British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) has announced that the ship Pacific Crane (4800 tons) is to be towed from the Barrow-in-Furness Docks today Thursday 3rd June on an estimated five-day journey to a breakers yard at Rotterdam. Following the company’s announcement in 2002 (see CORE Briefing 12/02) that the ship was be taken out of service ‘having come to the end of its working life’, the Pacific Crane has been laid up at Barrow whilst decisions were made on her fate.
Owned and operated by Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd (PNTL), of which BNFL is a major shareholder, the Pacific Crane was built in 1980 by Swan Hunter at the Hebburn yard and undertook a number of contentious voyages during her lifetime, including the transport of plutonium dioxide to Japan from France. Shortly before she was withdrawn from service in 2002, a memo leaked from the office of Barrow-based shipping agents James Fisher and Sons suggested that corrosion of the Pacific Crane’s hull had been discovered during a ship survey carried out at Greenock by Lloyds.
BNFL’s Head of International Transport, Captain Malcolm Miller, said today that after arriving at Rotterdam ‘all hazardous material, including asbestos’, will be removed from the ship before she is ‘recycled’ at a specialist facility. Mindful of the outcry over the recent ‘Ghost ships to Teesside’ saga, he stressed that all necessary licences had been obtained and that “she certainly won’t be beached in India “. The work, which satisfies the Basel Convention, the International Maritime Organisation’s recommendations and the EU Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations, will be undertaken by Scheepsloperij Nederland BV at S-Gravendeel.
Along with five other Pacific ships, The Pacific Crane was built primarily for the Japanese run. It gained international notoriety on a number of occasions over the last decade, the best recorded being her re-flagging and re-naming as the Akatsuki Maru in 1992 for a shipment of more than a ton of plutonium powder from the French reprocessing plant at La Hague to Japan. Labelled The Doomsday Ship by the Daily Mirror newspaper, the specially converted ship with Japanese security guards on board was escorted from France to Japan by the armed Japanese coastguard cutter ‘Shikishima’ as protection against terrorist action. Ownership was transferred from PNTL to the then newly formed Japanese company Sea Bird Limited and the ship re-registered at Tokyo for the voyage.
Reconverted as the Pacific Crane, the ship subsequently undertook a number of trips from France carrying containers of vitrified high level waste for storage in Japan. In 1998, the ship suffered the ignominy of being holed in three places just above the waterline whilst berthed in Barrow when it was rammed by a floating accommodation barge which had broken free of its moorings in a gale (see CORE Briefing 17/98).
Earlier this year BNFL announced that the Pacific Swan, one year older than the Pacific Crane, was also to be laid up as it ‘had completed all its scheduled work’. The demise of both leaves just the Sandpiper, Teal and Pintail of the original Pacific fleet, the two latter ships converted and armed to transport plutonium in the form of MOX fuel. Of the two ships wholly owned by BNFL, the European Shearwater transports European spent nuclear fuel to Barrow for reprocessing at Sellafield. The Atlantic Osprey, specially converted to ship MOX fuel to Europe, is currently transporting both nuclear and non-nuclear cargos
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