Magazine Issue 2 - Winter 1996
Corporation Without a Cause... BRITISH NUCLEAR FUELS

If you had only seen their television advertising you could be forgiven for thinking that BNFL Plc spends its vast budget on building virtual reality simulations of sheep dog trials and teaching yoga to robots. Alas the truth is somewhat less inspiring. Story by Chris Grimshaw.

BNFL's principal activities are the design, manufacture and reprocessing of nuclear fuels. It operates a number of sites around the UK, including a solid waste storage facility at Drigg and the oldest industrial scale nuclear power station in the world, the notorious Calder Hall at Sellafield - or The Embarassment Formerly Known as Windscale. This magnificent Cumbrian tourist attraction is arguably the dirtiest nuclear installation in the world. It is here that hundreds of tonnes of nuclear waste are stored and reprocessed each year.

The Sellafield plant's environmental record is an unhappy one. In its 44 year history it has seen nearly 1000 nuclear accidents1. According to Greenpeace its discharges have made the Irish Sea the most radioactively polluted sea on the planet, and by 1990 it was still releasing more radioactivity into the environment than any other nuclear establishment. Whilst emissions have been drastically reduced since the 60s and 70s, the situation is still appalling. In 1983, 25 miles of Cumbrian beach had to be closed for six months due to a radioactive leak discovered by Greenpeace and members of the public. Even though members of the public were contaminated BNFL was fined only £10,000 with £60,000 costs. In 1986 plutonium mist escaped into the atmosphere contaminating 11 workers, and forcing an Amber Alert. In 1992, 6 gallons of plutonium nitrate was leaked, halting reprocessing for several months.

In the reprocessing operation spent fuel rods are dissolved in nitric acid and separated into uranium, plutonium, and liquid 'high level' waste. The uranium and plutonium can then be recycled as nuclear fuel. Much of the waste is stored on site at Sellafield and then vitrified but a great deal is pumped into the Irish sea in dilute form, millions of gallons every day. Sellafield also produces vast quantites of gaseous waste. The legal maximum discharge of krypton-85 gas from Sellafield is 350,000 TeraBecquerels of radioactivity every year. The radioactivity released by the Chernobyl accident totalled 1,850,000 TBq, just five times more. The problem with reprocessing is that in diluting waste its volume is hugely increased, thus increasing the chances of some of it escaping. There is a much simpler alternative however, known as dry storage. It involves simply storing spent fuel and other waste products in overground facilities where it can be monitored and, if necessary moved. No further hazardous wastes need be created and released into the environment.

In March 1994, two years and two public 'consultations' later than intended (see inset), THORP - The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant entered service, the largest addition to Sellafield's facilities in its history. It was designed to process the waste from Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors and Pressurised Water Reactors that had been accumulating in Sellafield's cooling ponds for years. Only one year later in 1995, many of its operations had to be suspended for six weeks after a spillage of nitric acid. THORP is still not past the commissioning phase with emmissions set to rise drastically by the time it is working to design capacity.

The original justification for THORP given in the late 70s comprised three main reasons:
To recover uranium and plutonium from the spent fuel. To make profits. To manage nuclear waste as safely as possible.

Since then however the world has come into a glut of uranium, whilst reprocessing has gone way over budget and become highly uneconomical. THORP was planned to cost £300 million but ended up costing £1.8 billion. Fast breeder reactors, the proposed users of recovered plutonium, have long since been abandoned internationally as unworkable. D. Fisher, Assistant Director General of the IAEA, said in 1992, "We've got plutonium coming out of our ears... and we're racking our brains as to how to get rid of the stuff." Perhaps this is why they have now invented MOX - mixed oxide fuel - a lethal mixture of plutonium and uranium that can be used as fuel in conventional nuclear power stations. The only other use for plutonium is to make atomic bombs, recently judged to be illegal under international law.

Even the USA is keen to see the trade in it stopped but BNFL and the British government seem quite oblivious to the problem of plutonium proliferation. An atomic bomb can be constructed with as little as 4kg of it, yet by 2010 Japan, one of BNFL's largest customers will have accumulated a stockpile of 80 or 90 tonnes, and by the 2020s, more plutonium than presently exists in all the nuclear warheads in the world4. That plutonium has to travel half way around the world by ship. Clearly BNFL's reprocessing work is unnecessarily endangering world security.

So what is the purpose of reprocessing nuclear waste when it can be more cheaply and safely kept in 'dry storage'? Asked to justify the practice of reprocessing nuclear waste, John Barber a spokesperson for BNFL said "that's a question you should ask our customers... BNFL does something which its customers ask it to do and which it is authorised to do by various regulatory authorities." Hardly the attitude you would expect from the company that took out television adverts to invite us all round to the Sellafield Exhibition Centre to see for ourselves (the centre was described by an engineer who once worked on THORP as, "the only source of genuine entertainment in the area"). In 1990, four years before THORP began operating, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee concluded that "There are no compelling waste management reasons to reprocess oxide fuel." And A. Johnson, BNFL executive director 1989, has said, "Reprocessing is not necessary. In fact one or two of our most important customers would love to cancel their contracts at the drop of a hat."

In researching most corporations it is easy to see the motive for their actions: profits. In the case of BNFL the very existence of real profits has been called into question. In spite of all its assurances to the contrary BNFL is a huge polluter of our air and our seas, and it seems unwilling even to justify its actions to the public. Its reprocessing operations seem to this writer to serve no purpose other than their own continued existence, not unlike the government that has been its doting patron for the last 17 years.

The Public Consultations
Between Nov '92 and Oct '93 the Secretary of State for the Environment, John Gummer, and The Minister of Agriculture, Gillian Shepherd, staged two public consultations over the planned THORP plant. In the first some 64,000 people and 104 local authorities objected, and 58,000 people called for a public inquiry. In the second, 42,000 objected and 12,000 called for a public inquiry. No public inquiry was ever held. Numerous concerned NGOs and several foreign governments also pressed for an inquiry.

Although THORP poses an environmental and public health risk to the whole world and proliferates world stocks of plutonium John Gummer dismissed the controversy. On 15 Dec '93 he said in the Commons, "I have decided not to hold a hearing or public inquiry, not least because we are satisfied that no issues have been raised which would cause us to conclude that further consultation or debate is necessary". They ruled out many of the objections made as "wider issues" and therefore irrelevant even though no legal basis exists for this classification.

The only benefits the ministers found were economic ones but even they did not see all of the available documentation, ignoring key reports such as the Touche Ross study of the economics of THORP. They simply accepted the arguments given by the DTI, BNFL's major shareholder and kept their inquiry behind closed doors.

Since 1986 it has been government policy to "justify" all new radioactive emissions from nuclear installations. Yet how can the ministers be said to have justified THORP, to have weighed its dubious benefits against its drawbacks, when most of the objections were arbitrarily declared irrelevant?

Open Government? Grrr, Rant!
My original intention for this feature was to focus on the air transport of radioactive materials, as new guidelines allowing the air transport of MOX fuel have recently been implemented (see CW1 p.5). MOX is now being flown around in aircraft in packaging that is crash rated to withstand only 30mph impacts.

I can, as a result of my inquiries, only offer this one piece of advice to those who wish to investigate the nuclear industry: be patient, very patient. All of the departments that I spoke to, including the Environment Agency, DTi, DoT, National Radiological Protection Board, AEA Technology, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Authority) amongst others, were either extremely suspicious, or gave me irrelevant information, although I was only asking for information supposedly in the public domain.

Don Martin of the DoT assured me that the packaging is perfectly safe, but, no, he didn't know of any scientific studies that backed up that assertion. The DoT is obliged to simply implement whatever new guidelines are drawn up by the IAEA. After several days of trying I managed to talk to a Mr. Gregoriev at the IAEA's public information office in Vienna (they had assured me that he was the man to speak to). Gregoriev told me at great length about how it had proved much safer to fly plutonium out of the Ukraine during some war there, which did not answer my question, and then told me that he didn't know much about the engineering of the packaging at all. He couldn't work his phone either. He told me I should speak to a certain Mr Webb, but he was never in.

The only organisation that did send me information about air transport was BNFL. Their fact sheet carried all sorts of assurances about the safety of these flights but was entirely evidence free.

British Nuclear Fuels PLC
• Hinton House, H341, Risley, Warrington, Cheshire, WA3 6AS. tel. 01925 832 000.
• 65 Buckingham Gate, London SW1. tel. 0171 222 9717.
• Public Info Centre, Cumberland House, 74 Lowther Street, Whitehaven. tel. 01946 591 800.