be unlawful and in breach of international agreements. The return shipment would also violate an undertaking given by the UK government to the International Law of the Sea Tribunal in November 2001. Following a challenge against the newly approved Sellafield MOX Plant by the Irish government to the Tribunal, the UK told the Tribunal that no imports of MOX fuel associated with the operations of the Sellafield MOX Plant would go ahead before October 2002.

The two vessels, the Pacific Pintail and the Pacific Teal, one acting as an armed escort, the other carrying the plutonium, would face a barrage of international opposition if they make their global journey, the environmental organisation predicted. Demonstrations are planned in Ireland today. The ships plan to pick up the plutonium MOX material at Takahama in Japan in June, and return it to the UK in early August.

The material is being returned to the UK solely because, after being shipped as fuel to Japan in 1999, it was revealed that the manufacturer, BNFL, had falsified critical quality control data during its production.

"The industry is creating a floating terrorist target and a dangerous hazard simply in order for BNFL to be able to get new contracts with its Japanese customers. This would result in yet more shipments of plutonium fuel, perhaps as many as 80 over the next decade," Burnie said.

The nuclear industry is keeping secret the route of the proposed June shipment, but is likely to take one of three possible routes from Japan to the UK. Caribbean countries have already this year voiced their "implacable opposition" to nuclear shipments through their region and Latin American countries have also voiced protest. During a shipment of MOX to Japan through the Tasman Sea last year, a flotilla of small yachts sailed from Australia and New Zealand to oppose the PNTL vessels. The flotilla protest was supported by the New Zealand government.

"BNFL lied to the world about the falsification of safety data; countries along the routes have every right to be concerned that a company with such a dangerous and discreditable history should be in charge of the safety of this shipment," Burnie said.

There are also serious concerns about the safety of the shipment, which should also have prevented the PNTL vessel leaving. The cask in which the plutonium is to be transported has not yet been licensed by the Japanese authorities. An earlier licence was revoked when it was discovered that levels of the single largest source of radioactivity in the cask, the radioisotope Plutonium-241, will be up to twice as high as originally estimated.

"This shipment must be abandoned before it is too late. When this BNFL MOX fuel arrived in Japan in 1999, Japan was experiencing its worst ever nuclear accident at Tokai-mura. On the present schedule, the plutonium shipment will take place right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup in Japan, in spite of the enormous diversion of security resources this will take. The nuclear industry in the UK and Japan clearly has not learned from its mistakes, and are showing total disregard for public safety, the environment and international security," Burnie concluded.