In announcing the early closure of their Magnox power stations at Calder Hall and Chapelcross in a press statement today, BNFL has blamed low prices in the wholesale electricity market.
Whilst poor economics will play some part in the closures, the principal reason for closing Calder Hall is clearly the costly and physically difficult problem of the tilted ‘charge pans’ discovered on three of the four reactors last year and the company’s technical inability to rectify it and provide the requisite safety case to the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII). The same problem was discovered on one reactor at Chapelcross.
A CORE spokesperson said today:
“ Why can’t BNFL call a spade a spade ? The reactors, well beyond their sell-by date, are clapped out and were unlikely ever to come back on line after the discovery last year that charge pans on top of the reactors had shifted due to graphite movement in the cores. Whilst we welcome the closure of these military reactors, we would have welcomed even more some honesty from the Company in their announcement “
Calder Hall will now commence shutting down in 9 months time, in March 2003 rather than 2006. Just 2 weeks ago BNFL’s Head of Sellafield Brian Watson told the Local Liaison Committee that three Calder reactors were “unlikely to return to operation until at least the back-end of the year” because of the charge pan problems. No reference was made to low electricity prices. Earlier claims by BNFL that all four reactors would come back on line were privately rejected as being optimistic in the extreme by some sections of the Regulatory bodies.
Chapelcross, in Scotland, will now complete a progressive shut down no later than March 2005 rather than 2008. The extra two years operation over Calder Hall is to allow the completion of Ministry of Defence contracts for the production of tritium for UK’s nuclear weapon’s programme.
Calder Hall was opened in 1956 under the banner ‘nuclear power – electricity too cheap to meter’. Chapelcross came on line in 1959. Both stations have suffered serious accidents in the past 12 months involving the uncontrolled fall of fuel rods during de-fuelling operations.
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