ENGLAND: British Nuclear fooled again

The problems facing British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) continue to mount. 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 workers had forged passes 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 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) 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 each day into the Irish Sea. 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 takes place because using plutonium extracted from nuclear waste to make new fuel is uneconomic.

“The NEA's own figures show an 80% 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.

BY JIM GREEN

Tools

• Bookmark This Page
• Print This Page