After 7 years of deliberation, Sellafield’s International Nuclear Services (INS) confirmed yesterday (9th June 2009) that the 8 unirradiated MOX fuel assemblies, returned from Japan to Sellafield in disgrace in 2002, will be sent to France for processing at the La Hague plant. The transport is scheduled for around 2014/15.
The fuel was fabricated in Sellafield’s MOX Demonstration Facility (MDF) – the forerunner to the larger Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) – and shipped under heavy security from British Nuclear Fuel’s (BNFL) Ramsden Dock terminal at Barrow-in-Furness to Japan in July 1999 for use in Kansai Electric’s Takahama Reactor 4. The shipment of the plutonium fuel assemblies, sailing against widespread international condemnation, was subject to further humiliation as it approached Japan when it was revealed that the Quality Assurance data for the fuel had been falsified by bored workers in MDF.
The revelation led to major repercussions for Sellafield, including the resignation of its Chief Executive, the sacking of several MDF workers, an investigation into MDF’s operation by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) and the agreement by the UK Government to pay damages to Kansai Electric of £40M as well as the cost of returning the fuel to Sellafield. It also led to the abandonment of further business deals by Japanese utilities with Sellafield – a killer-blow to BNFL’s hopes of securing large MOX fuel orders for SMP.
The discredited fuel, temporarily pond-stored in Japan, was finally returned to Sellafield in 2002 where it was placed in THORP’s storage pond under a requirement by the NII that BNFL was to produce a management plan for the returned fuel ‘within one year of their receipt at Sellafield’. Seven years later, that management plan was disclosed by INS to the Commercial Operations Sub-Committee of the West Cumbria Sites Stakeholder Group (WCSSG).
The delivery to France in 2014/15 will also include a further 8 unirradiated MOX fuel assemblies that were being fabricated in MDF when it was closed by the NII as a result of the falsification scandal. All the assemblies will be processed by Areva NC in its La Hague reprocessing plant where it is understood the assemblies will be dismantled and the MOX fuel pellets crushed (Sellafield has no such facility) to recover the plutonium contained in the fuel.
The plutonium recovered from the 16 MOX fuel assemblies, which could total some 500kg (the 8 Japanese MOX fuel assemblies were known to have contained 255kg) will be retained at La Hague as ‘repayment’ for the use of French plutonium in completing MOX fuel orders that had to be sub-contracted by the struggling SMP. The remainder of the recovered material, classified as Plutonium Contaminated Material (PCM) will be returned to Sellafield for storage/disposal.
Built to produce 120 MOX fuel assemblies per year, Government approval for SMP’s operation in 2001 was based largely on BNFL assurances that major orders were expected to be won from Japanese utilities. Today, having produced only a handful of MOX fuel assemblies for European customers after 8 years of operation, not one order has been secured from Japan. With its woeful performance under constant review by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) who took ownership of the plant in 2005, a decision on whether or not to close SMP will be publicly announced by the NDA by September this year.
MDF, which had a significantly better production record than SMP, was relegated by the NII to being a research facility only.